How lucky we are to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.

How lucky we are to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.

This is one of my favorite quotes, primarily because it hits so close to home. I spent tonight at an art museum, drinking wine and spending time with some of the people that mean the most to me.  

This whole "senior" year thing is really starting to suck. Everyone is getting all sad and sentimental like we're never going to see each other again. When in fact, I will spend the rest of my life with these people. 

I have no plan.  That's literally the scariest thing a 20-something can say as they approach graduation; I have no plan. That basically translates into: I have no direction! I have no purpose! I don't know what's happening! and that sucks. I would like to challenge that notion however, being in my 20's with no where to go is actually the best place to go. Having nowhere to go means that I can go ANYWHERE. I have limitless possibilities! If I want to go to Australia for a month then I will! If i want to get a job in a diving shop and hang out with sharks I will! (but really I won't, don't worry.) I can do anything because I have nothing stopping me! Instead of being scared of this lack of direction and purpose I think we should start to embrace it, it means we are free. We are completely and utterly free. A quote from one of my favorite books that describes this is, "we were infinite". 

So to all my soon to be recent grads that don't have that next step meticulously planned out, calm it down. You've got options. 

Saying goodbye to this place that has made us who we are will be hard, but it will still be here. It's just like when we left for college; we said goodbye to our parents, but they weren't worried because they knew we had no choice but to come back home at some point.  If you've allowed it to, Carolina has shaped you, molded you, transformed you, into amazing, passionate and beautiful person. Carolina gave us each other. It's more than a place a we have to say goodbye too, it's a life that we've built together. I wont BS you and say anything like Carolina gave us hope and new found meaning, but Carolina did give us ourselves and it gave us each other. 

We are so very lucky to call this place home. 

So, go forth, be amazing! be average! be mediocre! It doesn't matter, just be and be happy. Know you have a place to come back to, a place that's waiting on your return. It may be years from now, it may be months from now, it may be in 2 weeks; but just know that you can always come home. 

See you around Carolina. 

My life in a song:

 Before I get all mushy and that kind of foolishness I want to talk about a few things.  People for some odd reason think I am funny, but I’m trying to tell you, I’m not actually that funny, my life is just big LOL most of the time. There are somethings in life that won’t happen to anybody but me and that is because most of the time my life is a joke; which is ironic because as I’ve stated before I don’t joke.

Now, when I was casually hanging out in the Ahmedabad airport getting ready to  fly off to Mumbai, I heard what I thought was a cat meowing. But I thought to myself, Leigh, surely there is no cat in the airport, because that would be stupid. Well I was sitting therer minding my own business and I see an ornage tabby, casually strolling through the airport.  Well appaernatly only I was confused, distressed, put off, whatever you want to call it, because others saw the same orange tabby as I did but they just continued on with their conversations, even the security dogs in the airport weren’t concerned. I just looked around and tried to understand what was happening in the world…I never figured it out.

Cat chilling in the airport

And as we’re on the topic of things I don’t understand here’s the banana I was given on the plane.

do you understand this tiny banana?

So I was in Amsterdam getting ready to fly on home and when you get to the gate yu have to go through a  type of security again. Well there was an airport rep there asking me the usual questions (have you accepted anything from a stranger since you’ve been here? How long were you in India?) Then he asked me “Why were you in India?” I told him I was working at a school teaching deaf and mute students English. Well, (and here’s where it get awkward) he decided it would be appropriatge to hit on me. So he responded by eyeballing me and saying, “hmm, I wish I deaf and mute and you were my teacher.” I just looked at him and said “Do you really wish that? Because I think you don’t. OK goodbye.” Then I ran away.

On to the mushy stuff:

If you know, maybe even if you don’t you know that I love the Avett Brothers, I love their music, I love the meaning behind it, I love everything about them.  There’s a song by them that sums up my trip to India pretty perfectly.

