Busting Crackers and Cologne

This past week has been a fairly standard week in the life of an eMi intern; I'm still working on the civil design for the projects I've been assigned to, which are still about a week or two away from completion. There's really nothing that the average person finds exciting about the nitty gritty of my work (designing poop tanks and water systems), so I unapologetically devote very little blog space to discussing those things. Instead, here are a couple noteworthy things from my week outside of work:

• Diwali - This upcoming Friday is a Hindu holiday called Diwali, which I'm told is the Indian equivalent of Christmas. It's considered their "festival of lights", so there will supposedly be massive fireworks shows on Friday, and many have already been set off in the past few days. Yesterday morning, the neighbor kid set off a few firecrackers (known as "busting crackers" in these parts) at 7 AM, a slightly unwelcome start to my day.
• Hindi - My co-worker Graham recently said that his 2-year-old daughter Priya is going through a "language explosion", where she has all-of-a-sudden started talking all the time. Well, for whatever reason, I've had a little language explosion of my own in the past couple weeks with Hindi...which isn't to say that I've been speaking it well or even correctly, just that I've had lots of opportunities to speak it. Everything that I learned from my Hindi classes 6 months ago seems to be flooding my memory, and it's all making sense for once. It's been very exciting for me, and even though I'm rarely forced to speak Hindi, it's nice to have the language barrier broken somewhat.

And finally, here is a conversation from dinner tonight with Hudson, Graham's 5-year-old son:

Intern Katie: "...Maybe he should put some cologne on."

Hudson: "What?? What's that?"

Me: "It's something you put on that makes you smell good."

Hudson: "Boys don't need that!"

Amen Hudson.