I can’t really sleep
As the title read, I can’t really sleep. I slept around 1am last night and that’s because I forced myself to sleep and today, well right now, its 6am. I’ve noticed that I have to force myself to sleep around here. Usually when I am travelling, I have to do that a lot. I don’t usually feel tired and maybe that’s a problem. I’ll take a nap afterwards.
Hmm yesterday: woke up at 9am. I realized I didn’t want to bother my flatmates(yes they use the word “flat” here) for food. I wanted to go to the gym(recreation center) but it had already closed at 9am. I went online and stayed there for a couple of hours. Oh, the night before, my roommate as of now, Karin, told me to be careful with the toothpaste as there is a lot of fluoride already in water already. I don’t drink the water but rinse out with it, so I need to check if my toothpaste has fluoride or not.
On with my day yesterday… I didn’t really leave til about 1pm, and event that was a struggle, to leave the house. My orginal tasks for the day were to :
1. Buy toilet paper(sounds silly but I used up the last roll, so as common courtesy, I should buy the new roll) as well as food for breakfast for the next two days and possibly lunch for the next day.
2. Exchange money!!
3. Unlock my phone because I couldn’t unlock it unless I was roaming via the network I have in the States and activate the simcard.
Results: I got my money! Finally I have some rupees and the exchange rate was 44.60, pretty good. It was first time that a begger came up to myself and the two other interns. Although as some alumni AIESECers have told me, I can pass off as Indian, just as long as I don’t speak. Our next task was to go unlock the phone: which we did but the sim card wasn’t working so I need to buy a new one. I started to get a bit hungry after that so the AIESECers took us to a place where they served international food; I had Mexican chicken (it was a still a bit spicy but tasted amazing still). The place was relatively expensive for probably a “typical” Indian person since it was 300 rupees per person but the conversion on that is 6.67 (I use 45 in my head), which is incredible because in NY I spend about $30 for a good meal out.
During our lunch, the conversation had come up to the possibility of going to Bombay (Mumbai). It’s about $12 for a train there and its about 4 hours away by train, which isn’t that bad. We would go next weekend but Suzana, Emily and I need to see if we can go because we work sometimes on Saturdays, so we need to double check that. The conversation was interesting because we kept talking about traveling and I had to keep converting, asking the alumni to convert from the metric system. I guess that a bad thing that I learned so far: I don’t know my conversions.
I laugh to myself because I learned conversions in probably elementary school and never thought about it. Everywhere else in the world, they use the metric system while us Americans don’t. OH and another thing, they speak British English, so I need to be careful with how I say things and use synonyms.
Next: Shopping! Mihir, alumni of AIESEC, knows someone who owns a clothing line. He said that it was high-end but everywhere we went, the conversion turned out to be cheap for us, so we went and looked around. The first piece of clothing, a sari, with very intricate detail and the quality of the material was just top-of-the-line. I look at the price tag and sucked through my teeth. The sari was around 15,000 rupees, converted into about $300. High-end huh? This was similar to the Saks Fifth Avenue or any of the B Stores (Bloomingdales, Bendel, Barney’s). There was even a representative following us around. I guess they knew that we were just shopping around or since we are foreigners that we would buy something. I can’t decide which one it was.
Next: Go to movies!!! We wanted to see a Bollywood movie but then realized that there would be no subtitles, which isn’t fun so we ended up watching X-Men: First Class. We bought the tickets and while we were waiting, I found out that they have reserved seating. You can choose where you want to sit in the movie theatre and can even have recliner seats! the concept to me seems odd but for a movie like Harry Potter(which I am going to see the first showing of, hopefully) where you need to camp out about a couple of hours before just to get a good seat, seems logical. I told that we need to camp out here and one of the guys says, “For what? All I need to do is reserve the tickets and we just need to show up, that’s all. No camping out for six hours, no worries.” =)
We got out of the movies around 7pm and finally went to supermarket. We passed by some slums and I didn’t take any pictures. I didn’t think it was necessary but I’ll see how I feel about it later on to show how it looks like. We bought cereal, milk, yogurt, orange juice, and flats. We didn’t realize that we forgot to buy toilet paper so we need to “borrow” from another flatmate. It was Emily’s birthday so we surprised here with a cake. Tradition that the flat has is to feed the person with cake and then put cake on her face. It was so funny.
Finally we had some chips and that was my dinner really, along with some watermelon.
Fun times: I hope we can come back via rickshaw and visit the flat because this place is just so lively. Laughter is the key to a person’s heart and the flat had me from day one.
Today, we are finding out more about when we are moving and what the schedule might be like for tomorrow: our first day of work!