hello from Hyderbad

I had a super smooth trip here. Amsterdam was kind of crazy because of security but other than that I had no bumps. I had a lovely night in Mumbai then right off to Hyderabad. My school is in the northwest part of the state and it's like a desert which I wasn't expecting. My campus isn't beautiful by any means, but I love it. The campus, with gates guarded by police, is something like 23,000 acres and we are the farthest from anything. There are buses that run (sort of) and we're getting bikes so it will be a little easier to get to and from classes but whoa is it a change from Agnes. As is the registration process. Some classes started 3 weeks ago while other departments haven't even posted a schedule (like the dance department)and classes are 1-3 hours so everything conflicts and I have noooo idea how my schedule will turn out. We can start going to classes if we want, but I think most of us will wait until Monday. Today, if all went as planned, is a bundh, which means everything is closed. The opposing party is pissed about something doing with the division of my state so they just do whatever to stop the flow of daily life. We still have our wait staff and some classes are still going because our school isn't government run. We have a wait staff in our 'hotsel' which is so weird but they are so nice and so cute. They take a lot of pride in serving us and it's rude to try to help them. I went to get more toast today and one of the guys brought it to me instead and looked very accomplished. The food is pretty good. I always opt for the consistent fruit (bananas or pineapple usually) white rice, and roti bread. Not a huge fan of the yogurt but it helps with the spices to just mix it with everything. We get a special treat of coke or orange soda and have really good ice cream-it's like whipped cream texture and really flavorful. We've had about 6 power outages today because it rained a lot so I'm going to stop here before I lose all this. We have a campus tour today and hopefully I'll get a bike!
Miss you all....but I love it here.