sleepless long nights that is what my youth was for

(unknown source, captures the attitude towards our travel week)

SATURDAY 6TH MARCH

In the end, it wasn't our train, although it was going to the right place. We plonked ourselves down and stuck around feigning ignorance until the true seat owners came along, and then drifted down the carriages in search of empty beds. We found some, and tried our luck a little more.
The ticket collector eventually did come around, and told us we should move to General Compartment. This is the lowest rank of carriage, and is mostly filled with people who have not seen 'whites' before. Being so determined to get to Ahmedabad (which is in Gujarat), we moved down there at twelve at night, and actually found seats. It wasn't the most comfortable of journeys, and the following five hours consisted of light napping on each other's shoulders and moving feet around so that the children sleeping on the floor would have enough space, but we got there in the end.
Cue Saturday morning, used to catch up on sleep in some hotel somewhere near the station.
When we eventually got and cleaned up, we set off to see the city.
Starting with a thali, which is a collection of curries, dahl and other bits and pieces, we saw a mosque and wandered around for a while. Walking into an old fort which was due to be fixed, it was interesting to see the British influence on the architecture, espescially as it was right next ot a Hindu temple.
We stumbled upon an art showroom, filled with watercolour and collage pieces commenting on the expansion and modernisation of the city over the past twenty years. Vibrant colours and stylised figures made the paintings rather hopeful in their semi-criticism, and the artist was pleased to see us 'youth' interested in his depictions of our peers.
We headed off to the Law Gardens, which turned out to be a park. It was calm and a nice way to end the day.
By evening we made our way to the train station, where we caught our train to Udaipur, our first stop in Rajasthan.

and everything that i want to know is on a local train outside tokyo

(the Rajasthani desert, on our camel safari)

Having returned from Project/Travel week last week, I'm finally getting around to my attempt to paint my experiences up in words for all of you out there.

It's a strange thing. I'm sitting facing the pool playing music loudly to the night, in a restful moment away from the hubbub of school-life here. Yet, I've stationed myself and my packet of juice slapbang inbetween the Social Centre and Gossip, our tuck shop here. It should be bustling, but I guess the mocks and tests coming up have tied the hands of a lot of second years right now.

The week of my birthday, the desert and a 24 hour train journey across three states was busy, so I'm going to (hopefully) bring you the stories day by day (I'm feeling very CNN-ish, and was going to write 'as they happen' but I restrained myself) over the course of the next eight days.
This will prevent potential RSI for me and overwhelming quantities of text for you to read :)

FRIDAY MARCH 5TH

After spending the previous evening on a moonlight picnic in the biodiversity reserve, and having slept on a roof (it felt like camping out in the summertime, if you managed to ignore the mosquitoes) I got up and packed for the week.
(this sounds so simple written down, but I'm sure as most of you know, I'm not the world's best/speediest/most effective packer. In hindsight, I did pretty well though, as I wore almost everything, had space for souveniers and only forgot my pajamas (: )

I was going to travel with Yanna (German/French, grew up in Japan, our organised one), Aradhya (Indian and our only second year in the group), Andres (Spanish and an amazing violin player), Bartek (our Polish sarcasm dose), Osnat (our Israeli CliniClown game-instigator) and Emilio (the patriotic American who pretended to be Indian for the week). We didn't really know each other too well, so the week would at the very least contain some getting-to-know-people-ness, which I always think is fun.

So it got to three and we were all excitedly standing around in the heat of the day with our backpacks and travelling clothes on. We'd booked a bus with a bunch of others who needed to get to Bombay to catch trains, and were waiting for everyone to arrive (we work on Indian/MUWCI time here, which means that things happen anywhere between ten minutes and two days after they were supposed to).
By half past we'd all dribbled in, and the bags were being tied to the roof. Our ringleader (the second year at this point in time) was getting slightly stressed, as our train was due to leave at 20:30 and getting into Bombay would take us four hours at least around this time of day.
The bus driver took his time though, and eventually we (already too hot in the bus, tearfully and cheerfully waving goodbye to other friends) were on our way.

Naturally we had a couple more obstacles to get past before we could get out of the state and into our chosen travel week region. The first was a flat tire, which landed us at some unknown pitstop area, with a ringleader who was getting more agitated as the time wore on. We considered hitch-hiking the remaining two hours into Bombay, but settled for getting our backpacks down in advance to allow us to jump off and race for a train if neccessary.
We got to Bombay by 19:30, but with the evening traffic and sheer scale of the city it was unlikely that we would make our train. We were advised to get off and catch a train from a nearby station, which might still get us there in time.

We grabbed our backpacks and jumped out.
We ran along roads and pavements, hauling each other up and pulling everyone along.
We got to the station and found a line a mile long for tickets.

