My sad septum...

So, funny story:

There once was a girl named Julie. She never loved her nose, but in the past few years, she had learned to accept it, and was even starting to like it.
Well, one day, she decides to go to India for three months. While there, she meets a very sweet 3 1/2 year old boy named Ayush. Last night, they were playing around and suddenly he lunges forward and accidentally headbutts her in the face...crunch...Julie's nose gets broken. Hilarious, no?

I will be going to a doctor to check it out in the next few days. It's pretty ugly, but not horrendous (and some of that is probably swelling). More upsetting though is my inability to breathe out of it so far (complete inability to breathe out of one nostril; partial ability--with deep concentration--to breathe out of the other) and the pain, which kept me up last night despite copious amounts of painkillers. We'll see what the doctor says and I'll probably wait to do anything about it until I get home (though hopping on the medical tourism bandwagon would be tempting, given that there are some really good and very cheap Indian doctors...).


In other news:

I started my one-on-one Hindi lessons yesterday and they are going well. Hindi is pretty hard. The structures aren't so bad, but there are sooooo many syllables in some of the verbs and things that I get tongue-tied quickly. But that said, I have no expectations of becoming even conversationally fluent; it's just nice to have some ability to speak it while I'm here.

I also found a translator! So I am getting my interviews ready to go and hope to start those soon!

And finally, Judaism apparently doesn't exist. The other day, my coworkers were asking me about what religion I am. They weren't terribly surprised I'm not Hindu, but they did think that, given my last name, I am Muslim. When I told them I am Jewish, they were incredibly confused and had no idea what I was saying. In my attempt at explaining that it's a relatively common religion in the U.S., after Christianity, and that Christianity, Islam and Judaism are similar, they then became under the impression that Judaism is an offshoot of Christianity and seemed pleased at the end that they "understood," stating : "Oh, so you are Christian." Ummm, no. But I will leave that for another day....