Well we've made it through the last couple weeks of teaching and testing and are ready for two weeks of fun. First, we leave on Monday for Week Without Walls where myself and a group of other teachers will be taking the entire 6th grade class up to Matheran (the place we visited a few weeks ago) which is a couple hours out of Mumbai
at a hill station surrounded by great scenery and great opportunities to do some outdoor activities, science projects, and work on teambuilding and leadership activities. We will be up there from Monday to Thursday then return to school and work on some activities back in classes on Friday, ending with a short presentation for the parents that afternooon. Should be a fun adventure with 54 pre-teens.
Second, we are all set for our trip to China. We have our plane tickets, train tickets, visas, and a basic idea of what we want to do. We still need to figure out the timings and public transit for how to get from place to place but we are feeling pretty ready to go. As soon as WWW ends on Friday, we will be packing up and leaving Saturday evening for the next week. We have that week off for the Indain festival of Diwali which is a major celebration all over the country (like a Chanukah or Christmas type event). We even had an assembly at school this week to celebrate the story of Diwali and it included wonderful dance, costumes, music, and performance. Plus, the whole school was decorated with flowers and professional artists came in to do sand murals throughout campus. It was really beautiful and the school asked that everyone dress in traditional Indian attire that day so it was fun to see everyone in their sari's, kurta's, and salwar's.
By the way, the school sent out this request to wear Indian attire about 4 days before the assembly so of course we went out shopping the night before and ran into 5 other teachers and 3 parents at the same store shopping for clothes at the last minute. It was really amusing. Even so, it was really fun and we ended up finding some really nice things and I'm glad we got the opportunity to buy some Indian outfits and have an excuse to wear them. Of course it would have been nice to have something tailored for us that could have been much prettier and personal but there was not enough time to get that done. Oh well. Some day we will pick out something really great and have it tailored. I'm sure we will need something else to wear down the road.
Being that it is the season of celebrations with Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu holidays it was also an appropriate time to have some celebrations of our own. We had our second annual Oktoberfest on the Kiara roof top last weekend complete with bbq, beer, pretzels, the chicken dance, and of course Dave in his lederhosen and feathered cap. Good times. We also just held Cafe ASB on the roof last night which was a staff get-together/talent show. Also very good times. We are keeping busy working hard and playing hard.
I've uploaded some pictures of our Diwali outfits and some from Oktoberfest which didn't turn out so great but oh well. I have also finally finished going through all our video from Goa so those have been uploaded on YouTube as well. There will be lots more to come after WWW and China so I hope this will satisfy the masses for a while. Be back in November. Enjoy!
K&E
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