Punewali

Dear World,

I live in Pune.

I have a spacious bedroom in a flat that I rent from a rotund, sweet landlady who occasionally activates her inner real estate hawk. I share a kitchen with three Ayurveda students: two German girls and one American boy, all of whom are just great. I have my own bathroom, a toilet that flushes, a removable showerhead whose water reaches lukewarm (hey, that's pretty good for a geyser a million years old!), and -- the piece de resistance, ladies and gentlemen -- a BATHTUB. No one in India has a bathtub: I am truly blessed. Best of all, I have finally figured out how to tell rickshaw drivers the way to my apartment building.

I go to school every morning with J, a Marathi student who takes classes in the building next door to the Sanskrit classrooms. The same rickshaw driver picks us up every morning. Deccan College campus, where the AIIS Sanskrit building is, is really something else. It's way, WAY out on the outskirts of the city, and it's always empty. It's totally green and overrun with long, wild grass and beautiful banyan trees. There are pigs, dogs, water buffalo, cows, and goats roaming around. This morning I spotted a green, blue-tailed parrot perched in a window of the deserted chapel that I pass on the way to class. After the incredible congestion and dirt of Pune city proper, Deccan College is like a spa. On second thought, it's more like a safari.

More adventures with the atrocious, notorious Indian bureaucracy: registering with the police, purchasing a cell phone, and arranging for a wireless internet USB plug-in -- all of which took about 5 trees' worth of paperwork. But those were the tasks of today, and after 6 hours they're all done. I wait, fingers crossed, for cell phone and internet to activate. (Please please please please please activate. Please.)

I have the rest of the week, and the week following it, off from school. I love Sanskrit class, but this comes as quite a relief. I'll get to catch up with my work for the next week or so. Then I'm going to Goa for a little beach vacation with my Sanskrit and Marathi buddies. It may be a task to get there -- I take a train to Mumbai, then a long taxi ride to the Mumbai airport, and then a flight to Goa -- but I hope that it will be worth it. Goa is too beautiful to miss. The fresh air and sea winds there will be very, very welcome.

And so I must sign off before my minutes at the internet cafe expire. Here's hoping for a technology-filled weekend, and--on this most incredible beginning of all beginnings-- l'Shanah Tovah.