Current location:	The living room
Current mood:	worried

Part Three (aka Day 2)
Today begins the longest day ever. We got to sleep until 8:30 and then had breakfast and left by 9:30. We were going to Chhondok's home. This was an event, because he was from the "gram." The village. However, after the four hour train ride yesterday, another 3 hours in the car each way was not very appetizing. We set off and I did flashcards for about an hour and a half before I just looked out of the window. There's only so much staring at flashcards that you can realistically do. And the view out the car window is great. Fields stretch out for miles, punctuated by tall palm trees. The rice fields are being plowed by farmers with either oxen or water buffalows, while women gather the rice into bundles. We stopped for tea, then kept going. One problem is the smell. As the car has no AC, we travel with all the windows open. This is nice, but India in general is so polluted, even out in the village that you end up eating the exhaust of passing buses, the thick black smoke of coal being used to make food at roadside stalls, and probably burning cow dung, which is also used as a fuel. You know how black your lungs are becoming by marking how much brown dust is accumulating upon your body and everything that you're wearing. It's amazing that even out in the middle of nowhere it's so polluted that you don't want to inhale. We stopped on the way at a temple. Whose--that is, which god--I don't know, because there were many statues there, some very ancient, the kind I've seen in museums. There was a ceremony going on. A blessing perhaps. The priest who was doing it came right up to us and offered us milk, which Joel took, sipped, and flipped over his head (hair, but Joel shaves his head), which is apparently the proper thing to do. I declined it, and Andy, not knowing what to do, took it and chucked it over his hair.

Then we hiked up a very large hill that they call a mountain. But the temperature was probably 90 degrees, and more importantly, there was no trail. Eventually we had to stop, because there simply was no trail, and so we went down again. Then we finished our trip out to Chhondok's village, but first we had to go an alternate route because the road was shut down apparently. So we offroaded a bit, which was bad for the Geo Metro, which kept getting stuck. Scott and Proshenjit kept having to get out and push. In fact, as we were going through a village the car totally bottomed out on something and we were stuck fast. The driver couldn't move the stickshift, and the car was definitely beached on something. So 6 guys pushed the car backward and we went over again and made it. At Cchondok's we sat awkwardly for about 30 minutes, then we were fed. That's the one thing about visiting village places. There is a TON of food. We ate on plates made of leaves. Which was fabulously biodegradable and began to degrade as I ate. We had rice, daal, fried fish eggs (eew), fish (bones! Aaaagh! Tiny bones!), mango, shondesh (Indian sweet things, one of which is covered with a really thin layer of silver that you eat), payesh (milk and rice that's really sweet. Delicious!) and some other stuff. I gorged, because who knows when you will ever eat this kind of food again. Then Ben and I went exploring, and were followed by a gaggle of giggling children.

Some of the mud hut pictures are from his "village" though he lived in a normal (by Indian standards) house. But it makes you wonder how he could possibly have made it to Kolkata. 4 hours by train and 3 by car is simply a measure of time. In fact, here is a place that's in the middle of nowhere, where cars are rare and computers, internet, cell phones, etc. absolutely unheard of. How strange it must have been for him to go from village life to the university as a young man. Then we went to a neighboring village (where our Metro bottomed out, actually) and this is where the Adibashi tribe lives, but we didn't talk to them or anything. They look normal, wear normal clothes, but I guess their dialect is a bit different. There I saw more pigs, baby goats, etc. We walked until we reached a pond where the guys skipped rocks, then we went back. Another 3 hours, but actually it took longer. And it was black out and it looked like we were always a hair's breadth away from killing someone or ourselves dying. It was terrifying. I wasn't going to eat dinner, but I ended up having some roti and a vegetable curry. Bad Karen, I'm just getting fatter.

The next day we slept in, and at 9:30 or so we went to a village an hour away (are you sensing a trend?) were they make terracotta things. I didn't understand, because I thought everything was made by mold, but I guess only the plates were done by mold, which means the others were by hand, which is cool. But it started to RAIN and few of us had umbrellas and we kept getting stranded in houses. Ben bought two horses. Everything was super, super cheap. We finally called the cars and had them come because it was never going to stop raining and the street was starting to look like a river. We got back, had lunch, and then had nothing to do for the next 3.5 hours (I napped) until the train at 5:45. The way back we only had 4 AC seats for some reason, so the rest of us rode non AC, which meant stuck among a bunch of Indians, some of whom I suspect didn't have tickets and others who didn't care that they were in our seats. I like the feel of the wind from the window, but I got SO dirty from it. When it was pitch black out, the lights were still on inside, so I got pretty far into "The Kite Runner" (Thank you, Mom!), which I'll finish on this trip this weekend. We got in at 9:15, and we made it at last to the apartment at about 10:20 or so. How very tiring!

And that completes the description of my trip. End. Now I have an hour before I leave for my next adventure, and I'm very, very worried about it. Wish me luck.