Rustic charm?

How strange it is to be spending Christmas Eve by myself, in a shabby hotel in Paharganj (should be Backpackerganj, or, as my father suggested, Pahargrunge), having spent all evening speaking broken Hindi and worrying about getting kidnapped/electrocuted/lost/ripped-off. After many happy, warm Christmases with D & D in Cambridge, or just with my parents at home, this is *truly* a new one.

But while I can hear every conversation on the street below my $12/night room, just witnessed a massive dog fight outside, haven't spoken English in 3 hours, and am in a part of Delhi entirely new to me, there are just enough comforts to make things bilkul merry. The people who work at my hotel -- though they did, in fact, rip me off -- are good-hearted. After phoning downstairs and requesting hot water, I could take a perfectly hot shower under a real shower head. My mobile phone works. My internet (look, see!) works. The electricity works. The lighting is soft. Best of all, I can listen to Bach advent cantatas and get my Christmas music fix: just doing my part for the noise pollution. And I just got to call my parents and grandfather in Boston, which is pretty great.

I've very rarely felt frightened or threatened in India, and I don't think I was tonight -- but when, upon dropping my bags in my room, I paused to think about my situation (young woman traveling alone in unfamiliar territory at midnight with a vocabulary of maybe 15 Hindi words at her disposal), I did grow a little apprehensive. Perhaps loneliness has something to do with it: these sorts of situations would be almost worry-free if I had a traveling companion looking out for me. Perhaps it's just the darkness and the sound of men's voices outside that scare me, and everything will be fine when I wake up in the morning and the bazaar downstairs comes alive again.

Last Christmas, I stood on the bank of the Sea of Galilee and looked out over the deep waters and up at the stars. I was with a friend; we stood together there for a long time, happy (for lack of a better word) to be alive and to be with each other. I never dreamed then that in a year's time, I would be here.