Being in High School Again

Living with my grandparents is almost like being in high school again. Every time I go out they ask when I’m coming back, what my plans are, who I’m hanging out with, etc. I know every Thursday and Friday night I will be going out (weekends here are Fridays and Saturdays, still getting used to that) but I don’t usually know when or where. And I don’t usually know if I will be eating dinner at home or not. This is usually the biggest concern. After the first week when I told my grandmother that I will go out late on the weekends, she stopped worrying all the time and I was fine for a bit. Other times I’ve come to Dubai, she has stayed awake until I came home, but now she goes to sleep. However, on Friday night I went out to a friend’s birthday party, and we got another stretched hummer limo and bottle service at a club. Needless to say, I was wasted when I got home, and somehow my grandmother woke up. She then proceeded to yell at me for drinking. I honestly don’t remember much of what she said, but when I woke up the next morning, she proceeded to yell at me more and tell me how disappointed she was at me. I blamed it on the American friends I was hanging out with and told her they were bad influences. But now I realize that I will have to move out at some point. On top of that, she set the alarm in my room for 7am!!! I was so pissed!! I asked her about it, and she said she didn’t know how to use it and that it must have happened randomly. But the alarm clock had been in my room the whole time I’ve been here, and had never gone off.

Luckily for me, my grandparents left for India today and will be gone for a month and a half, so I don’t have to worry about them for a while. Besides the whole religion thing, I have been getting really annoyed with my grandparents lately. Every morning I wake up my grandmother wants to talk, which isn’t a bad thing, but when im tired and cranky in the morning, sometimes I just don’t want to talk, especially when she talks to me in Gujurati, a Hindi like language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarati_language). I don’t understand the language completely, and I have to really concentrate to understand it, and in the morning im just way too lazy. My grandfather has really bad hearing, and doesn’t understand my English very well. So when he talks to me, I have to yell back at him and repeat myself 5 times, which gets annoying after a while. And then, when I leave every morning, my grandmother wants to hold my hand and pinch my cheeks. This is cute, but doing this every morning for a month gets annoying. On top of that, I don’t work on Fridays and Saturdays, so I can have a normal weekend, but every Saturday morning they wake me up at 8am and ask if Im going to work. A lot of private companies have work 6 days a week, and they think I should be working, but I need my weekends.

In other news, there is a new girl in the Zainulbhai family!!!!! Azeem was officially married this weekend so I have a sister!!!! The wedding ceremonies aren’t for another month, but in Hindu custom, you get married on an auspicious day, and last Sunday was the only auspicious day for the next couple of months. It’s exciting to have a sister!

The only problem with Indian weddings is that sending out invitations are a huge process. For close family members, you have to literally hand deliver the invitiations with gifts. So, for the past week, I had to run around town and deliver invitations with my grandparents.