Friday's Adventure

This past week has been spent going to teacher development and training meetings. Fun and adventurous, not! But it has also been a chance to get more settled. I love having new two neighbors, Anna and Kelsey, at Mt. Herman, even though they’ll only be here for the semester. On August 15, I’ll be getting a hopefully longer term neighbor. Fingers crossed! On Wednesday, Anna and Kelsey hosted a movie night at their apartment, and many of our new friends hiked up and cooked dinner together!

Anyhow, I’ll spend this entry writing about yesterday! (I’m dating the blog as Friday even though I am writing this on Saturday.) It started out normal, a day spent preparing for and procrastinating from classes. I cleaned out my classroom, and tried to plan a few lessons. By the way, I thought California textbooks were bad, but there are couple here that just suck!

(Capacity – 24 desks)

Yes, we do eat our meals at the cafeteria. We have the option of 3-meals-per-day or lunch only. I ended up going with the lunch only plan, since my aiya (spelling) is going to cook twice a week for me, and I can always pay individually for the cafeteria dinner meals. So after lunch and after more procrastination, I went to our daily tea at 4pm at the teacher’s lounge. The clouds had lifted after a morning of pouring, and this is what we saw:

(view during tea)

(we were above the cloud layers)

Then, we had a banquet at 7pm and pigged out some more. Oh, btw, tmi (too much information) but I got to send in my first “sample” (if you know what I mean) because of irregularly scheduled programming (if you know what I mean). Results came back normal, but I’m taking some gas and lacto bacillas (good bacteria) pills now. You don’t have to call me GI Jeanne just yet. Remember what GI stands for? I’m for the most part fine, but am having 15-minute stomach pains after meals, and when this happened in China last summer, I lost 8 pounds. I don’t want to do that!

Afterwards, the “young” folk crowded in a van and headed towards The Tavern, a westernized bar in the Mussoorie bazaar. We crowded maybe 9 passengers into an oversized taxi. We celebrated Kyle’s birthday, who turned 25! Chris had just gotten his wisdom tooth pulled two days prior had picked up some hard-to-come buy wine as a gift. It was 750 rupees, very expensive, but we all chipped in! The discussion on my end of the table revolved around the upcoming school year and the Woodstock schedule. The table was like a spectrum from sober on my end to happily buzzed on the other. Eventually, some patrons started dancing to the Indian music, and our whole table got up and joined in!

(in the taxi)

(at the Tavern)

We left around 12:15am. But the night wasn’t over. Taxis were all gone, so the gang had to walk back. This would normally take maybe one hour. Well, Anna, Kelsey, Neeraj, and I were convinced by veteran Ben to take the “short cut” to the top of the hill, while the rest of the group split off to go to their closer homes. By 1:30am, we were still wandering aimlessly, sweating in the misty rain, seeing only two steps in front of us a time, choosing between forks in the road. Neeraj made the executive decision to knock on someone’s door to ask for help. Loud knocking! Finally, a woman’s voice was heard, and Neeraj communicated in hindi that we were lost and needed help. We were from Woodstock. “You’re lying!” she yelled back. Oh well! As we were leaving, another neighbor came out of his house with his wife, and they were a little nicer and gave us directions. At that point, the angry lady from before came out to see what was going on. Anna and Kelsey, being eye witnesses, said that in the lady’s hand was a very large knife, about 2” wide and 9” long, almost like an axe. Neeraj was too busy talking, and I was too busy watching. Luckily, the lady put it down when she saw how sharply dressed we looked but was still really pissed!

This foggy picture was set on a timer. It was our way of capturing our adventure that night, when we still had about five minutes to go. We finally made it home around 1:50am.

(lost in the woods!)