Well, I had my exam today, and I think it went fine. Thankfully, Fielding and Mandeville didn’t feature overly much and I could answer on just Swift, Dryden and Pope. Had a bit of an episode though trying to convince the office people that despite not having a roll number, I still needed a place to sit and that I was indeed meant to be there at all. One of my professors, Udaya saw me wandering the corridor looking for someone vaguely official to plead with so I could get a desk and laughed at my plight. He seemed to think it all too inevitable that two minutes before I was due to sit an exam, no one knew what to do with me. I guess I should have expected it. One professor who teaches paper 1 told me to just sit where I had done for his paper. Despite never seeing me before. How obvious do you feel it was that I didn’t take paper 1, and that he, as teacher, should have realised this??? It isn’t like I am hard to miss, being the one white person in the department and all. Udaya is right though: it was totally inevitable.
After the exam I went to meet Lauren for a hot chocolate in Barista. They have an interesting new winter menu full of spicy hot chocolate and the like. It is bad when you get excited for hot chocolate flavours but you know. Tried to play scrabble with Lauren but I started to win so we had to stop playing. She is so competitive sometimes, it is quite funny. We were hardly ten minutes in and she was already annoyed at her lack of letter luck.
Went to Hindi and learnt all about going via things, so going to England via plane, for example. Hindi teacher told us all about Corg (I don’t know how to spell it) in Karnatakh, where we must go. He is full of these random little anecdotes about different cities or foods or religion. It’s the best part of the class when he tells us a random tale. You really feel that he wants us to see as much as we possibly can. He is also very old, and yet has traveled very widely and intends to keep doing so. Lauren thinks he looks like a very old and wise tortoise.
After Hindi, Lauren and I met Nitin to go to the Tibetan refugee colony up our road for some dinner and a general wander. We ended up going to the wrong Tibetan refugee camp (yes, there are two within a mile of each other…) and then spent about half an hour trying to flag an auto to take us back the way we had come to get to the other one. As we were trying to flag the autos, I was hit in the stomach by a motorbike. It was quite sudden and I hardly realised what had happened until I noticed that the motorbike had come to a rolling halt as it had met the resistance of my body. The guy had no lights on (of course, this being Delhi in the pitch dark) and just mumbled sorry before speeding off. All I can say is, thank Christ the theory that no one here goes fast enough to do any harm is true. The front of the bike just hit me in the side of my stomach and sort of spun me round, but I was fine at the end of the day. Lauren and Nitin didn’t even notice. Thank god Nitin didn’t, as he would have had a heart attack. He is one of these nice but slightly chauvinistic males who probably agrees whole heartedly with the opinion that females should not be allowed out after dark lest they get themselves into a Situation. I had just a small bruise, but it knocked the wind out of me and I was glad when we finally managed to hail an auto down.
The other Tibetan refugee colony is down a tiny alley way and is a complete world away from everything around it. There are little pagoda style temples and prayer wheels and loads of shops selling incense and Dalai Lama endorsed goods. Sort of like the Che Guevara coke I saw in Monaco. Very weird. We went to a restro-hotel called Wodhen House that was really nice, and I wouldn’t mind staying there. Marie and David have stayed there before and said it was quite good. Certainly the food was pretty good and very affordable: 65 Rs for a bowl of Thukpa. Not bad. On our way out though we saw three massive dead rats lying on someone’s doorstep, neatly arranged in a row. That was slightly unnerving, but at least they were dead.
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