india update

Sorry to leave this un-updated for so long. I landed safely in Tiruchirapalli on July 4 after a few long days of traveling and we've been busy here ever since. We're staying in a small village about 1 hour away from Tiruchy at the Gramalaya training center, and it's beautiful out here!
Internet access is limited, but as a team we're updating a blog about production here. We're writing posts for each day and posting pictures on it too, so you can check that to see what I'm up to on a day-to-day basis. Right now it says I wrote all the posts but really, I just wrote the first two. There is something that I wrote along with my teammate Abbey that the SOW organizers didn't post to the blog though, so here are some not-so-p.c. observations:

Some surprising things about India:

• The hospitality of the people. The people we’ve met have been very open to sharing their stories, whether they are showing us their toilet or letting us take pictures or demonstrating the way you grind spices for cooking. We were worried about establishing relationships across the language barrier, but that hasn’t really been a problem.
• Driving on the left side of the road. This shouldn’t really be a surprise, but it does throw you off a little bit, especially when there are also goats, mopeds, ox-carts and people on the road too, and no traffic signals.
• The food. Like I said before, we were expecting to live off of the power bars we brought, but we’ve been so stuffed from every meal we haven’t even touched them. A funny story: one morning at breakfast, Palaniyandi (a Gramalaya employee who has been accompanying us) told us that the cooks were concerned that we didn’t like the food because they thought we weren’t eating enough. Since then we've tried to step it up but with three huge, carb-y meals a day we're getting I think I'll be a little rounder for the Thai beaches. Not that I'm complaining though, home-cooked south Indian food is delish.
• Hot beverages. Whenever we go to our rooms to rest, Jaya (the lady who has been helping us feel at home here) offers to bring us tea or coffee. They serve both with milk and lots of sugar, so one time we asked if we could just have black coffee. Black indeed. Gramalaya’s black is our…white. We won’t say they were wrong – it does look black. But as far as taste goes, black it is not. We soon realized that the point where they start adding sugar is the point where we Americans typically stop. At about seven tablespoons per tea cup.
• The head wiggle. Everywhere you look, people wiggle their head from side to side, and the gesture has so many meanings it can be hard to interpret. Sometimes it means yes, sometimes hello and sometimes just general agreement. For us, it looks a little like people are shaking their heads “no” the way Americans do, when really they mean the opposite. This becomes a problem more often than one would think. For example, “Are we interviewing these people at 7 a.m.?” Head wiggle. “Do you like this saree that I want to purchase?” Head wiggle.