Salvation Song by the Avett Brothers  (you don’t have to read all the lyrics but I would encourage to give the song a listen, I’ve also bolded the important parts for you)

And I would give up everything

No this is not just about me

And I don't know a plainer way to say it Babe

And they may pay us off in fame

Though that is not why we came

And I know well and good that won't heal our hearts

We came for salvation

We came for family

We came for all that's good that's how we'll walk away

We came to break the bad

We came to cheer the sad

We came to leave behind the world a better way

Now if I'm walkin' through the rain

And I hear you call my name

I will break into a run without a pause

And if your love laughs at your dreams

Well it's not as bad as it seems

Either way one of them has got to go

And if you take of my soul

You can still leave it whole

With the pieces of you own you leave behind

We came for salvation

We came for family

We came for all that's good that's how we'll walk away

We came to break the bad

We came to cheer the sad

We came to leave behind the world a better way

And I would give up everything

And if you were to come up clean

And see you shine so bright in a world of woe

And they may pay us off in fame

But that is not why we came

And if it compromises truth then we will go

We came for salvation

We came for family

We came for all that's good that's how we'll walk away

We came to break the bad

We came to cheer the sad

We came to leave behind the world a better way

I’ll miss my kids. I’ll miss the family we had. But I did what I went to do, and I learned a lot.

Signing off for the last time.

I came to leave behind the world a better way,

Leigh

I love it when a monkey eats a cookie with me

Things that are untrue:

 this sign

I really don’t think I need to say more but in an attempt at full disclosure, this sign is up the McDonalds down the road.  I just don’t understand why they think a disgusting looking veggie patty is irresistible.

Things that are true:

Monkeys love Parle G cookies. 

In case you can’t tell, I am feeding a monkey, he is literally taking a cookie right out of my hand….do you know where I fed said monkey? In the hostel….No big deal. There were just some monkeys chilling in/at the window of the hostel so I ran down with a pack of biscuits and fed them! It was so awesome! That it is was awesome until it got scary…and it got scary when there was like 7 monkeys…coming into the hostel. We were trying to feed them through the bars but they just kept on coming in, they sat on this girls bed, then they walked around inside the hostel for a while.

We accidentally dropped a cookie pretty far back inside the hostel and the monkey pranced right on in like he owned the place and picked it up. 

And for all of you that know me, you know I hate goodbyes, so I do this really unhealthy thing where I pretend like nothing is going to happen and like I am not going anywhere…so that’s what I’m doing now.

pretending like I’m not leaving in 2 days,

Leigh

                    

I was riding my elephant through the school…

Well as you can see through the title I had a particularly eventful last couple of days. I rode my new favorite elephant (I named her Lucy) through the school! I deemed it socially acceptable to call and wake up my mother at 1 AM her time to inform her of this event. She didn’t answer…thanks mom. Well when she finally called me back she said “wow Leigh! That’s so cool! Where did you ride it?” I said “through the school, naturally…where else would I have had an elephant ride?” So Lucy and I are gallivanting through the school and I’m waving at all the children, who by the way have gotten up out of there seats and are now standing outside, and I’m thinking to myself…I’m on an elephant right now…im actually riding an elephant in India…through a school of all places.  It was awesome. I love Lucy. She’s practically my best friend.

So I’ve figured out why some of the teachers would consider me a slight distraction…In one day I effectively distracted at least 20 students, and I only went to two classes….In the first class one of the boys challenged me to an arm wrestling competition. Well of course I had to step up to the challenge, and once I wrestrled (and beat) one of them that prompted a whole competition…so I was wrestling the 3^rd or 4^th boy (and still winning I might add, even though some of them might tell you differently, but they would be wrong) and the match ended and I won and I was jumping and cheering and I turned around and there the teacher was…just standing looking at me, he said congratulations then proceeded to teach…I silently snuck out.

In the next class the kids were looking super sleepy so naturally the best decision  could think of was to through limes at them when the teacher wasn’t  and force them to eat them. Well what happened was, the teacher happened to look up as I was chucking a lime at a kids head and all I could come up with was “Sorry, she lent me that earlier.” I was truly failing. I just left and went and sat in a corner after that. (there were supposed to be pics, but Im 99% sure the kids accidently deleted them : ( 

So we were semi hiking/semi riding up this mountain yesterday and it was super awesome and really pretty!

The problem with the hike/ride was that there were cows and donkeys all over the place. I was standing there, minding my own business and here comes two donkeys charging at me. Well I thought, I’ll just show them so I stood my ground and looked serious….well apparently donkey’s don’t understand my serious face as they kept right on coming and I had to (at the last minute mind you) literally jump out of the way. These guys saw what happened and said "Don't worry, they won't harm you." to which I reponded, "Well, they were chraging at me, so...I think they might have harmed me." I don’t understand a country where the donkey’s aren’t afraid of the humans.

