Legend, oh legend, the thiiiiird wheel legend

As we sat in the pan-asian restaurant next door to my apartment, the place where 82 smiling young men do just about everything but chew your food for you and spit it into your mouth, Jared, Lea, and I discussed the curious fact that there is no word in Bengali for "awkward" or "uncomfortable." I discovered this during my language studies this summer and was shocked, since these two words could probably describe how I’m feeling 50 percent of the time. Perhaps this is the true cultural barrier I face here. I’d probably be best suited to go back to studying German, a marvelous language that has words reserved solely for "pleasure at the misfortune of others" and "the feeling you get in the wintertime when you sit in front of a roaring fire, only emotionally."

Sorry to those of you I’ve neglected to email in the last couple of weeks (hopefully this will change now that I have an INTERNET of my very own!). I’ve had a bit of a surge in my workload as I’m now basically interning with the NGO I was going to be researching through, suddenly I have a social life outside of my interactions with the guy who recharges my cell phone minutes, and to top it all off the lovely Lea and her lovely friend Jared have been chillaxing in Kolkata with me for the last couple days, which has seriously increased the occurrence of "outings" in my daily life. On Sunday we headed towards the Park/Sudder Street area of central Kolkata with mostly a goal of "looking at white people." Sudder Street is the backpacker district here. Those of you who know me well know that my favorite people in the world are ex-pats, especially those who come to Kolkata. While I do know many non-Indians living in this city who are great and have totally legit reasons to be here, most of the North American/Israeli/Western European/Japanese presence is here for reasons of charity tourism, meaning sometimes stints as short as a week or two of volunteering with the orphans or sickies at one of big Mama T’s institutions. I am a pretty strong believer that volunteerism has the power to destroy civilizations unless it is done well, which is rarely the case. And here you get a pretty large and transient number of people who do crap that really doesn’t improve anyone’s lives but their own and at the same time feeds into a larger narrative of HOW POOR AND WRETCHED Kolkata is, which is at once annoying, problematic, and not true when you compare it to plenty of other cities who have much better reputations. I don’t want to belittle the work that a lot of good organizations do here and everywhere around the world, but I was a part of this volunteerism-in-Kolkata sphere for five months the last time I lived here and plenty of it is total bull. I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to say that "poverty" as a tourist attraction is pretty ridiculous, but here these people are, flocking to Sudder Street en masse to eat their breakfast food and be assholes.

Talking about this was a bit more fun than actually doing it, mostly because Jared wasn’t wearing his "whitey go home!" t-shirt and because judging others, while perhaps my favorite pastime, is ultimately pretty unfulfilling (I hope you are all paying attention to this IMPORTANT LESSON). We decided to go to New Market, a huuuuge bazaar which also might be the most stressful place in the world. Before that of course we had to pee, a slight problem because there aren’t many public bathrooms around here unless you’re comfortable using the side of the road. I went into the closest shop and asked the man behind the counter in Bengali where we might find a bathroom, and his eyes got really wide as he was all, "oh my goodness, no," like I had just asked if I could go to the bathroom right there in the middle of his liquor store. After a little confusion he finally pointed us towards the fire brigade, which was great as I’m all for the word "brigade" to be as much a part of my life as possible. New Market was a bust, which was foreseeable but unfortunate. We ended up drinking HeMan 5000 at my favorite bar on Park Street in the "family" section, so I can’t chalk the entire day up as a loss.

I’ve been sleeping in a lot more than is usual for me, which has meant waking up at 7 and waiting an hour to go back to sleep (not entirely sure why…), while I mostly just play Snake Xenzia on my MOHbile or stare at things. This morning as I stared at my bedspread, I realized that the entire thing is just an artist’s rendering of the female reproductive cycle, a fact that excited me more than it did Lea and Jared when I shared my revelation with them. I guess when you put your mind to it just about anything can look like a fallopian tube.