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I have not eaten as much naan as I was expecting. In fact, I prefer chapatti (also known as roti) these days: a lighter disk of bread like a tortilla that is a nicer utensil than the heavy and filling naan. That said, you can't really go wrong with naan. We made it in a tandoor oven, but I guess a conventional oven could also do. It would be less exciting though.

This is an analogue of potato pancakes, an excellent and healthy breakfast food. The preparation is split into two phases: making the dough and the filling, and putting it all together.

The tandoor is a cylindrical clay, metal or cement oven that gets quite hot and scary but is used for a wide variety of delicious meals. It is not a common household appliance, but rather something that restaurants and hotels would have; we are lucky enough at the SIT program center to have our own. Tandoori Chicken is a specific style of chicken cooked in the tandoor.

I just spent a week in a small town in Rajasthan with three other students (Ally, Ilan, and Margaux) and our Hindi professor, Prahladji. Ally, Ilan, and Margaux are just super kind and passionate and exuberant people and were a lot of fun to be around, and Prahladji is a bit of a trickster and makes a lot of silly jokes and sticks out his tongue and I am pretty sure he enjoyed our company as much as we enjoyed his. Every day we rode a taxi from Nathdwara, the town we were staying in, into the smaller village of Molela to work with Mukeshji on making pottery. Mukesh didn't have the best English, but was extremely patient and very warm and a brilliant potter. He made everything seem so easy! And then we'd mess up and everything would be awful and he'd come over and say “No problem, no problem” and touch our pottery and it would instantly be better than it was before we spilled water everywhere or tore an arm of Ganesha.

Okay, so here are the pictures I took from my major excursion. Remember both the fact that I'm not that big of a fan of photography when I could instead be standing dazed and awestruck with a little bit of drool coming out my mouth as I gaze wordlessly on the splendors of yore and also the fact that I was sick for a time and didn't want to take so many photos of either myself sweating and uncomfortable or of the inside of the room where I was sitting and watching bad movies on TV while a whole other country was outside my door. Also: I don't like taking selfies.

Ok. Wow.

The taste of rose is a a fundamentally non-linguistic concept, isn't it?

It has been a week mostly of monuments, and learning how to say “What time is it?” and a lot of paneer. Paneer is quite good. And Badminton!

I had a weekend! A good one! We did all kinds of crazy things, while avoiding sleep like the plague. And by crazy, I mean pretty not-crazy. We saw some old buildings! Some were big, some were small. We also played with a puppy, and saw several different cows.

So, I've just been reading some of David Foster Wallace's Oblivion Stories and he has this weird style of long, tortuously drawn out sentences that probably in the ones that I read at least lasted on average a good page or so, with minimal punctuation and wide oscillations through time and across subplots and random tangents and which (the style) has gotten rather steeped in my mind and it's not like it is bad, per se, although I don't profess to have the linguistic skill to pull it off myself and but so I'm sorry if that makes its way into my writing because really DFW can only barely pull it off himself and presumably from many perspectives does not quite manage to.