Welcome to Jaipur (It's been waiting for you)

Hello all.
It is early morning and I'm in a hotel in Jaipur. I've been having trouble sleeping more than a few hours at a time since I left the States. Hopefully that resolves itself... but for now, I'm resigned to writing blog posts in the dark at 4:45am.
Yesterday all of the Hindi AIIS Summer Program Students travelled together from Delhi to Jaipur via bus. This was my first real chance to see India, and it was both exactly what I expected and incredibly surreal and shocking. Here are some of my first impressions:

• The streets are populated with feral dogs. They're seriously everywhere. Most of them look healthy enough, surprisingly, but some are definitely worse for wear. In Delhi I also saw several small groups of wild pigs roaming the streets.
• Cows really do wander around freely here. And not just the Brahman cows that we usually think of. I saw several different kinds, including a black and white dairy cow. I also saw a surprising number of camels on the journey down to Jaipur, plus one horse who looked sorely out of place,
• There is garbage EVERYWHERE. Seriously. Just in huge piles and swaths along the highway and in the streets. According to one of the other girls in my program, India doesn't have any kind of organized trash collection/disposal system. There's nowhere to throw trash away and nobody to pick it up. It's a real shame, I think. It's very jarring.
• There are men everywhere. In the streets, riding on the highway, running shops. They're very visible. The women are nearly invisible. I think on the ride down I probably saw ten men for every woman. When I did see women I caught glimpses of them at home or working in the fields, cloaked in bright saris hunched over in the heat. The gender dichotomy is impossible to ignore. I feel very aware of my gender here.
• There is a lot of Hinglish in the signs and advertisements here. Hinglish takes many forms: Hindi interspersed with English words, English written in Devanagari script, and even sometimes Hindi written in Roman script. I'm also definitely noticing the prestige aspect English seems to have here, and it's very interesting to say the least.
• Indian driving is as terrifying as everyone says. It involves a lot of horn-blowing and ignoring of lanes. However, there does seem to be a method to the madness. Drivers are very alert and negotiate non verbally with each other rather than simply staying in their lane and riding it out. The large trucks here are almost all hand-painted in bright colors. Most of them have some variations of "Blow Horn" or "Horn Please" painted across the back. Horns are used to warn larger vehicles that you're approaching from behind. This is how those tiny motorbikes and rickshaws avoid getting run over, I suppose. I imagine that if you are confident, competent, and aware of the Indian rules of the road, driving here probably isn't actually that dangerous. It's just a different mindset than the U.S.

So far in Jaipur we haven't seen a lot. It seems like a very nice city. Everyone keeps saying how nice it is compared to Delhi, which from what little I've seen I do agree with. We spent some time at AIIS yesterday. They served us lunch, introduced themselves, and answered some of our questions. Today we will have orientation and then meet our host families. My host home seems nice; it's a couple in their 50s with a 25 year old fashion designer daughter. I'll have my own room and bathroom with a cooler (not quite an air conditioner, but it's supposed to be fairly effective). They also have a pet dog, I don't have to pay extra for electric, and it's only 2.5km from my school. Pretty much all of us (especially the girls) have been assigned curfews by our families; mine is 9:30pm. But while that would probably bother a lot of us back home (especially considering a majority of us are graduate students), it's not really a big deal here. The city isn't safe after dark, especially for women. It's just a reality of living here, and it's true for local women as well.

Since I've been on a  bus most of the time I don't have any pictures yet, but I will be posting them to Facebook once I get a chance!