"Soft Landing"

One of my favorite stories so far is from the very beginning. The whole group arrived at a hostel in Delhi late Sunday night, internal clocks turned upside down by the 10 1/2 hour time difference. Of course, I couldn't sleep at all and by 3:30 am I began hearing a man singing/chanting in what I assumed to be Hindi from what seemed to be right outside my window. It carried on well into the morning until my roommate and I finally gave up pretending to sleep. In the daylight we could see the golden dome of what turned out to be Bangla Sahib Gurudwara, the largest Sikh temple in Delhi. The singing we had heard had been the Call to Prayer. After breakfast and before orientation officially began, a group of us ventured out of the hostel and found the temple, stunning with its white marble structure and golden turrets. We went inside, shoes off, heads covered, and found a large bath next to it as well. All in all a beautiful morning and fitting introduction to India.
As it becomes harder to describe my experiences to family and friends back home succinctly in an email, I find myself reverting back to this moment. I guess the story is easy to tell because it fits neatly into most of our Western expectations of what India is. Rimaji, the program director, said repeatedly the first week that MSID purposefully plans a "soft landing" for its students, and I think that phrase applies here as well. Looking back from my two week hindsight vantage point, I'm thankful for those soft landings because the hard landings, questions, and stories come up soon enough.