I arrived at the airport after an 11 hour flight (and Kathryn's not-so-brilliant plan to go out to a party the night before when we had to leave for the airport by 5 AM) during which I slept little and watched a lot of mediocre movies. I was tired and pretty overwhelmed. It didn't help when I couldn't find my driver for like 20 minutes and all these taxi drivers would just walk by staring at me intensely. Finally I found him-well he found me- and we began our drive to my apartment. He kept trying to point out various landmarks along the way but I don't have a clue what he was saying.
We pulled up in front of this really dingy and ramshackle building and all I could think was 'oh please no oh please no oh please no' but he must have had similar concerns as he told me to wait in the car since the building was too poor (really it was just a bunch of gesturing and a couple 'stay car stay car..house too poor, too poor'). He got directions from a boy on the street and we turned a couple more corners to arrive at a nicer looking building. There was no where in sight but after just 30 seconds of us staring around in confusion a blonde girl rounded the corner and I all but jumped on her asking her if she was from AIESEC and knew where apartment 254 was. Turns out she is a housemate of mine, named Claudia, from Poland. The apartment is sparse but clean and has all the amenities I need. I have quite a few housemates. 2 polish housemates, 2 italian housemates, 1 estonian, 1 venezuelan, annnnnnnnnnd I can't remember the last one. There are three rooms, 2 with three beds and 1 with four beds. I am sharing a room with an italian guy who also works at PAIRVI with me and so far so good. He's an easy roommate.
Sunday involved a lot of stomach rumbling (and me having no idea where to get food) and sleeping. Vivek, the housing manager, came by in the late morning and took me to an ATM and then an american restaurant to get some take out food since all the shops were closed for the opening ceremony of the commonwealth games - for which I was very very thankful. I also bought some bakery items so I would have breakfast the next morning.
Today I woke up and got ready for my first day of work. Sarah and (I don't know how to say or spell my italian roommate's name, he told me to call him conrad but i'm still trying to learn the italian one cause i feel bad) so we'll just call him italian roommate for now, both work at PAIRVI with me but I was meeting a girl from AIESEC so they went ahead without me. The AIESEC girl picked me up but her driver didn't know how to get to the PAIRVI office so after quite some time of driving around and asking directions we managed to find it. Turns out its better we were late cause the boss hadn't arrived yet. We only had to wait a couple minutes and he arrived and without further a-do I was given my first assignment. I have to write a paper on the position that each major world economies and economies in transition have on climate change and agriculture. For good NGO measure they tossed in livelihood of fishing communities, arctic communities, and women so I definitely have my work cut out for me as I know NOTHING about climate change and there is absolutely no economic spin on it at all. ah well.
I'm still nervous to go to the markets alone and my food has been pretty sparse as I have no idea what half of the vegetables are that they are selling. There are no real grocery stores around here so its just whatever you can find at the various small corner stores and what not, which makes my already limited cooking abilities even more limited.
That's about it for now! Will update once something else has happened that is worth writing about :)
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