Because the ride from Jaipur to Jaisalmer is incredibly long and the bus leaves at an incredibly inconvenient time, I've elected to go to Jodhpur first. I've decided to look into the role of storytelling and folklore in Raika communities as well as doing an ethnography of the tribe/family I would be staying with. Jodhpur is where the institute for Rajasthani Folklore is located and so I'm going to take a day and see what I can dig up.

Later...
Managed to get a rickshaw in the middle of the night and he, miracle of miracles, actually took me to my hotel while cheating me minimally. The hotel was full of tourists—who I found a bit annoying—but was an amazing Haveli with super-friendly staff and a good all-veg restaurant, located at the foot of the fort. Backtracking a bit, the hotel in Pushkar was a perfectly lovely place, but played this horribly new-agey chanting music that, after about an hour, made me want to tear my eyeballs out and which I did NOT find relaxing. They must wholesale the stuff, because the restaurant at the hotel play the exact same tape non-stop until I wanted to scream. Otherwise, I love the place and will stay there if I ever go back to Jodhpur.

I couldn't find the institute. Nor could I find anyone who knew of the institute—or knew if it would be open on a Sunday—a fact I hadn't even thought of. (I DID find the folklore museum, twice, but it didn't help much.) My ISP advisor, a totally awesome and wonderfully positive woman named Melia, seemed to be out of cell-range and so around 2PM I gave up and decided to do some research online using SITs library system. Then the powercuts started.

Finally, I went back to my room, read a book on Fieldwork (which just happened to be about fieldwork in folklore research and exactly what I needed to read), and did a preliminary outline of my paper. I broke everything down into six or seven five-page sections—and then those down into five or six one-page subsections. I just needed to do the research for each subsection, write a one-page summary, and finish by connecting everything together with introductions and lead-ins. After having this basic structure down, I felt like I was on track and pretty good about the project.