(Placement) Testing, (Apartment) shopping, (over)eating, oh my!

First off, I want to say: I know I've updated the blog every day since being here, but I swear I have a life. Kind of. Anyway, today was another fun day. I slept through breakfast in the morning, deciding to opt for an extra 45 minutes of sleep (a dangerous bet, given the fact that I have no alarm clock with me right now). Breakfast in the Gem Inn, where we're staying for now, isn't that great anyway - they had buttered toast, corn flakes, and bananas. So as I was running for the bus, I grabbed a slice of toast and a banana. Anyway, we took the placement test today. Ohhh, boy. That was a whole lot of fun. I was expecting something more like a school test; you know, asking some basic questions then moving on up to the more difficult stuff. But no, this test just dove right in with 3rd and 4th year grammar/vocab. It was split into two parts: listening and reading comprehension. The listening part went alright, but the reading was way over my head. There was lots of legal/political material, so I knew basically no vocab. Some topics: bribery, curfew enforcement, and war preparation. I... might have missed the days where they taught us that stuff in first year Hindi.
Anyway, after bombing the placement test, we had to figure out living situations. Apparently, only 8 host families signed up for this year's program, allotting a total of 20 rooms for AIIS kids. And given that there were 39 or so kids who wanted to stay with a host family, plus the fact that only about half of the families were ok with guys staying with them, I decided to just find a flat independently with some of the other guys. We saw maybe 4 or 5 places (each of which I thought was incredible) but in the end settled on a place in the downtown area. The owner was really young and seemed really cool. And he included a good deal of amenities: electricity, water, internet, and laundry were all included in the price of Rs. 9000 per month. Which comes out to around $200 per month. Which would be a lot of money, but thank you South Asian Studies Council! I think all in all there are going to be 12 of us staying there, which should be fun. I'll take/upload pictures of the place when we move in tomorrow. Also, I'm glad I dropped out of the host family thing - apparently it got very competitive and cutthroat and there may have been some hurt feelings. Glad I got to avoid all that.
Anyway, after the living situations were finalized, we went back to the center to get the results of out placement tests. And before the full announcement, Rakesh-ji (the leader of the program here) pulled me aside and was like "So... you've only taken one year of Hindi, right?" Apparently my score on the test put me in the advanced level class, which is going to suck. I just won't know enough to get by. But he said that if I wanted to/the workload proved to be too much, I could always switch down into the intermediate level. So... we'll see how this goes. I guess watching hours of Bollywood movies has finally proved fruitful in some aspect of my life.
Annd... other than that, and in reference to last part of this title, THERE WAS SO MUCH FOOD TODAY. Like, so many of the older people whose flats we visited insisted on giving us some food. And the program had a welcome-to-the-center lunch made for us. So all in all, I ate a whole lot of food today. And as I lie here on my bed typing this post with my swollen belly almost blocking my vision of my laptop, I can't help but think it might have been a mistake.