GUESS WHO'S BACK??

It's official; I'M BACK! After a fourteen hour red eye from JFK (not to mention the eight months of wait time since I submitted the Fulbright application), I landed in Delhi on Tuesday evening. Certainly, the sleeplessness and restlessness associated with a long overnight flight makes for a surreal post-flight day, but my whole time in Delhi has felt very surreal - that is, until a few hours ago when we took OUR FIRST AUTO(RICKSHAW) RIDE this trip. Finally, we left the comforts and confines of our oddly Disneyland-esque, grand, and sheltered hotel and got to experience a little tiny bit of Delhi as we made our way out for our first unsupervised dinner trip. Albeit short, that auto ride was great: A) because I got to experience it through newbies' eyes, as it was the first auto ride for the friends that I rode with, and B) because it got me really and truly excited to be back. I feel it now in a way that I didn't before, for whatever reason.

By and large, the flight went well. Two movies and a long conversation with a Fulbright friend and her new local seat buddy later, we landed in Delhi up one Indian tentative wedding invitation already!! (Fingers crossed that it works out for us!) We're here in Delhi for Fulbright orientation, which is not a particularly noteworthy experience - it's been a lot of preparatory lectures on teaching, culture, and safety. What I perhaps should do, however, is take a step back and say a few words about Fulbright:

US Senator William J. Fulbright founded the Fulbright program in 1946 as part of a diplomacy project to promote mutual understanding between Americans and people of other countries after World War II. To my knowledge, the U.S. has been sending Fulbrighters  of some capacity to India for quite a few decades now, since Fulbright's early years. As a recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, I'll be an English Teaching Assistant (read: English teacher... not assistant) at a school here in Kolkata for the next nine months.

But first of all, when I get to Kolkata I'll spend the first month getting oriented (believe me, it may in fact take that long) and learning Bangla, the regional language of my state of residence, West Bengal. (It's the same language that's spoken in Bangladesh, which was once a part of India, and a few other small Indian states in the area like Tripura [although regional accents/dialects may be cause for some variation here and there].) Hopefully it goes well!

More on Delhi sight-seeing to come!

Bhalo thakben (or "be well" in Bangla),

Rach