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!