a booming good time

I haven’t really been able to sleep through the night this past week, which is very annoying. Maybe the jet lag is making me a light sleeper, but I’ve been woken up in the wee hours by the most random things. Monday and Tuesday, there were mosquitos buzzing around my head. Wednesday, in an effort to keep them away, I had my fan on, and I woke up cold (yes, cold in India). Yesterday the heavyweight championships of dogs was taking place outside of my window, and all of these stray dogs were brawling over the heaps of trash outside my building. This morning takes the cake though – I woke up to a series of explosions. There’s a lot of rocks around Hyderabad so when they do construction they have to blast the rock to clear it and I’m pretty much used to the sound of explosions around the city by now, but it was just strange to wake up to rattling windows.

I think there’s also something living in my air conditioner, as I can hear it burrowing, even though I’m on the third floor. I have to give it a couple of raps every now and then to make it go somewhere else. It could be anything, which is very exciting.

This past week has been crazy stressful – there are tons of classes here that seem interesting but there’s no logical system in place for organizing them. Classes change times without notice, professors may or may not show up but you still have to wait around at least 40 minutes, and they might meet m/t, m/w, t/th, fr/sat, or any other random combination, making it excessively hard to fit them together.

A lot of the classes do actually seem pretty good, so that’s a plus, it will be fun learning about India through them. One that I definitely won’t be taking though am kind of curious about is Gay Indian Literature. I went to the first class to check it out, and the professor might be the gayest and most perverted man I’ve ever met. I think the best way to describe him is that he’s incredibly cheeky. Anyway, at the next class, I didn’t go because I had a conflict, but apparently he asked “where is that little Canadian boy?” and went on to explain to the class of about 15 people how he thought I looked very cute in my pants but wished that they hadn’t told me it’s not appropriate to wear shorts here so that he could check out my legs. According to some people who know more about him, if I took his class, there’s a more than 100% chance that he would invite me to come over and sleep at his house. Gay culture is pretty marginalized in India, hence why straight guys will cruise around holding hands and putting their arms around each other (they do it all the time here), and apparently the university just sort of turns a blind eye to this guy and his big bag of personality.

Having a great time though – last weekend was a winner. On Saturday a couple of us went out to Lingampally to find a Hindu temple we’d seen earlier. It was closed, but around the corner there was an elementary school that was just getting out. First we were waving at them in their courtyard, then suddenly there were 10 of them on our right, then 20 on our left, then 30 on our right, then we were just getting straight up swarmed by these little munchkins who wanted to shake our hands and pose for pictures (they get a huge kick out of seeing their pictures on digital cameras).

That was definitely really exciting, and it’s funny how big of a kick they get out of foreigners here. Random strangers will always ask us to pose for pictures for us and people always want to shake my hand. I’m a freakin VIP over here.

Next day we took a bus tour of the city and saw a couple of cool things briefly – the Qutb Shahi tombs, HEH the Nezam’s palace (quite a construction), some more tombs, and the light and sound show at Golconda Fort – a super sweet place with a super tacky show.

Last night we went out to the F Bar – I think it stands for “Fashion”. Everything there was really cool – three years ago. The music was extra-dated, which was really entertaining. It was actually pretty expensive by Indian standards, so we were cruising with the high rollers last night. We also had our own car and driver for the night, cause we’re classy like that. Chetan talked to him in Telegu and apparently for 1000 rupees ($25) he’d let us drive the car around, and if we got pulled over we’d just have to pay the copper another 1000 rupees. This place is crazy corrupt.

So Tuesday is a big kite flying holiday, which is awesome, but somehow they forgot to mention this to us. I feel like this is probably something that happens every year, yet NOBODY knows if class is canceled for it or not, not even the teachers. The holiday is on Tuesday, but I think classes are canceled on Monday and not Tuesday – we’re all learning very rapidly to just stop worrying and let things work themselves out here.

In honour of this holiday, we’re taking our first trip! We were going to go to these crazy caves but alllllll the trains and buses filled up so we’re going to do a more local circuit and go to see some temples and a wildlife sanctuary and stuff.