One month down!

Marta from Germany and Carla from Italy <3

All of the exchange students in Surat

Host mom and I at my surprise birthday party!

Once again time has flown by and I have let more than two weeks pass since my last blog post. Because of that I think I will take a different approach and not write every detail of what I have been up to. My parents (and MAYBE Lester) would be the only people who would actually be interested in a post that long.

Most of the time I feel like I am in a dream. But every day there are times where I really realize that I'm on the other side of the world from Chelan. For some reason life feels so normal even though it has completely turned upside down.

The culture here is different in almost every way you can imagine. I feel like a child sometimes, re-learning how to do every-day tasks

in the correct way for India. At first I felt stupid for not knowing the right way to do certain things but now I almost expect to be corrected when I do something new. I know that I am already growing as a person because ordinarily, being corrected would really bother me. I always hated doing things wrong or being ignorant to information. But now the more I learn, the better I am at accepting being wrong and the more I want to learn what the right way to do something is. But I struggle with trying to remember and trying to balance everything I am learning with everything I need to do. Slowly I am improving that but it still needs work.

I am also learning more than ever to get out of my comfort zone. I am definitely not the kind of person to stay within the realms of comfort, however there are definitely things that I am more uncomfortable doing. At the last Rotary meeting I sang a part of a song in front of the club. Not to mention that the song was in Hindi. I would never call myself a good singer by any means, but now I am going to singing classes with my host mom in preparation for singing at the District Conference (yikes).

The fact that I have been here for a little over a month blows my mind. Each week goes by so fast sometimes I feel like I cant even keep up with myself! But time going fast just means that I am staying busy and having fun. :)
I have an exciting few weeks and months ahead of me so I will try my best updating more often.
Until then--
All of my love, as always.