India continued

Today is Tuesday and I have been here for almost one week now. I am over my jetlag and much more used to the weather and the food....this makes things a lot better!!!! Yesterday we had our Orientation where we met the Director and Coordinator of the Program along with some other people of the University. We also talked about the University, Hyderabad and some safety rules...then we chose our classes. I decided to take Contemporary India (which I think is going to be incredibly interesting...we will discuss family values, the caste system, political system, religions, traditional India versus new "globalized" India....it sounds great!!!) and Ethnographic Approaches to Indian Society, which I am also looking forward to. These two classes will meet twice a week for an hour or an hour and a half each. I am also taking Hindi, which will meet 4 times a week. Additionaly, I will be doing my two credit Independent study through SDSU...so all together, I will have 11 credits in 6 weeks....pretty good I thought :) We just met for Hindi for the first time and it will definately be a challenge, there is only three of us taking it and the teacher I think will be good, but fairly strict. Hindi is also a Skript language so right now we are starting by learning some simple sentences like "Hi, my name is...." and I think tomorrow we will look at how the script isactually written. I know that in 6 weeks it will be very hard to really learn much, but even if we will be able to say some simple senteces and understand a little it will be worth it...plus I have never tried to learn a skript langauge so it will be interesting to see how much harder and how different it will be from learning Spanish or French...
This morning at 7 am we also went to Yoga class as a group...it was GREAT!!!!! It is about a 5 minute walk from the guest house in a huge, open warehouse-like-looking building with no real windows (well, open windows) and huge open doors, behind it is a field with people playing cricket (well not at 7am, but at other times of the day) We all sat on little mats (or "mini-carpets" :) and started with a Prayer, this was really cool. we are sitting there is total silence, with the birds in the background and the subtle breeze blowing in from outside, listening to a prayer sung by this Indian man. We did a few simple breathing exercises and some poses, but nothing to difficult...we will learn more as we go. The only thing kind of annoying were all the flies....it is hard to relax your body and concentrate on "your inner self" when you have flies dancing on your nose :) It was a great experience, especially cause the whole group went and I think we will all continue to go every morning before breakfast.
Yesterday, we also went into the city to exchange some money, since most of us only had dollars. It is still very hard to see all the poverty on the street...You can drive down a road and see all these little huts and self-made tents out of platicbags, mudd and sticks and children running around, women carrying buckets with water and old people slepiong on the side of the street among (HUGE!!!) cows and stray dogs...all in the middlew of the city..then, however, a few fet further is a huge cement wall surrounding this HUUUGE mansion with BMW's in the garage and the most extravagant things you can imagine...it is a very different world that is for sure...We went to Thomas Cook to exchange our money and for 400$ I got 17,700 rupees or something like that...makes you feel kind of rich to hold that much money.... 1 US dollar is about 44.75 rupees...We sat down and had a Sprite and it was 8 rupees...that is about 20 cents....I think so far I have maybe spent 5 dollars since I have gotten here....Eating at the Guest house is delicious, we get thre full meals with dessert, tea, fresh fruit and vegetables every day and it costs us 5 $ a day....its crazy!!! Today after class and after lunch, Satya will take us to go Sari shopping so I am very excited....I need to find some postcards and some souvenirs for friends and family....
I can already tell this is going to be a great experience and I cannot wait to se what is next....