Orientation? More like BORE-ientation! – Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 5:30 P.M.

…shut up, I know it was stupid title. But I didn’t have anything fun to title this one. But you got the point! Today was orientation. We got up at 6 A.M. (we would have such an early wake-up time the night I finally get over jetlag [oh, in other news, I got over jetlag!]), had breakfast at the hotel (an odd combination of Western and Indian dishes; think idli with scrambled eggs, dosa with toast and jam, and my personal favorite: chutney omelets ) , and then got on our (clearly designated) tourist bus to go to AIIS headquarters for orientation.
As the title suggests, orientation was not the most exciting part of my day. The first few talks given were really basic (and definitely designed for people who had never been to India), so it was a lot of stuff like “India has many different religions… and many different languages. Here are some!” But there was a cool presentation on public health which was actually very informative. We learned the tricks for finding oafe places to get food on the street, the best brands of bottled water to buy, and the most effective ways of repelling mosquitoes. Then we had a 20-minute tea break before going back to hear a few more speakers. By this point, I had doodled over most of the papers we had been given and a good chunk of the folder in which they were held. I don’t really know what the second set of presentations was about. I think one guy was talking about the need for enthusiasm in learning or something.
Anyway, then we had lunch in the defense (defence, for Leah – I like to try to help her with her language skills in her foreign country) colony. I’m really impressed with and grateful for how much work goes into preparing this food for us. The chef is so nice to us and he makes such good food every day. I hope he comes to Jaipur with us. So after lunch, we had three choices: go back to the hotel, go to the National Museum, or go to the Museum of Arts and Crafts. I opted for the National Museum, but a surprisingly large number of students just wanted to go back to the hotel. And I TOTALLY would have taken pictures at the museum, but we would have had to pay extra.
The museum was really cool. Well, to be fair, our tour started off fairly terribly – we were taken into the auditorium, where the curators intended to show us a few brief documentaries about Harappa/Mohenjo Daro and Maurya-era Buddhism. Now, I’m no film expert, but I’m pretty sure the Watagatpitusberry video (if you haven’t seen in, I highly recommend it) 1) had a higher budget, 2) looked more legitimate, and 3) was ultimately more effective. So after a torturous half hour, we finally got to leave (even our tour guide was like “Yeah… do you guys find this interesting? No? Let’s leave…”) and look around. The museum has a great range of artifacts from many of India’s different cities/kingdoms/empires from all different time periods. It was altogether a pretty impressive museum. If you ever go, don’t let the appearance of the main hall fool you; it’s still pretty cool.
I just got back from the museum now. Tomorrow, we head off to Jaipur! I’m pretty excited to actually reach the city in which I will be staying for the next 10 weeks. It seems like a pretty busy day – we drive the 5 hours to Jaipur and then we meet our potential host families. I say potential because today we learned how the assignment process will work: there are a limited number of host families, so we will meet/visit them all tomorrow. Students who want to live with a host family get to choose which one, while students who don’t (or overflow from the host family process) will either stay in an inn by the school or rent flats from families in the area. And then the day after tomorrow, we move in to our respective places and take our placement tests. Going to be a fun time.
Also, and I’ll leave this as a closing comment – on the way back from dinner, conversation between a 7ish-year-old kid and his 9ish sister:
"So many white people!"
"Why are they here?"
"I don’t know..."

Little kid, I don’t quite know either.