Just a general update (with photos: yay!)

Holy thunder and lightning batman!!! I have never witnessed a storm like the one last night. The storm started at about 10 pm, with far-off lighting in the distance. At about 1:45 am, I was rudely awakened by a massive “BOOOOM”! That rattled the windows (and we have some pretty big windows). This continued pretty much incessantly for I-don’t-know-how-long, but I got back to sleep about 3 ish, I’m not exactly sure.

Great way to get ready for a chem. test, isn’t it?

So anyway, I haven’t written an OFFICIAL update for a while now.

Photos  I have taken recently that are awesome:

Some fantastic rain, which nonetheless pales in comparison to last night.

A nice shot of quad

Because I can never take too many photos of the hill station

On advisor morning, Mr Steve decided to take advantage of the fabulous sunshine. We jumpd out the windows in the health room onto the balcony outside. This is a shot of the quad from above!

I’ll start on Thursday, the day of the RE (religious ed.) retreat to Rajpur. That was reeeaaaaallly fun; the center was absolutely beautiful. I stayed in the red bungalow with Nina, Subin, Yeshin, Eein and Devika. It was a bit weird not to have Kalki there, to be honest.

The facilities included bucket showers, geckoes and sporadic electricity, which was surprisingly nice. It was actually quite restful.

The red bungalow!

Here's a photo of mine and Devika's room

This photo is actually quite deceptive, as it leads you to believe the electricity was functional at the time.

Not so. This was our only source of light!

This is our bathroom!

Now with flash ;)

Friday, we went on our missions. I wrote about that in the previous post, so go check that out! It was a superb experience for me, and the rest of the group.

ZOMG SEAT BELT!

(In the taxi on the way to Herbertpur)

Mine didn't work :(

The view from the center I visited

I couldn't tell what fruit these were. Does anyone know?

Friday night was completely social. There was an epic truth-or-dare game which included Kalki singing gospel to the teachers, Setse awkwardly sitting beside a couple for 1 minute exactly, and (my favourite) Nina having to dance “Gagnam style” on the table the next day at breakfast (http://satwcomic.com/gangnam-style

 Once it has been seen it cannot be unseen).

This resulted in a hilarious dance lesson for Nina that evening in the bungalow, at the hands of our ever-so-patient Eein.

Left right left left, right left right right, cowboy lasso, hip rotation… Eein, you taught us well.

Some pics of the retreat center:

Dining hall

Some really pretty archways

Worship center

Playing football!

A gecko totally invaded our room, you know, no biggie...

On Saturday, which started off with the awesome dance show, we had a worship service with the Woodstock chaplain; Jubin spoke to us about her program (Anugrah) and we had a time of quiet reflection. I definitely learned a lot this weekend, and I am really happy to have gone on this trip!

Here are some photos of the trip home that I really liked:

Saturday night, I watched my first Hindi movie: Cocktail! It’s a movie about an elaborate love triangle (therefore fairly easy to follow, even with the lack of subtitles). It was actually really fun (even if my friends would rather I’d seen a better one as my first).

On to Sunday, we were rudely awakened by monkeys that decided to jump around on the roof for about 3 hours. I was highly amused. Devika was not.

Aside from tha, we relaxed all day. We ate a rather sad amount of junk food (thank-you, Tanuvee), played jungle speed, ordered in, and studied for chem.

Cinnabon...

Momos are my new favourite thing :D

We also helped Ms Maya finish up the "movie reels" of photos: every girl in grade 11 is featured somewhere along the wall. These are just the ones that we put up yesterday:

About the chem test: I TOTALLY DIDN’T FAIL!!! I don’t know what mark I got yet, but I am really confident about my chances. Yay Internet for teaching me AP chemistry!

That’s been my awesome week so far. Can you believe I’ve already been in India for a month and 5 days? I can’t…

Have fun at school tomorrow, everyone! >:D

Lots of love,

Emily