Meri Zindagi

This is Salma's picture. She is my very good friend here and I spend a lot of time with her - plus she does not speak English so I get to practice my Hindi with her. She is also our servant along with her mom, Husseina Auntie and her sister, Shabbanna. Salma is 17, she thinks, and somedays I do the laundry with her and we speak together.
These pictures are from the festival of Pola, which is a celebration of the bulls and their labour by the farmers. For this celebration, the bulls get the day off work and are painted in all different colors. I have gone to a nearby village with Tomke's family, where the celebration is larger. We also performed the pooja to a few bulls. (look at Tomke's Blog!!!)

Now there has been much celebration surrounding the arrival of Ganpati and the welcoming of Ganesha and into the household. Everyone has been so excited about his arrival and these past few days we have been preparing. During these past few days I have spent a lot of time at Tomke's house as her family just last night hosted a huge Pooja for Ganpati and Mahalakshumi. For this function we have worn Saris and there were so many people in attendance! For pictures on this, please visit Tomke's blog!!! Sorry, but it takes so long to upload them here!

OK, so these two pictures are of the first day of Ganpati, when Ganesha was welomed into peoples' homes: all day long people were bringing the idols into their houses and dancing in the streets to the music of drums - and by this I mean that only the men can dance - the women stand on their terraces and watch (both of these fotos I took from my terrace too!) P.S. the picture of these goats on my last post was also taken from my room. They come to graze just outside my house every day!

हेल्लो एवेर्योने! Hello everyone! सब नमस्ते!

Sorry that it has taken me so long to actually publish this first post! There is so much to say, but first I will just write a little about where I am: I living in Nasik, which is a holy city which means that there are many temples and it is relatively close to Mumbai - which means actually it takes about four hours to drive there... But for Indians, a four hour drive is not that far because we have been to Mumbai for day trips. I unfortunately will not be able to post as many times as I would like because my host family does not have internet, so here is from the entire last month some of the things that I have been doing. If you are interested in checking more, you might want to check Tomke's blog: http://www.tomke-in-indien.blogspot.com/ (Tomke is the exchange student from Germany and also my neighbour!)

This first foto is of Savannah and me in the San Francisco airport! Savannah picked me up and we walked around San Fran and got Mexican food for my last time and it was so much fun! I really enjoyed this day and it didn't even seem like we were leaving until we were on the plane. We also stopped in Shanghai, which was not much because they coralled us into this tiny room and the only thing vaguely Chinese was the drinking fountain, which spoke to us in Chinese and these hanging red diamond things.

This is my host sister, Ria, who is nine years old. She has taught me how to read and write to a certain extent, as she has only just learned last year herself.

Ganesha is kept in cars many times, and this entire last week has been a huge festival dedicated to him, his mother, and his wife. Ganesh idols are brought into the houses and kept for pooja for 1-10 days, but this celebration is mostly Maharashtran and my family is Punjabi so Ganesh is not kept in our house right now.