It's holiday season! Well in America—here, its just wrapping up with wedding season (so so many weddings in Delhi means random decorated elephants and horses walking around, cars with flowers taped all over them and coming home to a big party outside my neighborhood playing "I'm Sexy and I Know It" by LMFAO). I'm back in Delhi after a great two and a half weeks in Chennai. South India was great, and has the BEST coffee everywhere so I drank a ton of that and twitched for two weeks (too much caffeine). Note: In Chennai it's still hot enough for it to be inadvisable to walk around between the hours of 11 in the morning- 2 in the afternoon. In Delhi, it's actually getting cold and no one has heating so its sweaters and socks all the time. Seasons...who knew.
Anyways, over the past month, we've celebrated a bunch of holidays, some American, some Indian, and one especially for me courtesy of my home stay family. The holiday season I'm talking about kicked off with Halloween. People in India don't celebrate Halloween, and most people have no idea what it is, which means I really stood out walking around Delhi in costume all day.
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| Too accurate, from Lynn Hong |
Still, us American students celebrated anyway. A lot of people dressed in the Western clothes and were themselves for Halloween, although another student and I went all out. If you can't guess, I was a crazy cat lady: I wore a big flowery black hat and a nightgown, both give-aways from my program director who was cleaning out her closet, my glasses, a shawl, running shoes (cat ladies need practical footwear), and labeled my bag "BAG O' CATS." I can't really say I was greeted with more stares than normal, since looking as foreign as I do I tend to attract attention. I even showed up to an interview with a writer later that night in full costume—turns out she loves Halloween and was so happy to see me dressed up she gave me a jack o'lantern she carved.
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| A mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism: HAPPY HALLOWEEN |
I, of course, took the jack o' lantern home to Vasant Kunj and began to educate everyone on Halloween. I started by opening the door, giving my homestay mother a bag of candy, closing the door, opening it again, yelling "TRICK OR TREAT" and taking the candy from her. I proceeded to make her, my homestay brother, and his two friends do the same thing.
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| Forcing children to take candy from me—teaching life skills? |
Now that the candy part was down, I taught everyone about costumes by dressing them up with random stuff from my suitcase, and then proceeded to lead the whole motley crew on a parade down to my Massi-Ji Number Do's house while singing the Harry Potter theme song. My homestay mother in particular embraced the idea of Halloween as well as her costume of "ghost going to a party." See hand motions below!
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| My host brother's friends + Willy Wonka + ghost going to a party + a fancy dementor |
Next holiday came while I was in Chennai, and it is the Christmas of Hindu holidays—meaning its a really big deal. Its called the Festival of Lights celebrating good triumphing over evil and all sorts of other things you can google. People all dress up in new clothes, clean house, gather around family and friends and light TONS of stuff of fire. Everyone just lights fireworks like mad basically all day. I spent Diwali with an English girl from my hostel who had just arrived the day before. We walked on the beach, enjoying the fireworks going off, saying how nice and beautiful this holiday was. Then, we attempted to walk back through the town to our hostel.
CRAZINESS THINGS EXPLODING EVERYWHERE. I ran into a cow. Multiple times we were corned by fireworks going off at all sides. Of course, all of the indian children were super nonchalant about all the stuff we were shrieking about. Then we joined a parade. I couldn't get a clear explanation on what was going on, but hey its India—stuff just kind of happens, its usually not explained, you just kind of roll with it.
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| A sample of what we tried to walk through |
The week after Diwali, it was Thanksgiving. I'm not terribly sentimental about Thanksgiving, but I like holidays in general, so I felt like I had to celebrate. I made a few friends at my hostel that day, and we ended up having a bit of a day and ended up going for a bit of a ride about Chennai dancing to Jay-Z and then had dinner at the only restaurant open after midnight. I made everyone go around the table and say what they were thankful for, which was meeting each other. Awwww!
My Thanksgiving festivites continued all weekend, as when I got back to Delhi, my dad was visiting. His company had sent him on a business trip in Hong Kong over Thanksgiving, so he stopped over in Delhi for the weekend to hang out with me and make me feel cool for showing him around the city.
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| Dad gives a big THUMBS UP to the Red Fort |
In honor of my dad visiting, and because I had missed actual Diwali, my home stay family had a "Choti Diwali" (little Diwali) celebration for us. Everyone made a big dinner, had a lot of sweets, and lit some firecrackers my family had saved. My host mother made my father and I light at least one of every firework. I thought I was going to die. I didn't.
So this is a summary of my last month via holidays. What is really strange is that it was my second to last month in India—I'll be home (2 days before) my next big holiday coming up. I feel like by now I've actually managed to make myself a little life here—I don't want to leave it and go back to my "real" life. However, I am currently living my real life right now. I think I've mentally removed "my life in India" from the time line of "my real life." Like right now, my "real life" is just on pause while I go and be in India. How is this going to feel when I get back?
