I am no longer homeless!!!!! I found, well actually Sarah found this great apartment that an older couple is renting out to a single female. Enter: me. So we called, and then we hopped in an auto and went right over to see the place. After a little bit of confusion (because what would a day in India be without some confusion) we found the place. And it is huuuuuuuuge!!! I have the entire bottom floor of the house to myself! I thought it was just going to be a room off to the corner of their house, which would have suit me just fine. But it's an entire two bedroom apartment for just me!!! I have a dining room, a kitchen (no gas for the stove yet but they said they would help me with that), a sitting room, my bedroom, and another bedroom too...they said they won't be renting that one out. Seriously??? And guess how much this beauty is costing me? $220 for a month, plus utilities. I am moving in tomorrow. It was really wonderful because I was looking in all the wrong places, and was getting frustrated, thinking about not staying here for long, just continuing to travel and vio-la...Sarah found it online.
After that we walked to the market from my new place, bought some food, and walked back to Sarah's. Apparently it's all within walking distance, but I was so hopelessly lost that I would never be able to find it again. Thank god for auto-rickshwas. The trip to the house in the auto cost about $1. But I do have a lot of time on my hands and I love to walk, so I find myself wishing my trip to India came with a GPS. It's very humbling for me, because I've always considered myself to have a fairly good sense of direction. But then maybe that's only because I've lived in Chicago for the past 6 years; whoever planned Chicago was organized and sensible. It is based on a grid system, and I could always determine the cardinal directions based on the lake, and therefore always knew where I was. It was the English who established the primary road systems in Bangalore, and it shows: nothing is direct, everything is round-about-this and garden-that, with the roads going around the gardens and then in spider-web fashion branching out from there. Of course the chaotic traffic, the cows standing in the middle of the road, the piles of burning garbage, the stench of urine eminating from the sidewalks(making them uninhabitable which is why all the pedestrians walk on the road, adding to the chaos), the stray dogs wandering around, and the constant need to be looking down so as not to fall off the raised sidewalks or step in a big pile of cow shit (which is liquidy and slippery and would result in a total wipeout) doesn't aid my attempts at keeping track of where I am. I'm more focused on staying upright than where I am going. I'm sure eventually I'll get the hang of this. Sarah complimented me on my street crossing skills today, so I know there's hope.
I don't think I have painted a very beautiful picture of India so far, and for that I'm sorry. But, truth is, you have to be able to look past this to see the beauty in the city, and I'm too absorbed in trying to survive that I haven't had the chance. But for me, I love the chaos; I love it because I don't understand it at all, but it works. Everybody here in this city thinks nothing of it - and here I am, bewildered, dumbfounded, and amazed. I describe it as chaos, because to me that's what it seems like, but it's not. There is an order to it, and everyone except me knows aobut it. I don't think three weeks will be enough time to decipher this encrypted code of life that goes on here, but at least it should be enough time for me to be able to walk from point A to point B, without getting lost, getting run over, or wiping out on a pile of cow shit. Here's hoping!
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