Luckily we had charm and (I'm sad to say) foreign blood on our side, and we got our tickets.

We continued to run through the station.
We linked hands and jumped on a random carriage.

It turned out to be a women's only carriage, which made for an amusing/slightly uncomfortable twenty minutes for some of our group. The women all watched us, alien as we were with massive bags, braids over our heads like Heidi (that would be me) and franctic looks on our faces. We were told to get off at a station, we did, and it turned out to be the wrong one.

The rush continued.
We ran out of the station.
We shouted for taxis.
We piled into two and kept our fingers crossed we'd end up at the same station.
We did.

It was 21:15.

Thinking that the Indian time scale we'd had such problems with earlier might work to our advantage, we checked the platform.
There was a train there.
Hoping for the best, but suspecting it wasn't ours, we got on.

we could be walking around the zoo, with the sun shining down over me and you

(Rory and I pretending to be local in Mahabaleshwar)

I just had my final Active English session.

It's odd to think that the seven children I taught together with Rory will go on into the big bad world with a vague memory of two girls trying to teach them the verb 'to be', playing silly colour games and singing the hokey pokey too loudly and clearly for them to do anything but laugh at the sight of it.

We tried to teach them about our countries of origin, but ended up focusing on the difference between continents and countries and dancing whilst they looked on, bemused. It was worrying to see them look so lost with the map of the world, and I hope our little diagrams of clogs, hamburgers and the first man on the moon will one day help them in life.

From this point on, we'll be spending our Tuesdays workshopping about teaching English as a foreign language, which sounds considerably less exciting than attempting to captivate the imaginations of Sonali, Sandeep, Sanjeevni, Priyanka, Tiranbul and the various others that occasionally attended.

I think that every time I ride or walk by Paud School, I will see the playground filled with small circles of MUWCI and Paud students, trying to communicate ideas and grammar for an hour. Here's to next year and a new batch of first years and fifth graders.

x

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!

Sitting in restaurants, thought we were so grown up.

A couple more November Exeat rehashes, as the next Exeat and Travel Week begin to approach.

(mosque in the Muslin area, the ghats - washing area of Bombay where millions of items get washed every day, I think, and Marine Drive at eight in the morning)

After visiting an art gallery, we fished out our guide book and looked at what we could do for the afternoon. The Muslim Area, described as full of junk and flea markets, sounded quite obscure and interesting, so down we headed.

Unfortunately, it was Ede. That in itself wasn't a bad thing, however the fact that dead goats were being dragged out of taxi boots was slightly less pleasant. Also, the markets were non-existant due to this festival, and the streets were bustling with Muslim men.

We left the area and began to explore the streets. Stumbling upon a temple, we chatted with the priest about what the temple for for and so on (it was a Hindu temple) as it was intricately decorated with white carved pillars and ceilings, all of which was apparently more than a hundred years old. From time to time old people would come in and kneel before the statue of the gods, praying, we were told, for strength. He would then give them some sort of sweet paste in a leaf and perform some sort of prayer. Definitely an interesting and unexpected cultural interaction. After hearing our age and purpose in India, he sent us off with bananas and good wishes.

this is small town music, this is big town music.

(chapati making)
(oh the people you meet at train stations)

So here's a dosage of culture for you.
These are all from a Friday in November, when I was on my way to Mumbai/Bombay for Exeat (a long weekend away, we get two a term).

Deciding at the spur of the moment to go to Bombay, we went to the train station. There, we bought our tickets, discovered we had three hours to kill, and wandered around the area trying local food. We walked into a small, one-meal restaurant filled with Indian men eating thalis (not sure how to spell that. It is a round metal tray on which one gets chapati/rice/some sort of starch and several bowls of dip-like things. I suppose it is the Indian version of tapas, and the contents differs per place and region.) and tried that. It was really nice, although us being there may have bowled them over a bit (being 'white'). We also saw men making chapatis around th back of a hotel, which was interesting. Two point five hours and stomachs filled with chai, Indian sweets and thalis, we went back to the station.

The platform was covered in sleeping people, either waiting for trains or simply sleeping there as it was covered. We met a man dressed in white with some sort of massive horn instrument on his back. He looked holy in a way, so we decided to practice our limited Hindi on him. Unfortunately, he spoke almost no Hindi himself, as he spoke Marathi, but we managed to chat to some extent about where he was from, where he was going and got him to play the horn thing for us. This gathered a crowd, and we decided it was about time to move on and find our train.
Once on, we spotted two other religious looking men, dressed all in orange. We tried to take pictures of them discreetly, but I'm not sure how well that worked. After all that, we fell asleep clutching on to our belongings, and woke up in Bombay five hours later.