So I’ve had two very full days of class already and my brain is completely fried. It’s not necessarily harder concepts or thoughts (except my philosophy course which sometimes makes me feel like I can’t even speak my own language), but the amount of work that they are expecting us to do has become a little daunting. I have a feeling that sleep is going to become a strange foreign concept very soon.
I don’t want to bore anyone too much but I actually thing my classes are kind of awesome so I’ll give an overview of each of them; feel free to skip to the end if you just want to hear what we’ll be doing this weekend!
Starting next week I will start my mornings on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday with a 6:30 am yoga class. Yeah I know, me wake up at 6:30? It won’t be pretty but I’m determined to try! Dr. Meera will be teaching it and she has told us that she gives a lot of yoga history and philosophy along with our classes so it will be interesting to compare it with the classes I’ve been to in America.
After yoga all of my classes begin at 8, except for Friday and Saturday when the times for our field visits change weekly. On Mondays and Thursdays I have a 3 total hours of Ayurveda, which is a class focusing on the traditional form of health care of the same name that is holistic and preventative in nature. The really fun part about this class is that there is an hour of practicals each week which are when we get to either experience or observe the treatments we are studying which basically means FREE MASSAGES!! Let’s just hope I don’t fall asleep and drool on their special treatment table! On Tuesdays and Wednesdays I have 3 hours total of Global Health Problems which is a basic public health class, nothing too exciting or extraordinary there but it also one of the courses I’m taking which counts towards my major back home so that’s good. Indian Intellectual Traditions is the philosophy course that I mentioned earlier when I said I felt a little over my head. I’ve never taken a philosophy course and I’m not even sure why the heck Dr. Meera (same lady that does yoga) let me into that course. Yesterday’s course was all about trying to decipher what we mean when we talk about our ‘self’. Is it purely a name or identity? Is it our mind? Our body? Or our soul? Is it eternal? Is it an accumulation of experiences or is our ‘self’ predetermined? All of these questions and no answers. So. Frustrating. But the hardest part is that it is dealing with Indian philosophy and I know even less about that than western philosophy. We’ll see how that ends up but needless to say I’m skeptical of my capabilities here. Maternal and Child Health meets every Thursday from 8 to 12:30, so tomorrow will be my first class. From what I’ve heard, after an hour of lecture, discussion and theory, we will be doing field visits every week to different clinics, schools, and women’s shelters to see firsthand what we are learning. Seriously, so cool. There is also the class that Ginny is teaching called Contemporary Indian Studies which is basically an all-encompassing course on Indian history, politics, and culture. This class also does a lot of field visits on friday mornings to various places.
On top of all this I have an online reflection course for Arcadia University, I’m taking an optional Hindi language course to learn the basics, and I may or may not take the bharatanatyam dance class. Goodbye sleep and hello Indian culture.
In other news. I’ve found nutella and ritz crackers, yummmm :))))) and four of us girls bought tickets to go to a music festival this weekend on St. Mary’s Island. A lot of people camp out so we may decide to join them but for now we are planning on coming back to campus to sleep on our hard but clean beds. Also even though Manipal in the day time is completely safe for girls to be alone, we all agreed that as four pasty white american girls at a trippy music festival on a seclueded island, it may not be the smartest decision to stay overnight on a used tent by the beach. Just a thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment