A Month Gone
So a month has nearly gone and I am still having a fantastic time. I have had many more experiences of
Bangalore and India in General. I still love the teaching and the kids are still absolutely fantastic. The last few weeks we have been given more responsibility with the kids. We are currently running English assessments for the whole school. At the moment we are completing Jayanagar and they we will be going onto the other 3 schools around the city to do the same assessments. These assessments will tell the teachers whether or no the children need extra help. We have been giving the children stickers for coming out of class disregarding whether they are doing well or not which they absolutely love.
On Sunday a reporter published an article in the Bangalore times about the school which was really good to read. It makes you realize the backgrounds which these children come from and how different they are at school.
We have explored the city now to great extent and found the best places to shop and eat. We have also been away now twice at the weekends which has been really good. Last weekend we went to Pondicherry which was an 8 hour bus journey away. It is on the west coast of Bangalore near Chennai. The bus journey on the way was quite good. We were on a semi-sleeper bus which means the seats just reclined. Some of us slept well but others didn’t sleep well at all! When we arrived, we had no accommodation booked so we got in a Rickshaw and asked him to take us to a cheap but clean Hotel which he did. It was reasonable; al that mattered was having clean rooms and hot water which it did. On arrival we slept for a while as we were all pretty tired. We had a good breakfast and relaxed for the day on Paradise Island which was lovely. In the evening we went to a lovely restaurant which did amazing French food (Pondicherry is a French town). We had an early night as we were all still tired from the bus journey and doing nothing during the day!!!! We had a few problems when we arrived back that night as we were told we were going to be chucked out our rooms at 6am as that was the time in which we arrived but in the end we managed to decide that if they kept out deposit of about 3 pounds that we could have our rooms until midday!
On Saturday we spent the day relaxing again. We had a late breakfast/early lunch in another little French restaurant which was lovely and very cheap although the service was quite bad!! We hired bikes and visited the local Ashram which was lovely. On our way there we met a guy called Mali who was from Mexico. He was about 60 and he asked us to stop by on our way back past which we did. He was lovely and he told us all about his life!! For the rest of the day we took a rickshaw to 2 other beaches just out of town which were both lovely. Sadly our weekend in Pondicherry was over after this and we had to get the night bus back to Bangalore. I did not enjoy the journey home as we were on a sleeper bus and I felt very sick lying down on the bus! I did not sleep very well but caught up on some sleep when I got back home to the apartment!
This weekend coming we are going on an adventure camp to see Tigers and Elephants which should be amazing. There will be 20 of us going and I can’t wait. We will be camping as well which will be an experience and we have camp fires and rafting organized for us which will be good.
I am still enjoying my home stay. The lady is lovely whom Deepa and I are staying with. She cooks us lovely food and looks after us well. At the moment she has her 2 daughters over from Australia for the week which is really nice and hopefully tonight we will be going out for a few drinks together.