Two Lizards, a Football Match, and a Tea Party: Jan 30-Feb 3

This week was a relatively uneventful one in terms of events outside campus (I did not have any field visits this week; my next will likely be on February 16^th). Luckily, my lack of field visits has coincided perfectly with the hostel football tournament! My team, Hostel 13, had practice on Wednesday night, practice again Thursday night, then our first match on Friday. I found some cleats that fit—size 12 white and fluorescent green Nike T90’s—and I think they might be the biggest shoes in all of India. The store I went to had three different models in size 12 and they were all Nikes; the cheap brand Nivia appears not to manufacture anything above around size 10. Luckily, the T90 Nikes that fit me the best were also 50% off. My long walk to the store in the midday sun had paid off.

We played against Hostel 2 in our match Friday night and came away with a 1-0 victory. My hostel is all Masters and PhD students (except me), so we have somewhat of an age advantage playing against the undergrad students. I am one of the two starting center backs and am a head taller than most of my teammates. We play a strange formation that includes a left and right back, two center backs, two center midfielders, a left and right midfielder/”winger,” one striker in the center, and a “10^th man” who as far as I can tell has free reign to roam the field and take shots as he wishes. We tend to have a lot of our team concentrated in the center of the field, which makes sense because we have four people defending in the center. We dominated possession most of the game but were only able to convert one goal. It was thrilling to play a competitive game of soccer again. I am really glad Abebe, the Ethiopian guy who lives across the hall from me, asked me if I wanted to play on the team.

In the matches, we play 2 halves, each somewhere between 20-25 minutes long. Considering the exactness of timing of many other activities in India, I would not be surprised if the two halves are of slightly different lengths due to some random factors like if the ref—another student—has a meeting or if the lights will be turned off on the field soon. I have been chronically early to practices and games so far. By “early,” I mean I roll up on my bike one minute before we are supposed to be there. I am usually the first person on the team at the field by a solid ten minutes. I am not convinced that I will ever get used to the timing here. Each practice I think to myself: “this one will start on time, right?” Wrong. Then our first match came around and I thought: “games will start on time even if practices don’t, right?” Wrong again; our game started about 15 minutes late. I am not so much worried about spending a few minutes of my time sitting around before the game starts as how our game starting late will affect the people who have the last time slot. The field lights do not stay on past 10:00pm for anyone. I think this timing of events (just like walking on the left side of the sidewalk) is something that I will never quite get used to while I am here. I will just be glad that I am not someone who has a habit of showing up to events 20 minutes early.

There is a small fruit store on campus near one of the three gates. Early in the week, I decided to buy some more fruit to supplement my usual afternoon snack of 2 bananas. I bought some small oranges (more like large satsumas), which I had purchased once before and confirmed their good taste. I also decided to buy a couple fruits that I had never seen before: a small squishy fruit with brown skin about the color of a kiwi and the size of a ping pong ball and a green (unripe)/yellow (ripe) fruit about the size of an apple. I brought them back to the office to eat and asked Shilpa what they were. The brown fruit is called bael in Hindi. It had a dull orange interior, a dark pit that did not stick to the fruit, and tasted familiarly sweet. It was not my favorite flavor, but I am glad I tried it and have been trying to think where I have tasted that flavor before. After eating the two small baels, I asked Shilpa what the larger yellow fruit was. She replied “guava” and I once again—just like when I realized what the bucket in my room was for—felt like an ignorant American who does not know what real, whole fruit looks like because he only eats sugary juice and soda (this is not me, but I lived the stereotype in this instance). I backpedaled and made some excuses for my ignorance, saying that I had never seen a whole guava before in the US and had only eaten guava in other tropical countries. I took a bite and displayed my ignorance once again when I remarked that the inside was white, not pink. Apparently guavas have a white interior in India. Since this incident, I have decided that guava is one of my favorite fruits and have had one every couple of days. I tried one green and did not like it as much, so I am going to stick to ripe guava in the future.

                                                                                                              

In the bathroom recently, I saw two lizards at the same time hiding under two different lights—this confirmed my suspicion that there is not just one lizard in the building. I bet the lizard who snatched the bug off the wall is a different lizard from the one that fell from the ceiling and made a “splat” sound on the ground behind me. The bug-snatcher seems a little smarter from my catalogued behavioral analysis. Also in the bath room recently are bees. Not nice honey bees or bumblebees, but some sort of wasp that looks nasty. They generally mind their own business and hang out on the lights, but occasionally one of them starts flying around and sends me cowering into the corner. I have a fairly large fear of bees, and this fear is exponentially larger if I am washing my hands or brushing my teeth (fewer hands available for swatting) and without a shirt on (brushing my teeth, per above). They usually only sit on the lights at night, and there are often dead wasps on the floor of the bathroom in the morning, as if they just sit there all night until they fall off from exhaustion and die in the wee hours of the morning. I am not sure what this behavior signifies, but I hope it means that the wasps will migrate out of the bathroom on my floor soon.

On Thursday, my hostel had a Tea Party in the afternoon instead of the normal tiffin (afternoon snacks) in the mess. Outside in a grassy area between two wings of my hostel, there was a long line leading up to the food—which included a veg puff pastry, a ketchup-like dipping sauce, a vegetable curry dish, sweet creamy pudding dessert, cake, ice cream, chips, soda, and tea. Instead of the standard stainless steel mess trays, we were served on large plastic plates with plastic silverware and paper cups. In addition to the much better selection of food than normal, there were also a few lawn games out, including Zorball, the large inflatable ball that you hold around your torso and run into other people. I have seen these only a handful of times, and then only from a distance. The setup was a sumo wrestling-type of game where you get a running start and try to either knock the other person down or push them out of the “ring,” which was a sheet on the ground. I battled against Ybek, an Ethiopian guy from my hallway, and won 2-1. It was really fun and disorienting to be inside the bubble—the plastic was not especially transparent and my ears were mostly obscured, so it took a lot of concentration to see/hear the countdown before I was allowed to start running. The part I was not expecting from this battle was my face smashing against the inside of the Zorball immediately after the collision. It felt similar to falling down inside a bouncy house or being pegged in the head by an exercise ball. Not especially pleasant, but also not especially unpleasant or physically harmful. I have always wanted to try running into someone while inside one of these large inflatable balls, and I will surely do it again if my hostel has another Tea Party this semester. I think it is one per hostel per semester, but as with many things here in India, the timing is not well-defined and not easy for someone not familiar with the system to pick up on. This theme of relaxed timing is more prominent in my life now that I am living on campus than it was when I was in India for my previous summer trips; I still have not fully integrated this perception of time into my mental calendar, but I am still hopeful that I can learn while I am here.

Picture I took of the ATM when I thought it was not going to charge me but not dispense any cash...it ended up timing out and not charging me; I think the ATM was out of money but for some reason still accepted my card. This ATM has cash in it about 50% of the time.