Just trying to get a fat ride home

You've probably noticed that I have been posting a lot lately. The reason, to slake your thirst for an answer, is that I do not have a job. Even a volunteer one. Even a half-day part-time pay-to-work-so-you-can-put-it-on-your-resume one. But I'm working on it. In the meantime, since I've got all this free time on my hands having established that the one potential hobby I might pursue, headstanding yoga, is out of the question, I've been doing some shopping.

Yesterday, for example, we went to Le Marche supermarket in Vasant Vihar, an upscale and very expat-ed neighborhood in South Delhi to pick up some western foods. The market, though expensive by Indian standards, was just like being in the states, aside from the guard swatting at flies with a tennis racket and the checkout teller with body odor strong enough to remove paint (more on my theory of the subcontinent untouched by deodorant another time). We bought some pretzel bits, peanut butter, and an absurdly large block of parmesan cheese that in order to ever equalize out into our budget will have to last us until 2014 at the earliest.

Then it was time to find a rickshaw home. If you have not been religiously reading our blog (and if not, why not?) you may not have seen the bit about Delhi rickshaws and the meter. They are 'supposed' to take you on the meter, but almost never do and so you have to barter. Though I am sure sticking out like a sore thumb will always work to my disadvantage when bargaining here, I am hoping that being able to conduct the bargaining in Hindi will help.

After yesterday posting the creatively constructed email from our friend and correspondent Bunty Everest in Pushkar, I feel should confess that my Hindi skills are horrific and I could certainly not compose even a sentence about the bright on room with windows on the out side. We are starting classes (nearby the home of the fire escape goat pictured yesterday, I might add) on Monday, so hopefully that will bring some improvement, but so far for a person with a background in foreign languages things have been grim. My vocabulary consists (literally) of the following words:

okay
it's okay
yes
bottle
to urinate
water
fat
I am not a man
I am rich/I am not rich.

You try stringing those together to get a fair price on a taxi and let me know how it goes. I blame some of this on my friend Priya, a Fulbrighter doing research on the Bollywood film industry who spent part of her childhood here and speaks Hindi, who said she would teach me a few words. To her credit she did not explicitly say she would teach me useful words.

I did try to explain once after being quoted a price for a 5 minute rickshaw ride around the corner, the sum of which would have purchased a bus ticket from here to the Arabian peninsula, that I am not rich just because I am western and it's not fair to try to rip people off based on their skin color or something insipidly useless like that. What came out, because I do not in fact know any of the words necessary to express that thought in Hindi, was a much simpler sentence mostly beyond my control about fat and urination that did not lower the price of the ride. Just you wait, rickshawwallahs of the world, until I can express myself properly.