Hoe huppelt zijn paardje het dek op en neer

by Laura Callaghan, seems to capture what I've been up to (minus the bear, plus some mosquitoes)

Nog maar negen daagjes!
Het wordt steeds vreemder om hier te zijn, omdat ik in minder dan twee weken thuis zal zijn.
Hier wordt het nu superdruk, met veel toetsen/assignments/dinners/festivities, dus hopelijk zullen jullie mijn lack of emails begrijpen. Aan het begin werd mij verteld dat MUWCI uit drie 's'en bestond ; slapen, studeren en socialisen. Daarvan lukt het nooit om meer dan twee te doen, waardoor de meesten met een ernstig slaapgebrek rondlopen (je herkent het aan de kleine, rode oogjes, grumpy expression, slumped shoulders en rommelige kleding).

This weekend was MUWCIfest, as well as Christmas Cookie baking, Sinterklaas and the continuous Secret Santa thing we've got going on campus. As one of only four active Dutch members of the community, it meant that we had quite a few poems to write and traditions to explain. It worked out quite well, with the National Committee sending us massive sacks of pepernoten, taai taai, schuimpjes, banketstaven and chocolade letters (amazing. really.) which just about fed the 200+ community, of which most left out their shoes on Sunday night (Sinterklaas shifted his celebration to Sunday here, due to MUWCIfest and the fact that he had a nine hour flight from Holland to India to get).
We also got the Caf(eteria) to cook a 'Dutch' dinner, which was interesting, considering that India doesn't really have much in the way of bacon, or meat at all really. They made mashed potato and carrot with pork sauce (the Indian variation on hutspot) as well as pancakes with watery applemousse and chocolate sauce, pasta (we couldn't think of much Dutch food they'd be able to make), brown bread and veg biriyani (not quite so Dutch but alright). Everyone seemed to like it, though, which is good (:
With a small group of people we also did surprises, which actually worked out quite well. That afternoon, I'd also taught a couple of people how to make speculaas, so although there was no:
snow
cold
very few Dutch
real Pieten
etc
there was some sense of Sinterklaas.
Acting as Pieten, we ran around very early on Monday morning, filling shoes (or not, in the case of one greedy house that had left all their shoes out with a rather rude note informing us to 'FILL EM UP') and picking up nice notes to Sinterklaas (or Sinta Claus, or Sintaklast).
Anyhows, I've got another lesson to go to, so hopefully I'll get round to more updates about Exeat and campus soon!
x

little darling, it feels like years since it's been here

Found this somewhere, thought it was rather nice (:

For the past week, I've been sleeping/eating/reading/working/socialising.
It's stopped raining now, and the pool is looking rather yellow, and in just about a month I'll be back in still raining but rather pool-less (at least, free pool atop a mountain style) Holland (:

I was thinking I should perhaps run a couple of bits on general stuff like the food, weather, people and any other things that are now part of my routine but may seem novel to anyone outside of MUWCI/India.
Any suggestions?

Today was a fairly run-of-the-mill day, with school (which starts at 07:30), football (in which we ran up and down Internet Hill and through the Biodiversity Reserve, I felt a bit like I was in the jungle, which was fun) and college meeting (in which we all sit around and discuss important issues every week).

For the rest, I'm hoping it will dry but not warm up pretty soon, and that mosquitoes will become extinct before I return here in the spring. I should get some sleep.
Night!

worried about our little world falling apart

Vandaag heb ik besloten om alles even anders te doen.

Ik zit hier in mijn kamer gember koekjes te eten en naar het geluid van de (of is het nou het?) regen te luisteren.

Naast me zit m'n kamergenootje, die uit Kerala in India komt. Ze zit te studeren.
Voor de verandering is ons kamer niet met schreeuwerige koreans gevuld, die meestal de linkerhoek in beslag nemen. Het is nu even lekker rustig.

I've been back from Project Week since Monday evening.
Thus I've unpacked, done my laundry, rebonded and caught up with everyone here and started school again today.

It is most likely a nice idea to describe Project Week and what I got up to, so here goes:

Project Week started last Friday, when most of the groups left campus to catch trains and buses to get to all sorts of places. Our group only left on Saturday morning, giving us a little time to worry about an empty campus (it was rather lonely) and pack our stuff.

The train took twenty-one hours to get to Bangalore, which is in the south, in the state of Karnataka. As they speak mainly Karnada there, I wasn't going to get much chance to practice my Hindi, but I took along my Dutch-Hindi book, just in case.
We travelled in Second Class, which means something else in India than in Europe, but I'm not quite sure what. We were in the non-AC section, which was not as bad as one might imagine. There were two square windows for every group of six bunks, with glass sheets and metal bars to pull down if you wanted to. Across the narrow aisle were two more bunks, and every couple of minutes some man with a very nasal voice would come down this aisle, shouting out the name of whtever he was selling (biscuits/chrisps/dinner/chai/scarves) in an irksome singson-ey tone.

