Kolkata Days 1& 2

Hello all!
So Emily and I got in to Kolkata yesterday afternoon, the 17th. It has been so different than what we expected. We got in and the woman from Volunteer Visions found us and we hopped in a cab. She told us that all the host families were full so we were being put in a hotel for the whole two weeks along with a few other volunteers. We got there and she told us everything we needed to know about the school and where to go and eat and then she left. Emily and I are staying in a room with a girl from Japan that is volunteering also. There are also two other boys from Japan and two people from Italy (yay!) and the man from Italy is a host coordinator and has been coming every summer for the past 5 years so he knows his way around and is so nice. We pretty much stayed in our room all day yesterday. Is it normal to sleep a ridiculously huge amout of hours in hot weather maybe? We slept 9 hours the night before last then yesterday sitting around our room we slept another three and then last night slept almost eleven!!! It is cool I guess. So whenever we want meals we just go to reception and tell them and they bring up mystery food. It is so exciting to sit there and wait to see what we get each time. For dinner last night Em and I were starving and they hahaha it is so funny, they brought us each a plate with 3 little tortilla things and some spicy broth...no spoon. We ate our meager food and hoped for a good breakfast. Our room is pretty cool we just have fans so sleep with no covers but it is nice. It is suprising becuase you could find lots of places with a/c in Bangalore and Chennai but not so much here.
Today we woke up and called for breakfast and watched tv...the only thing in English is VH1. Our breakfast came and it was hahahaha two slices of bread with sugar and butter on top!! Now don't get me wrong that was delicious but I am not used to eating so little at every meal. The lady from Volunteer Visions came to pick us up to go to the school we were going to be teaching at. We walked across our busy street (the Indian woman was dodging cars and motorbikes like the bad ass that she is and we stayed on the curb for so long cuz that is a learned skill) and we went to the train station and hopped on a super ghetto train. It has planty of seats and fans and wind but man at every stop more and more people piled on. It got real crowded but luckily our stop had come. The little village is 20 minutes down the line and literally right on the edge of the train tracks. We went in to find a one room schoolhouse. We took off our shoes and sat around waiting for the kids to arrive. 16 kids came all in uniform and they are so cute!!! They said their pledge of allegiance(sp?) and we jumped right in to sitting down and teaching them from their English books. I was working with an older girl maybe 10 named Vipik and the baby of the class maybe 4 Tanu. Tanu is adorable but the girls there have pretty short boy length hair and Emily and I thought she was a boy at first. I figured it out not when I saw her painted nails and toes (cuz my little bro Garrett def has painted nails most of the time) but when she acted really feminine and kinda OCD about her markers and the way her books were laid out neatly (kind of how I am) and it was confirmed but her brother when he said this is my sister. The older kids can speak English enough to talk a little and it is so fun. We did an hour of English followed by an hour of Math, and for some reason I found it way easier to teach the math than the English. We ended the schoolday with a game sort of like duck duck goose but not. We get to go there everyday and do this and I am so excited!
We just got back to our room and had lunch (rice and potato stuff and broth, again no utensils) and it was pretty good.
Oh I gotta talk about the toilet situation here. Most of the bathrooms in India have one Western style toilet (that's ours) and the rest are squat style. It is like a toilet built into the ground with grooves on each side so you can squat over the whole and not slip. We have been fortunate enough to only have to use those once. No where do they have toilet paper except the nice hotels and restaurants. We brought our own don't worry. What they do supposedly is use a hose thing and hose off over the hole....ew. Anyways our hotel has a normal looking above ground toilet BUT it has, instead of a seat, the grooves for not slipping. Now I haven't figured this out but are we supposed to climb up and squat way up there to use this toilet?? I have been just squating normal cuz it works and I have no idea. I know ou all wanted to hear that :)
Anyways we are just hanging out trying to figure out what to do ext with our cool Japanese and Italian friends.
I miss you all and I will write back porbably tomorrow or the next day. Internet is right by our hotel and we have lots of free time.
I love you mom!
I love you everyone else!
~Michelle