it won't last forever, and that's exactly why.

(a nice, calm, irrelevant picture of a tree-house, because I still love them.)

A jam-packed weekend filled with parties, culture and sunshine would make this moment sound too idyllic yet a three-day-stretch of business obligations would make this time sound too exhausting.

Sometimes the limitations of language do loom over my shoulder when I type, assigning associations and interpretations to words and paragraphs I try to leave 'pure'.

The writing of essays, blogposts, emails, stories.

The communication of ideas, thoughts, feelings, experiences.

How well does one achieve the aim of expressing one's mind?

(Thank you, TOK classes, for making me sound introspective and possibly even deep.)

So, a weekend this is.

Friday called in with an European Cultural Evening, which required baking and dancing on most of our parts. We started with an European Cafe, where all non-Europeans could come and enjoy cakes and drinks made by us. It worked out terribly well, with almost one hundred or so people sitting out on the lawn whilst the night drew in, chatting and munching away.

Then came our Cultural Show, which covered everything from the world's history in five minutes to the waltz to a skit on Shetland and, Holland's contribution, jumpstyle.

We closed with an European party, which just meant loud music and dancing. Good fun :)

Saturday and film class and being too tired after watching 2001: Space Odyssey to go to the drag party that evening. Oh, and wandering down to Paud with two guys, drinking lots of sugarcane juice and buying kilos of grapes.

Now it's Sunday morning, I'm off to brunch and film class, and tonight is the carnival party.

Monday means Holi (the festival of colours) and is a day off school. We're all planning to chuck coloured powder at eachother, which sounds like it might be a laugh :)

And then it's only four days until Rajastan for Project Week!

x

but frozen things they all unfreeze and now i taste like all those frozen strawberries i used to chill your bruising knees

I would love to say that this was the hill station where I spent my weekend, but it wasn't. A clue would be the snowy tops, the clouds and the lack of strawberries.

In actual fact, I was in Mahabaleshwar, a hill station about 140 km away from Pune.

After a schoolbus, rickshaw, jeep, volvo bus (like a coach), two public buses and five hours, we arrived at the strawberry laden spot on Saturday morning.

We (this is a rather ambiguous usage of the plural, as I spent the day with about four different groups of people) ate strawberries with cream, strawberry ice-cream, strawberry milkshakes, strawberry juice and wandered around the lovely hillside area.

As evening began to draw in, some groups went camping, some went paragliding (and then the wind dropped and they had to be driven back up the hillside) and we headed back to campus with a stop in Pune for some late-night dining.

Sunday rang in with a 'Sophie, we don't have a jeep! We'll need to be ready in ten minutes so we can hitch a ride with some teachers!' and a surprisingly successful ten minute shower/dress/wake-up session.

My family (as in, Christine, Mark and Henk) were in Pune, so I met up with them and 'showed them round'. Unfortunately, we ended up going somewhere completely different when the two rickshaw drivers misunderstood our destination, but we managed to regroup and saw my art teacher's exhibition as well.

I headed back to campus laden down with stuff for the CIs and Dutch cheese, where I found a bunch of people making kilos of strawberry jam.

Now it's Monday and only a fortnight to go until Project Week!