I finally started recording thing in a diary (not sure how long that will last) so here are some extracts that sum up my week:

Saturday 31/10/09

Earlier today the scenery from the train was incredible. There were dry auburn hills and green fields, small clusters of earthern houses and a real sense of calmth. There is an elderly couple opposite usm who were initially sitting cross-legged and reading the newspaper. She was wearing a lilac sari, which looked stunning against the blue window frame and seat and the red metal bars on the window. Monday 02/11/09 Wij zaten op een soort dakterra met een uitzicht op een heleboel pastel-kleurige gebouwen. Het was niet te warm omdat we onder een sort pakoda zateb, met chai en koekjes. De man [die ons een presentatie over APSA aan het geven was] zag er een beetje Sesame-Straat-achtig uit, met een very-oversized pale lilac shirt die in zijn hoogopgetrokken-netjes-gestreken broek zat gepropt...Hij vertelde ons over APSA, en hoe ze eerst altijd de 'baseline' vinden (alle basisinformatie, zoals hoe ver de school is, hoe het sanitair is, of ze water hebben, hoe veel enz) waarna ze een 'actionplan' ontwikkelen samen met de community-in-question... [about the vocational training centre]

There was a printing area, with five Indian guys standing around the equipment. In the adjoining room, seperated only by a partial wall on the right, was six sewing machines. These were white, plastic, modern. To the left was a large grey table with beige cotton that three women were cutting into strips...Straight down the hall was a small classroom, with half of it consisting of desks and girls, the other half of old, foot-controlled sewing machines. They were 3 or 5 months into their year of training, and were already making simple children's frocks.

Up a flight of stairs around the outside of the building was the elctronics department, with cute handdrawn images of the tools and their names on the walls. A handful of boys were sitting in a row behind a transparent wall, fiddling with bits of hardware. Another flight up was the computer training section. 30 pupils sat in plastic chirs, copying the text about CDs from the powerpoint slide being beamed up.

Tuesday : Dream School teaching (APSA's school for the children they rescue from child labour and the like)

Wednesday : ChildLine, viewing presentations given on this to government schools (a children's help line APSA is associated with)
Also: meeting with a government official to talk/learn about the health care and education systems in Karnataka
And: staying over at APSA's Girls' Hostel, where girls from APSA can stay for a while until they find jobs and their feet in the world

Thursday : Constituency work (where we viewed a children's meeting in a migratory slum, about what they thought needed improvement)
And: Fabindia presentation (Fabindia is a chain of stores where 60% of the moeny goes to the artisan, thus allowing traditional methods of craft to be preserved. This wasn't really part of our Project Week)

Friday : Inchara (means birdsong, the art and culture side of APSA)
Monday 09/11/09 In ongeveer vier uur komen we in Pune aan. Ik ben net op de middelste bunkk wakker geworden met een gezwollen oog na rond twaalf uren slaap in Rosie's slaapzak (die ze per ongeluk heeft achtergelaten toen ze donderdag avond met andere tweedjaars verder reisde), met als kussen Lenn en Victor's tailored, expensive suits, omdat Lenn dacht dat er twee creepy guys zijn spullen wouden stelen. We hebben net egg biriyani [boiled eggs, curry sauce and rice with bits in] en lassi [sweet yoghurt drink] binnengewerkt als lunch, en zitting nu allemaal rustig te lezen. Gelukkig is het niet zo warm buiten.

So that was pretty much that. It was interesting to learn about how the NGO functioned, and to try out several of their projects.

Some cute, surprising things I'll leave you with:
I found a whole bunch of Suske en Wiske's in a small secondhand bookshop in Bangalore. It really made my day.
I found HEMA stuff in a basement shop in Pune.
I showered with only cold water and ate with my hands all week.
I got my package today!

x

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

Don't you wanna get out of Cape Cod, out of Cape Cod tonight?

I'm sitting in a common room in a wada in MUWCI, feeling slightly out of whack.
It's now been a month (yes, I still seem to be counting) and I've just spent the past two days in the med centre with a cold. Time seemed to warp there, as all I did was sleep, watch films and eat.
Now I'm healthier again, so I suppose, whilst the internet is still up, I should probably update this blog (:

Since the third of September (woah, that's a while ago), I've been to Pune a couple more times, started school, performed a semi-improv piece on the flute with Benjamin the German on the piano for the First Year Show, dressed up as a Flamboyant Tellytubbie Zombie for the Second Year Show, tried a whole range of Commuity Interactions (known as CIs, where we work with the neighbouring villages) and Trivenis (known as CAS for all you lot) and painted my room.

Last weekend I had Film Studies, which is taught by a documentary maker from Mumbai. We have classes on Friday afternoon, a screening Friday evening, Saturday morning, another screening Saturday evening and a class Sunday morning, every fortnight. The classes are about everything to do with film, from shooting to analysing the film-maker's intentions. I'm still not sure whether I want to take it as my seventh subject, but for now I'm enjoying the classes.

I also went on an overnight, which means going off campus for, as the word suggests, a night. I went to Pune with a bunch of first and second years, tried the Indian clubbing scene (let's put it this way: it was an experience.) and stayed over at Khushi (an Indian who lives in Pune)'s.
It was slightly hard to find her place, as the rickshaw driver didn't know the appartment block, but Mika the Mauritian managed to ask directions in broken Hindi, which got us there in the end.

Things I've learnt in a month here:

- the pool is the best place to be
- on festival days, everything (nightlife stuff) closes at 1am
- compared to Indians, I have massive wrists (I have bought myself bangles)
- the internet actually dies here when it rains
- 'mai tumse pyar kurti hu' means 'I love you' in Hindi (:
- Busted actually made it to India (I have found an Indian-Rahul, who wants himself namechecked here- who can sing along to Crashed the Wedding (: )
- the postal service here is incredibly slow (I'd love to receive packages though (: )


Furthermore, I've seen some amazing views, a standout one being when the girls football team went on a jog up the nearby mountain. We did suicides at the top, on the slippery ground just after the rain, and could see almost the whole of the Mulshi Valley, where MUWCI is situated.

I'm off for Exeat this weekend, which means that I can go off campus from Friday till Sunday. I'm going to be heading for the beach, and I'll try and keep this blog more updated on events after that (:

love x