Acclimatizing....?

After a complete week of being here, I can see some ways we are beginning to adjust to our surroundings:

1. The kids are ready to eat something other than rice and dahl for dinner. These items are the main staples of any lunch or dinner for us and constitute the bulk of the calories we currently eat.
   
   
2. We get up and go to school with little fuss. That means that for one, we are finally adjusted to the time change and two, school is something ok to go to.
   
   
3. Grace and Corrina let me leave them at home alone for 2 hours (the cook was at the house...) while I went to town to get some food supplies.
   
   
4. When we walk around the market, people still stare at us all the time, but we are bothered by it less and less. Sometimes we just stare back.
   
   
5. The girls are getting, and want to do, homework. Grace read Antigone and memorized a few lines; Corrina read the first few chapters in a book about a family who move to Birmingham, Alabama from Michigan in the late 50's! She reading THAT in Sikkim!
   
   
6. We now know to anticipate that foods which sound and look like American food rarely taste like American food. The doughnuts, which looked so promising (!), were stale, greasy and not sweet.Yikes!
   
   
7. We are getting car sick less and less from the bumpy half hour ride to school.
   
   
8. We enjoy riding in the range rover-type vehicle with 12 people altogether. (Some are young students, so they take up less room....)
   
   
9. The screams coming from Grace regarding spiders in the bathroom (or anywhere else for that matter) have reduced to simple grunts and a request for their removal.
   
   
10. The girls drink a lot of tea.