So to get on with it, the wedding was really really cool. I didn't get a chance to say much about it before because I had like 10% battery, but it was so radically different from any wedding I'd conceived of that I really really enjoyed it. After the wedding, we came home and went up to the roof (yes, all buildings here have roof access to the public, AWESOME!) and hung out until about 2 am. While we were up there, our really drunk host brother who we never really hear talk much opened up. He told us stories about where he's from, called Kurg. Technically, he's not our host brother, he's our host brother's classmate, but he's lived here for about 3 years now. Kurg is a tribal village known for its coffee plantations, and is apparently kind of in the middle of nowhere. The village has its own language, not even the state language (Tamil I think? Haven't looked at a map yet). But the stories he told us were of the times (yes plural) he came face to face with panthers. Once one was sitting outside of his house watching him eat, and it waited for so long that he even went to sleep with it outside his window! He also told us of another time when he got to see a king cobra and a python fighting in the middle of the road. Very cool. There's a good chance I'll take a trip down to Kurg while I'm here and stay with his family and such.
On Friday, we mostly hung out. Becca and I went to drop off the professor on campus and got some chat and chai there in this tiny tiny shack made from bamboo and brush (I'm feeling fine, too). After lunch we went with our host brother, his wife, host sister, and their cousins to go swimming at a hotel pool. Apparently here you can either pay a fee and swim in the pools or if you order food/drinks you can swim for free! Luckily it was a westernized hotel so I didn't feel too out of place wearing a two-piece but I'll definitely be getting a one-piece before I go beaching in Chennai or Goa.
Lastly, yesterday. Yesterday we woke up at 4 am to go to Nagarjunakonda. It was Becca and me, the cousins, Saumia (host sister) and four of Saumia's friends. We watched the sunrise from the car and got out of town. Soon we were passing through these tiny villages, smaller than the size of Paoli (for those of you who know the reference). These villages quite literally had this one road that we were on, no side roads, no neighborhoods, no houses. We ended up stopping in one for breakfast (it was a four-hour car journey to where we were going). It was obviously the first time these people had actually seen white people with their own two eyes, they'd maybe heard of what white people are through word-of-mouth or something but had never seen us, so Becca and I got some interesting stares, especially when we ate at this dinky food place with our hands like we knew what we were doing. The food was really really bad, luckily we got safe food that didn't end up making us sick. Onward we went and made it to the dam, first. We stopped on a bridge for pictures, and halfway between our bridge and the dam we saw some structure. When we asked, we were told that it was actually the old bridge that had collapsed, and as this was being said a huge truck passed over our bridge and we felt it rumble beneath our feet. Creepy feeling. We kept going and stopped again to hike down to the river. When we got down, we took off our shoes and dipped our feet in, and after I'd bathed my feet they explained that this was the Krishna river, one of the four holy rivers in India. So my sins have been washed away =) (again, maybe that's why my computer charger is working now!)
Finally, we got into this small town and from there took a boat to this island where the Buddha himself had once preached. There was a cute little museum and lovely gardens, but this was the heat of the day so it was a little harder for me to enjoy. On our way back, we stopped at what was supposed to be waterfalls. We ate our lunch in the "parking lot", which was really just leveled dirt. There were a bunch of monkeys around, even one mom with it's baby attached to its underbelly, so we had to eat in the car with the doors shut. The monkeys, although super cute, are actually evil and will attack for food. Some little boys came by, too, and we gave them our leftover food, and in exchange we got to take their pictures. One of the little boys ran up to me with a page ripped from a magazine and pointed to a person on it. It was one of the white, blonde girls from "High School Musical", and he was saying that that was me! Haha they were a lot of fun.
We didn't get to see the waterfalls, though, because there was no water falling. India has hit a major drought this year, the likes of which they haven't seen in about 6 years. I've seen it rain about 8 times since I've been here, and none of those were monsoon-like, mostly it would just rain lightly for anywhere from 5-20 minutes. I saw some figures in the paper a week or two ago, and though I can't remember them exactly, we are at least 100 cm short on rain.
Basic power needs here are met with coal power, so I think that means about 300-500 megawatts, and it's normally the hydropower that supplements that. As it is, the power is consistently cut for about 3 hours every day here.
That was pretty much my weekend. I may or may not travel next weekend, but in two weeks I'll definitely be in Mumbai for the Ganesha festival. I'll explain more on that later (like when I know more about it haha).
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