one of these days

A little nostalgia trip (already): this picture is our first time in Pune, I believe.
From l-r, Mette, Sophie, Gesa (:

Now the swine flu panic has subsided a little, and I'm just about halfway through my first term.
Since Bombay, I've mainly stayed on campus and celebrated a lot of birthdays.

Just a brief, overdue summary of Bombay, it was insane to imagine that the city had more inhabitants, 28 million allegedly, than the whole of the lovely flat country I came from.
We went to see the Gateway of India, the Taj hotel, the shopping district and drove past the largest slum in India that weekend. It was definitely an experience.

Sometimes it hits me here that I'm at a UWC, in India, really. We get compulsory Global Affairs, where we discuss all sorts of issues, we have This is India sessions and we go down for overnights in the small villages. It is amazing.
This week was Environment Week, so there were a couple of activities running. The most pleasant was the lunch in the Butterfly Garden, by the Amphitheatre, today. The Garden is situated in the Biodiversity Reserve, that I plan on visiting much more often now that the rains have stopped. We all sat around on the soft but itchy green grassy slope, eating off plates made of leaves and listening to the choir and people playing plastic pipes and glass bottles.

This weekend I've got Film Studies, which is really interesting but means I'll be staying on campus most of this weekend. Next week is Project Week, so I'll be off to Bangalore to work with APSA, but first I'll need to learn jumpstyle, the waltz (I think...) and some Karnataka language.

For the time being, I have learnt some Hindi;
Namaste!
Ap kaise hai?
Me thik hu (:
(Hey, how are you? I'm good!)

and we're currently learning the script, which is rather hard as the alphabet consists of sounds like "t, tte, the, je, jhe, jher, cher, char" etc. Maybe I'll have grasped it by December!

358 Roadways

Some shots of my corner (W3H9R) (:

Happy birthday mr Gandhi

We've finally arrived at Devika's place in Bombay, after a rather interesting trip.

Initially, the jeep somebody had booked was cancelled, so we had to reorganise a jeep to get from campus to Pune.

From there, we had to find some other sort of transport to get us to Bombay/Mumbai. Our original plan- getting public transport- was crushed when we found out that we were an hour away from the station. We picked up another jeep, and were on the road again.

Upon our arrival in Bombay, indicated by the bumper to bumper traffic, we went out to dinner with a bunch of MUWCI folk. Then our attempt to find our accommodation started.

We got into a cab with a MUWCI Hindi speaker, and asked him for the address. He shrugged his bony shoulders, and began to drive, his head barely reaching over the top of the wheel.

The Hindi speaker asked people on the street for directions, but there were several places with similar names which caused us much confusion and many u-turns. Eventually, a man in a white string vest, surrounded by beggars sleeping on the street, managed to point us in the right direction.

It was a rather surreal journey. The cabs here have floor to ceiling carpeting, the group we were with was an eclectic mix of Korean/Nepali/Thai/Indian/Norwegian/Dutch, and Bombay is bright and vibrant, even on a dry (no alcohol) day.

Right now, we're waiting for two fellow students, who were planning on booking into a hotel but haven't brought their passports. Genius.

I'll update on what this night and weekend turned out like soon :)

x