January 12, 2010
So I promised at the end of the last post I did about India to tell a bit more about the dance party. This is a LONG story, so I've only put a few pictures at the end of the blog, and they aren't even really that cool or important. THIS is the meat of the update today. So to start with, it was at the girls dormitory on campus. They had dinner prepared for us and a HUGE bonfire outside, so we ate with the girls and then went outside. During dinner I sat next to two girls who I'll refer to for the rest of the post as RJ and EM because 1) I don't remember their actual names and 2) that's what I associate them with.
EM was an English major (get it?) and so her English was very good-she was on the quieter side but it was very interesting talking to her, seeing as how I myself am an English major. RJ? Well that's what I call her because as I was talking to her somehow the subject of my family came up. I was describing how music "runs in our blood": my Mom was in drama and musicals in high school, my grandpa can play seemingly dozens of instruments, my sister has an incredibly beautiful/powerful voice, and of my four brothers and myself, only one has not really shown interest in playing guitar (and the other four of us are not bad at it if I do say so myself). My dad plays guitar too, but at the end I just threw in what I thought was a throwaway line that my mom always says about my dad: "Everyone tells him that he's got a voice that he could have used as a DJ or something on the radio"
Now RJ's English wasn't quite as good as EM's, so while I could tell she was following I could also tell that she wasn't getting 100% of what I was saying. However, as soon as I said that my dad could have "been a disc jockey" her eyes lit up. And I mean LIT UP. I was a bit taken aback, actually lol. "A radio jockey? Your father is a radio jockey???"
Turns out her life's ambition is to become a radio jockey (or RJ)! And no matter how many times I tried to explain it, I just couldn't communicate that my dad was not actually a DJ but only could have been one. I didn't quite know it, but I had myself a problem.
We finished dinner and everyone went out to the bonfire. There were perhaps 200 girls gathered around it. I mean, just everywhere. We weren't quite sure what was going on, but any doubt or confusion vanished immediately when "Barbie Girl" by Aqua came blasting over the speakers: we had been lured to a dance party (I say 'lured' because our professor knew what was going on but hadn't let us know the full picture lol).
Now first a note about the girls: all of them were undergraduate students, so between 18 and 24ish years old. However, many of them were from villages or areas where they hadn't had the best access to a constant food supply. This meant that a large portion of these 18-24 year-olds looked as if they were 12 (they simply hadn't had the nutrition/diet to grow much). So that was really, really weird. The term that most of us guys adopted later after reflecting on it was "cognitive dissonance"-our eyes were telling us that these girls haven't hit puberty but our brains are telling us that they're our age and university students. I'm shaking my head right now remembering lol.
So these girls were RIDICULOUS-three of them came up to Adam, one of the graduate students from our group who has a wife and a three-year old daughter (not that the girls should have known that or anything), and told him "We're the three dirtiest girls here..."! Zack had a stalker who followed him around for the first half an hour or so and did some dance moves that you have to have him act out for you in order to get the full effect, and I had RJ and EM.
Now there were only 12 of us total, so we moved around quite a bit over the course of the party. We were either dancing with a group of about 12 girls for every member of our group or taking photos. I must have been in seventy pictures or so that night-and I'm NOT exaggerating. It was like a chain reaction-you'd pose for one photo with a girl and then all her friends would want a picture, then some of them would take a group photo with you, and then it'd start all over again. It was actually nice though cause we got to take a break from dancing haha.
Despite the fact that I kept moving around, RJ was always there with EM in tow. She kept bringing me back over to her group of friends. All of the girls were eager to teach all us guys dances that we assume must have been dances that only women dance in India (judging by the giggles and tittering that we all elicited). But RJ was getting to worry me. At one point, with me right there in front of me she said a couple sentences to one of her friends in Hinglish (a hybrid of Hindi and English that most Indians speak) about me: I knew it was about me because she kept gesturing towards me, I caught the words "radio jockey" and "father" (among others), and she pantomimed fainting at the end...lol
I actually started trying to slip away from her, using other girls who wanted photos and other things as excuses. She kept following me though, and actually called me out on avoiding her after the fourth time or so! haha
This all hit a crescendo for me at a point where RJ, EM and I had taken a break to talk for a bit. I had been talking with EM about what sorts of books she liked and other English-majory stuff for maybe a minute and a half when RJ, who had been standing there impatiently, rounded on EM and basically yelled at her in a string of Hindi and pantomimed zipping her lips closed. I didn't catch any english in there, so I asked EM what RJ had said.
EM thought about it for a second and then told me, "To put it simply, I like talking to you but she likes looking at you."
The specifics of the rest of the dance party kinda blur together: just more of the whole dance-then-take-a-break-for-photos routine. But that translation/comment by EM is what really sticks with me and summarizes the night for me. Ri-dic-ulous. Retarculous even!
So the next day, January 12th, we visited some English and History students in their classes at Lucknow University. Here's a bit of the campus:
Very nice, actually. It was funny-one of the history students asked one of the members of our group who the first emperor of America was lol
Our last stop in Lucknow was a building built by Claude Martin, the guy whose house is now the school with the cannons from last entry.
From the roof.
From Lucknow we were supposed to fly to Delhi and then fly from Delhi to Chennai. However, we almost missed our flight because Zack and Adam's things got locked in their room! What followed was the equivalent of watching the Keystone Cops: about six or seven people from the guest house tried various methods of removing the lock by force from the door. We finally got everything together and made it to the airport on time.
The sack lunch that the university gave us. From bottom-left clockwise: bread, potatoes, and a delicious sugar doughnut-thing (there was also some mutton that came with them).
And that is the rest of January 11th and the 12th. We arrived in Chennai at about 1 in the morning and spent the night in the Radisson near the airport.
Later today: travelling from Chennai to Mamallapuram! the sun returns from it's prolonged absence! the beach!
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