the everyday in india

i realized that i haven't really talked about what a daily schedule is like. i'll start with the food.

we eat at 8 am, 1 pm, and 7 pm, and most days the cuisine is the same for each, except breakfast has fewer vegetables and the occasional pancake from a western mix. we usually have the following:

dhal - lentils, which here are a yellow variety put into a bit of a watery stew with mustard seeds and eaten over rice
rice - white rice like that you get in chinese restaurants, but less sticky
chapati - basically a wheat tortilla that you tear and use as a potholder to eat the other food, especially the vegetables in sauce, but even the rice and dhal
squash - a type of "gourd," as they say, in a curry sauce
greens - sauteed or pureed, but never spicy
drumstick - a bizarre vegetable they serve in a curry sauce, which looks like celery but with a very fibrous husk around it. you cut it in half lengthwise and scrape the inside meat - which tastes like squash - off with your teeth and discard the fibrous strands of the outside
beans - green beans that are a bit less tender, usually in a spicy sauce

we've also been given hamburgers, beef stew, and chicken dishes - so much for the vegetarian stereotype. apparently, despite their holiness to hindus, cows (beef) are really cheap for meat. i guess the muslims rigged that deal!

here's a picture of us eating in our suite. you can see the chapatis in the foreground!

as for the rest of the daily activities, we usually have class from 10 to 1, break from 1 to 3:30, then have class again from 3:30 to 5:30 or 6. we have an hour to hang out or walk to a nearby lake, through some farms, and then we go to dr. shobha's house for dinner.

i have to mention that there are wonderful fruits here. papaya and banana are amazing, but what is out of this world is the mango. one ugly surprise was a beetle that had someone grown up inside the mango, but i swear there were no burrowing holes in the skin of the fruit. we even examined another one from the batch after that incident, and peeled it carefully to find another invader inside that one. i don't understand how it could have gotten inside unless it was in the fruit for the life of the fruit. please ponder and get back to me...

this weekend we are going to pune, the closest city, and to the ellora caves - hindu, buddhist and jain paintings inside these rock-cut caves. it should be fantastic.