I’ve arrived in Delhi and I finally have an internet connection. Sorry to anyone who wanted to reach me and couldn’t. I do have an Indian cellphone (thanks Sam) so you can reach me for any emergencies, but otherwise, I should have my computer on most of the time so my skype number is a good place to call me (these numbers are on my facebook profile).

I have moved into my room at Kumaon hostel (1 of 9 boys hostels – there are 2 girls hostels) with 10 other exchange students all in the same hall. There are also 5 girls wayyyy over on the other side of campus in the girls hostels. All of the exchange students are French except for 2 Swedes Swiss guys (sorry guys, I know your’re from Switzerland. Guess I was tired when I wrote it), who also speak fluently in French. Even though they came here partly to learn English and are happy to speak English with me, I am constantly surrounded by French. So I think I’ll be learning much more French than Hindi this semester, but thats fine. It’s just kind of ironic that I come all the way to India from Montreal, and end up learning French here. So we are all in pairs in our rooms, and my roommate is Franklin (pronounced in fraun-clain). The rooms are absolutely filthy. All the shelves are covered in dust and brown dirty ooze, like the kind of dirt that collects on a lightswitch when you dont clean it for a long time. The rooms are spacious enough, I think they gave us some of the bigger hostel rooms, but they are very bare; just a “single” bed, a closet, a shelf, and a fan. Unfortunately, when you open the window, there are lots of bugs and mosquitoes, so until I buy some screen for the window, my room is either very hot or very buggy. Down the hall we have a shared bathroom. It’s got a few quirks… It has 2 toilets, one without a toilet seat, no toilet paper, and the ground is always flooded from the faucets where people fill the cup they use to wash themselves… Honestly, I think I just don’t understand the mechanics of wiping without toilet paper. Do you just straight up use your hand? Is there some splashing motion going on? If someone could explain it to me, I’d be very grateful. There are two sinks, one is missing the pipe from the sink down to the drain on the floor so it splashes your legs when you use it. The urinals dont actually flush at all, and just have a tube down to an open drain so it smells like standing pee all the time. There are two showers, one without a shower head, and there is no hot water. Oh and you cannot drink the water from these faucets or you will get very sick. Lastly it’s quite messy and dirty so there is standing water and lots of mosquitoes all the time. The mess isn’t too far, and serves 3 meals a day plus afternoon tea (tea is always milky, sugary, chai tea here, in fact tea in hindi is just “chai”). It’s not bad, quite healthy, but fairly bland, and eating Indian food all the time is already getting old… Breakfast is actually quite bad though, usually something deep fried and savory, with terrible white bread and artificial jam, and hot sweet milk. What I wouldnt give for some real bread or a black coffee… Yesterday, we got excited because we thought they were serving pancakes. At least they really did look like pancakes, but they were full of onions, and it was served with curry. The hostel also has a music room with some instruments (that are all dirty and beat up), a computer lab (that looks like it’s from 1993), a sports closet, a south indian style kitchen (dont know what that means yet), and 24 hour guards who have really good head-bobbing abilities. I love the Indian head-bob, but I can never tell if they are saying yes or no! Also, no girls (other than family) are allowed in the except in the common room. It’s fine, I’ll survive, but it means we can’t really hang out with the girl exchange students so we always have to go our separate ways.

We have been exploring the area around campus quite a bit already. As soon as you leave the gates, the madness of Delhi hits you full force. There are some shanty shacks right on the wall and we are next to a very congested road. The roads in delhi are really crazy. Apparently there are more cars here than in the next 3 biggest cities combined! And add to that a ton of construction for some upcoming sporting event happening in 2010. When you drive here, you just go, there are no lanes and no rules. Occasionally a huge intersection will have lights that actually mean something, but only because there are traffic cops conducting traffic. Most of the time, when you come to an intersection, you just slow down and creep forward and go as soon as you can. The same goes for pedestrians crossing the streets. You walk and force people to slow or stop, and just have to be extremely cautious. Also, I read that if you get into an accident or hit a pedestrian here, you have to just flee the scene, or people might try to harm you, even possibly firebombing your car! Around IIT, there are many markets. I remember in Israel there were a few little market type streets. Here, every alley and street has tons of open shops, selling everything you can imagine. Everything is super cheap, although you have to really haggle if you are white, because many shopkeepers will try to rip you off.