Musings

Tomorrow, a Tuesday, is the last day of school for the week because of the Institute's midsummer break. :) This makes for a very delighted me. I'm headed out late tomorrow night to Nainital and then on to Corbett National Park. Nainital is supposed to be lovely--it's located at this point where the foothills of the Himalayas meet with a lake. Should be absolutely beautiful. And then Corbett is a tiger refuge, and our goal there is go on an a-watching safari while riding on the backs of elephants. Hopefully, my next posts will be able to relay traveling stories.

Classes, however, are going rather well. I started the program knowing absolutely nothing--literally, nothing. I had to learn "hello" ("adab" or "aadab"), "thank you" ("shukriya"), and other entry level vocabulary during the first few days. I also had to learn the non-Roman alphabet, as the Urdu alphabet is derived from Persian and Arabic, and how to form words. Urdu is also written right to left and has no true vowels. And, just to complicate things a little more, the way sentences are structured is COMPLETELY different than in English or French, the other languages I've studied.

Anyways, but what is EXCITING is that TODAY we learned simple past and past habitual verb tense, and this is in addition to learning about nouns, adjectives, postpositions, imperatives, interrogatives, and the present habitual tense, and tomorrow, we're learning the future tense.
And while I'm certainly not able to hold a coherent conversation with a native Urdu speaker, I feel like I've learned so much since arriving here, and that's a really gratifying feeling.

Other than that, not much is new. My nose might be infected, but I'm treating it and trying to keep it from causing me to take my nose ring out. :S I've become really attached to my pierced nose.