Back in Ahmedabad!!

Ilove the Pereras! How fortuitous for me that we are all happening to be here in the same city at the same time! I’m sure I just messed up my internal clock and jetlag completely – we are now at the same hotel in Ahmedabad, and we just stayed up until almost 3 in the morning talking! But I’m not complaining, I can always sleep later! But I am soo excited to be back in Ahmedabad after four years and on top of it, Nihal and Karuna arrive the same day and are here for four months. Did I mention how excited I am to be in Ahmedabad, because I AM! We were talking about all the places we should go back to!

So when I was here in 2005, we came to CEPT university and worked with a planning studio of masters students on a development project for Veraval, a fishing village in Gujarat. Often the students would speak to each other in Hindi; however, we never heard our names come up, so we figured that they must have code names for us so we wouldn’t know they were talking about us. Not that we thought they were saying anything really bad about us, it wasn’t like that because we had a lot of fun with them.

Well, they didn’t know that I now know a bit of Hindi….I met my friend Krupal for lunch in Delhi, and he got a call while we were there from another student I knew from his class, who was also in Delhi but couldn’t make it to lunch. So they were speaking in Hindi or Gujarati or whatever, but I made out that apparently Rahul asked whether or not I was still fat, because I caught Krupal’s end saying, ‘yes she is fat.’ I couldn’t even really be angry- it was too funny. I immediately said, “I can understand what you’re saying,’ which surprised him quite a bit I think. But that’s just how people are here, they talk about if you’re fat or not, not really out of a meanness but just stating a fact. Anyway Krupal then proceeded to tell me everyone from the class that had gotten fat, and funnier still Harpreet had told me earlier that I should wait to see Krupal because he had gotten fat since he got married. So I mean I can’t even get mad, it’s just like, ok yeah I am.

But so already on my flight from Delhi to Ahmedabad I met some cool people! You meet the most interesting people on planes I think! One happened to be a Fulbright alum who had studied agriculture at UC Davis in the 80s. One happened to work for the city of Ganhinagar and so knew all about the planning of it, so it is right in line with what I am researching….which by the way, I will actually post what I am doing here, in the next few days.

Oh and the pictures are of the gift box we all got from the Indian Foreign Secretary's office. There's incense, candy, a scarf, and more.