First Day of Pongal

Today was the first day of Pongal! I feel like we have celebrated it so much already, that it already started, but that really wasn’t the case I guess. I bought a saari and wore it for the first time. I can’t say that I really like wearing it. You have to constantly be worrying about if it is still on right. I prefer their other beautiful clothes. 

This is a bunch of us girls in our new saaris.

This is me.

This is us with the tailor who made our saaris for us.

It is interesting that women always look super dressed up here. Even most of the poor women, they all seem to wear nice clothes. I think it must be really important to them to look presentable and nice. The other day I was getting copies at a copying place, and the lady commented on the fact that I was not wearing any jewelry. It was kind of funny. She said I looked “very simply simple”, only it was in Telugu and my translator friend translated it for me. It’s okay though. I didn’t feel badly about my appearance because I have also had multiple people here tell me I look like a doll. Do they all have the same doll or something? If they do, then apparently it is blond and has my face pasted on it. If I end up finding it in the stores, I can buy it and have a lookalike doll, like the ones in those American Girl catalogues they used to sell.

 Anyways, so we burned stuff for Pongal, because that is what they do on the first day of Pongal. And then we did a dance around these cool designs that were on the ground, drawn in chalk. The designs are called Mugu. We learned how to draw some in my Telugu class. The dance must have looked either really good or really funny to the people of VIzag who were watching us, because somebody called the TV people and they recorded us doing that dance later that night. They even interviewed some of the girls a bit, but I didn’t really want to be interviewed, so I kind of scooted away at that part.

We visited our program doctor that night to celebrate Pongal a little with him. It was nice, he gave us little gifts of oranges and a few other things for us to eat. He told us we can stop by anytime, and he said he didn’t mean that in an “American” way and that we actually can stop by anytime. I thought that was pretty funny. After all, we do tend to say that over in America, and people don’t usually mean it literally.