Summer, part 1: Brazil to Bangalore

I’ll start back up with an understatement: it’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. Long enough that starting to blog again feels incredibly awkward, and I wouldn’t be doing it if I could think of an alternative that didn’t involve either those weirdly cheery mass emails or spending literally my entire life on the internet. But as terrible as I am about staying in touch, I do really miss you all — so back to blogging it is.*

I split the first month of the summer between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo on a law-school-sponsored exchange program. Since I will probably never get around to writing about it in detail, I’ll just say that Brazil was, as always, totally fabulous, and thanks to the heroic scheduling efforts of the Brazil cohort, the program way exceeded expectations. I left Brazil on the 20th and arrived in India on the 25th after a stop in New Haven to repack my bags, do laundry, and lie on the couch with a fever. Probably due to the fever and a persistent cough (sincere apologies to all my seatmates), the trip itself was extremely unpleasant. I’d be trying to forget it entirely were it not for a three hour stopover in Dubai, where the huge and shiny buildings rising out of the desert haze and flashing (oil?) trucks were enough to fascinate me out of my overmedicated and under-rested travel coma. In any case, I arrived in the Bangalore airport at 3am, exactly a week ago today. After some tense moments at the swine flu checkpoint — I was seriously worried I’d be sent back to the States, but luckily, my fever had disappeared somewhere over the Mediterranean — I sailed through immigration, retrieved my badly-smashed suitcase, and stepped outside to a cool, dark, and silent early-morning Bangalore.

*But still send emails! I swear I will answer them eventually.