Today I arrived in Belgaum and am staying in a BEAUTIFUL house!!
Dharwad was non-stop. Especially yesterday. I woke up at like 4:00 AM and just laid there until 7:00. When I went in to shower, I found that there was no shower - just a faucet sticking out of the wall and another one of those big buckets and small pitchers. Umm...?
While I was standing there wondering what to do, my host brought in two metal buckets full of hot water (really hot water -- heated by the solar-powered hot water heater on the roof.) I must have looked terribly confused, because he explained that cold water came out of the faucet and that I should mix the hot and cold in the bucket for my bath. Thus, my first "Indian bath."
I rushed around trying to get ready, as we were supposed to meet the team at 9:15. But we ended up sitting around the living room until after 10:00. People kept dropping in -- what's going on?? I have a feeling "time" is open to interpretation here.
We had an orientation meeting at the Dharwad Rotary hall. A past-president filled us in on what our GSE experience might be like, and answered a lot of our questions. He also gave us a very brief crash-course on Indian culture.
From there we visited an Ayurvedic hospital -- they use leeches!
We were supposed to return to our host's homes after that, but instead they brought us to this tiny village called Garag - the only place in India where national flags are produced. It was very interesting, as all the flags are made by hand.
At first we didn't notice that this woman had some extra help.
Evening was fun. Neeta and Rachana dressed me in a sari and we went into town to do some shopping. Then we went to some of their relatives because it happened to be Sankranti - a festival when you offer people sweets and say, "Take sweet, talk sweet, be sweet." A lovely tradition, really!
By 10:00 all I wanted to do was sleep. But my hosts took Elizabeth and I out to a restaurant for dinner. As you can tell from last night's post -- I was spent! This morning I took a walk down by a lake with Nagraj and the two girls.
In the afternoon, the team did our first presentation for the Dharwad Rotary club and then we left for Belgaum.
My host family seems super-cool. The husband and wife (Veerdhaval and Swati) have two young sons, and they live as part of an extended family: a grandmother, two aunts, an uncle, and four other kids. It's quite a full house! I got to stop at an internet cafe for ten minutes and had a little time to relax in the afternoon.
This evening, Veerdhaval and Swati took me to a garden where Gandhi once visited and then we stopped for some amazing sugar cane juice. Later I watched the women cook dinner and after we ate, I played cards upstairs with all six kids.
Veerdhaval and Swati, my Belgaum hosts.
The Gandhi memorial garden in Belgaum.
I gotta say, right now I am feeling about 200% better than I was at this time last night!
Namaste.