And also, apparently the monkey are racists. When we were in line to go up the mountain some people were feeding the monkeys so naturally I needed to get in on that because I mean really, how many times will I get to feed a monkey? Well I told Mr. Jaysh I’m going to feed that monkey!!! He promptly informed me that the monkey could see me, and he would know I was not Indian and he would slap me. I stood and stared at Mr. Jaysh for a second…then I said “Monkeys don’t slap people…” and he said “Yes, Leigh these monkeys will, they know you’re not Indian.” So basically what I deduced from this entire conversation was that Indian monkeys are racist…and I don’t like that.

Racist monkies.

We slammed on brakes yesterday so that we didn’t hit a wart hog…I was royally over that. O and then we had to wait because a cow was grazing…in the middle of the road. I’ll only say this once more, cows=steak not friends.

Cows are food,

Leigh

the lights will work forever...now, about the water...

I wrote a blog a while back about questions you should ask before you come to India, I have another one to add to the list: ask if there will always be running water.

When the guy picked me up from the airport he was talking about how advanced Ahmedabad was because the homes will always have power, no matter what day, no matter what time there will always be lights. I was trying to look excited about always having electricity…I come from America where we also always have lights so this wasn’t like a big thing for me. Well what he failed to mention (and I would soon find out he failed to mention a lot of things) was that while Ahmedabad may always have power, this city doesn’t not always have water. So imagine my surprise when after a hard day work (and by work I mean I taught some English then proceeded to sweat profusely for the rest of the day for no apparent reason), and I come back to the hostel and all I want to do is wash the gross lingering funk off of myself, but THERE IS NO WATER. I stand in disbelief and think ok maybe it’s just this faucet (at this point im starting to get a little delirious), so I try the next one, and the next one…until all the faucets have been tried but there is still no water. I almost had a break down.  That night I washed with the rest of the water in my half full water bottle. Needless to say I was not very clean and I was thoroughly over it.

O and NBD or anything but there were a couple elephants walking down the street the other day…I went outside...I got to pet them:

I mean we pretty much became instant BFF’s, I named the 1^st one Turquoise and 2^nd one Lobster. Don’t question me.

Before I came to India I went thrifting and bought quite a few horrendous looking skirts. I bought them because they were long and I could wear them in India, but I made no plans of returning to the US with them.  Well this morning I had a brilliant idea (I don’t have many, so when I get one  run with it),  ask one of the girls in the embroidery class to make one of my awful (and awfully long) skirts into a pair of shorts! The print is super cool it’s just the skirt is horrid. I was so excited and I was trying to make sure she understood what I wanted…I’m not 100% sure the message translated…so I’m either going to get back a super cool pair of shorts or she’s just going to cut my ugly skirt…I’ll find out soon enough.

In case anyone was wondering, NO the language barrier between the interns has NOT improved. Here’s the conversation that happened this morning with one of my dear French speaking friends. (bear in mind this is how I heard the conversation)

French speaking friend: What’s is Pinot Noir?

Me: It’s a type of wine.

French speaking friend: it’s what?

Me: Wine! it’s Wine!

French speaking friend: is it like the things you see out of?

Me: What in the world are you talking about? It’s vino, wine…it’s wine.

French speaking friend: no no no (and I’m writing this like she pronounced it) VINOCULERS!!

Me: are you kidding me? Binoculars? Yes, it’s the things you see out of.

French speaking friend: ok, thank you!

Me: Lord have mercy.

The thing about it is, this kind of conversation is normal.

Pinot Noir is wine,

Leigh

Touch the car, slap the person

So I’m in India, right? That means I can make up totally random slightly inappropriate games to play while driving through the India traffic, right? Well I hope you answered yes to both questions because that’s what I’ve done. All the interns at the school (keep in mind there’s 7 of us now) play this game called touch the car, slap the person. Let me explain before my many mothers out there think I’m going to get my arm chopped off.  Basically when we’re in a rickshaw and we’re close enough to another car, bus, or motorcycle we reach out and touch it really fast. You get 1 point for cars and buses and 2 points for motorcycles because it’s easier to get caught. Now we only play slap the person with each other, that’s when we’re in 2 or 3 separate rickshaws when we pass each other we reach out and slap the crap out of the each other. You may not enjoy our games but they keep us entertained when we think we’re going to die while driving through India.

We went to a night market last night I GOT TO BARGAIN! People in this country think that because I’m a foreigner I don’t know what I’m doing…they’re partially correct. But please note I have haggled with the best of them in Mexico and Jamaica, once I got the hang of it I was solid. I got a lot of stuff and only got cheated out of like 500 rupees (but that was in the beginning when I was young and dumb) by the end of the night I was pretty much a pro.

