Namaste!. . . Hello?

Welcome to Mumbai! The picture above is the gate of my hostel out to the street--big, leafy palms and other trees, crumbling slate (?) sidewalks and the occasional car. It's a sleepy pathway, two blocks removed from a bustling market street:


I soon learned that the only word of Hindi that I know, the greeting "namaste," is pretty much obsolete in the big city, especially among the more cosmopolitan crowd. When I asked some of the girls in my dorm (called a hostel) how to say "thank you" in the semi-official Indian language, they all looked at each other for a moment before telling me that I'd seem pretty antiquated if I tried to use it. My best bet is to go with plain old "thank you."

It's taken me a while to share my first posting--I've been here for a whole week now, but some things are slow going around here, like internet hookups. Just like in the US, the IT guys have their own odd corner (their nook is shared at the college with a separate glassed-in room where the server sits in brightly-lit wired isolation like an electric-chair victim), their own secrets, and apparently, their own timetable. There's a fluidity of time best described, I think by the following actual conversation:
Me: "So you said that your servicemen were going to be here at 4:00 pm yesterday and we waited for them for three hours."
IT: "Yes. They will be there today. What time will you be home?"
"What time should we be home?"
"Well, 4:00. They'll be there 4:00, 4:30."
"No problem. We'll be here at 4:00 to let you in."
"Yes, they'll be there 4:30, maybe 5:00."
"Ok. But will they really be there?"
"Yes. 5:00, 5:30 maybe."
This chronological line of bargaining went on for several days. And just like in a modern Indian fairytale, the third time was the charm.
Meanwhile, my roommate's modem blew out temporarily somehow, and we were wondering if they had chug-through tech support stops for Dell customers on autorickshaws.

I have more pictures and many more experiences to post in the next few days, just not more time tonight. "Thank you" for reading. . . did I pronounce it right?