If you’ve been reading my blog you’ll know that there is a tiny little human boy here with whom I’m in love with…BIG NEWS!!!!!! I walked up to him yesterday and said “Namaste” and gave him my hand (like so he could shake it), well he mumbled “namaste” and eye balled my hand suspiciously, then instead of shaking my hand he rubbed it….I figured this was more than I could ask for, so mission accomplished!

I was taking a nap yesterday and I was rudely and abruptly woken by tiny hands squeezing my forehead…I don’t know why this happened but it did and I was superbly over it. The auntie in the hostel walked up to me and said “headache?” I said “No auntie, not at all. They’re just squeezing my head.” She laughed; I don’t think she knew I was being completely serious.

Also, apparently I am a distraction…whoops…one of the teachers told me on Friday that a couple of the boys (Gelo and another one) haven’t been doing their homework because I come over to the hostel and distract them, ok this may be true BUT I distract them with English! I’m teaching and testing Gelo on the days of the week; so he had a legitimate excuse the other one did not. So the teacher told me to tell the boys that if they didn’t complete their homework I would hit them. Let’s rewind for a second here: they hit in this country, the teachers, the hostel aunties, all of them. It’s totally socially and culturally acceptable to hit children in the school. Well, I’m an American and we don’t hit kids, especially not teachers. Ok fast forward back to the story: well I knew that I would be lying if I told them I would hit them so I stood up and looked very serious and told them if they didn’t start completing their homework I would…be very sad. The teacher looked at me and was so confused…I gathered my stuff and scampered away before she could say anything.

Distractions and all,

Leigh   

"The movie is in Hindi...w/o subtitles..."

So last night we went and saw our first BOLLYWOOD MOVIE!!!!! it was super awesome! There was a small problem though…it was in Hindi…which could have been super awesome except there were no subtitles…so we sat through a movie fully entranced by what was going on but having actually no clue what was being said. The movie was super great through! It was  a story of love, comedy, tragedy, and action! It was pretty awesome. O and half way through there was an intermission…WHAT? There are intermissions in plays, not movies, but there was 5 minutes intermission in the middle of this movie...only in India.

The 4^th of July was super awesome!

I wore an American flag like a cape for the entire day! Underneath my cape I was wearing a red, white and blue polo, I felt a little closer to home. We set off super sketchy Indian fireworks that night and had this massive cake! We cut it into tiny pieces so all the kids could have some. Apparently in India it’s like a thing to rub cake in peoples faces…I sad this isn’t a thing in America on the fourth…but nonetheless this is how I ended up

Nikki left yesterday, it was so superbly sad. The kids were crying  she was crying, I was standing around looking awkward because I don’t really do feelings and I definitely don’t do crying. It was a sad affair, but she’s an American, I mean shes from Chicago, I’ll see her again.

I’ve started teaching some English! We play English games, so I’ll sign a certain word or draw a picture and two kids will run up to the board and it’s a competition to see who can write the word fastest and correctly. Well some of this English teaching carried over into the boys hostel where I spend a lot of time in the evenings. I’m tutoring a few of them in English (just learning basic English words) and working with some of the older ones on correct spelling and word usage. So last night Gelo and I were working on spelling all the days of the week correctly, well I looked away for one minute and magically he had all the days written down correctly, which was a real task because just 5 minutes earlier he was riding the struggle bus hard with Wednesday and Tuesday. So I looked at him and told him he was liar and a cheater and we weren’t friends. Well it turns out one of his friends across the room was signing how to spell it to him! I was very angry and he was so apologetic but I told him I didn’t care if he learned how to spell them or not and I refused to help him. But he moved and sat directly in front of me so I would know he wasn’t cheating and he started studying….so I may forgive him…if he can spell the days of the week today, I’ll let you know.

So there’s this little blind boy who’s my absolute favorite in the entire world. He’s approximately 2 ½ feet tall and he has 1 blue eye and one brown eye.  So the problem with this is my feelings of love are not reciprocated…every time I try to speak to him he literally runs away.  Our converstions normally go like this:

Me: “Namaste!”

Him:  Looks at me and sprints aways as fast as his tiny legs will carry him.

one day however it went like this:

Me: “Namaste, tiny baby”

Him: looked at me sketchily, “Namas…” SPRINT AWAY

Like he realized he was speaking to me in the middle of the word then realized it was time to run away….

here’s his pic:

He's so precious! I need him to love me back...

America the Great,

Leigh