Bye Bye India

Oh it is so sad. Despite the loose motions, dehydration, vomiting, sweating, rashes, insect bites and heat boils India really has been completely amazing. I'm already plotting my next trip back. How could I not, the children are far to brilliantly adorable to not see again.

Although underneath it all I supose I am happy to be coming home, there are so many wonderful people and things here I am going to miss. Despite its many many many flaws I will miss our little apartment, it was a lovely little home. I'll miss its roof and the sunsets, the lane by our house, the friendly man in the internet cafe, the shop thats full of western delights and Mocha Mojo - our air condintioned second home. I'm going to miss Bandra, and Mumbai and ocasionally understanding the hindi people spoken around me. I'll miss the risking my life everytime I get in a rickshaw or cross the street. I'll miss chai at the benches, and chai after school, and chai at the train station, and chai on the street.

I'm really not going to miss rice and Daal. Or the food burning my mouth so much that the blood pounds in my ears.

But mostly I'll miss the people. Josh and Tania for being so supportive, welcoming us into their home and providing such an incredible experience. The teachers at school for being so friendly and helpful. The other volunteers for being generally awesome and brilliant (Hi Amy!). Of course the children for being amazing and giving us so much love and entertainment, they will stay in our hearts for ever.

And I suppose I'll miss Lu and Vikki (who are abandoning me and heading off to South East Asia and Europe). They told me about One! and my experience here would not have been the same without them. They've have been amazing, brilliant, wonderful and fantastical friends and teachers and volunteers and bitching partners and travelling companions. I could not have done this without them. I'm missing them already!

Rash or Bite?

This is one of the many exciting questions you get to ask when living in India. It is one I have been asking on and off for the past week about a strange collection of bumpy red things on my leg. I get bitten a lot, so I asummed they were bites. But everyone else in the house has broken out in heat rashes, which made me think it could be a rash. Well after much puzzling someone finally announced that what ever it was, it was 'infected'. Lovely. And then someone else pointed this out, and another person so I decided perhaps I should toddle off to the doctor and let him decide.

Our local doctor is a funny one. I've been to him before when I had insane stomach cramps. Rather than throughly diagnose you, he pinpoints whats wrong to a rough selection of symptoms and then gives you prescription drugs for all of them. Quite often an array of differet problems are cured by the exact same drug (most recently massive pink horse pills have solved animal bites and colds). Last time he decided I had a stomach infection so I got one set of pills for that. But then he also decided to give me pills for all the other odd symptoms I'd mentioned. So I came away with a prescription for 3 different drugs.

So off I went to discover the secret of the red lumps, it turns out it is neither rash nor bite! Its the mysterious third option.... Heat Boils! Even lovlier. A little departing gift for my body because the sweat and loose motions wasn't enough!

This time I escaped with only 2 prescriptions, I protested against the pain pills. So I have some cream that says get well soon on the packet and some oxymoxycycloquinsilaxisin-thing (big and red and black) for the 'infection'. I have no idea if its working, it mostly makes me feel woozy.

Thank You!!!!!!!

Massive thank you to My Mum and Dad, Nanna, Vikki's parents and Lu's parents for donating money so the kids at Nallasopara and Khar could have Biriyani for their after programme treat, they thoroughly enjoyed it!!!!!!

End of Term

So everything has finished at school: no more classes, no more train rides to Nallasopara and no more children. I feel very sad.

Its been a really busy last few weeks. Straight after exams we went away to the water park, then we had sports day (my team came last, I was very unimpressed) and since then we've been rehearsing songs, plays and dances for the end of term programme. We had one programme in Nallasopara on Friday and the Khar one on Saturday. In between all that we've been desperately trying to finish off all the little jobs and bits and bobs around the office before we leave. Its been pretty frantic. I feels very strange to not have anything to do and to just have to hand all your work over to someone else. I hope it will all work out with the new volunteers. We also got to go on a home visit and see some of the kids in their houses in the slum. It was lovely, we all go offered chai and got to have a chat with the parents and everything. It was a lot like slumdog millionaire, which everyone has probably seen, so I won't go in to details. But it was Amazing.

The End of Term Programme ended up being really fun. We stayed up super late on Thursday night making masks and backdrops for all the performances. Then dragged them all to Nallasopara on the train only for the programme to go quite disasterously. We were quite downhearted. But then the Saturday Khar Programme ended up being awesome so we were very happy in the end. Lu's costumes looked brilliant, Vikki ended up taking on a star role in one of the little kids plays and I managed to get the ADD-tastic Step 3s through 2 verses of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". We also re-wrote The Ting Tings 'That not my name" and taught it to the Step 5s. They were awesome. I have a video!

But now its all over and there's nothing left to do but sleep, so I'm going home to do that!

Only a week to go...

... and even more things have broken in our apartment.

13. Another dead laptop has been found during a clear out we had last week
14. One of the volunteers laptop screens
15. The Fridge. It has finally packed up and given in. It smells. Luckily we have no food, I don't know why its smelling.

On a happier note I've bought another new camera charger, so I've been taking billions of pictures. This time I just went straight to Alfa and found my way round like a pro!

A New Arrival

Look how cute this little bundle of happiness is! Her name is Snow White, we call her Snow for short. She found being eaten by rats and was rescued by Tania and then adopted by the two orphans who live at school, Pavarti and Malesh. So the school has a cat now! She spends her days roaming around the office looking adorable and making it very hard to get any work done. She was quite ill when we first took her in and so came and stayed at our house for a couple of days which was brilliant! She wandered around and explored everything and curled up on the big water bottle to have some sleep. She's all skinny and has giant ears and paws, the lady at the pet shop thinks she might have worms which is quite cute really because lots of the kids at school have worms to! She fits in!

Anyway, Snows adoption seems like the perfect time to write about her new owners, Pavarti and Malesh. I had to say goodbye to them yesterday and it broke my heart to leave them. They have been such a big part of our experience at school and are a great example of why I'm so proud to be working for an organisation like One! International.

Pavarti is about 7 and Malesh is about 16, though no one knows for sure. There father was an alcoholic and he died when they were younger. After that they moved to Mumbai with there mother to find work. She was killed in a car accident by a drunk driver a couple of years ago. They were then split up and sent to live with different relatives. They were both poorly looked after and suffered both physical and mental abuse. Pavarti was hurt the most by this and became very withdrawn and would speak to no one but Malesh. Her health deteriated and they ended up living out on the beach by the school. Back in August Pavarti started having trouble breathing. The fishermen that lived nearby brought them to One! International to see if they could help. One! took pavarti to three different hospitals before someone would treat her. Finally a semi-private hospital took her in and had to perform life saving techniques to keep her going. One! found a sponsor to cover the cost of her treatment. The doctor gave her various timelines for how long she would stay alive. Originally a couple of weeks, then maybe up to two years and then decided that she could live well into adulthood or die the next day, they couldn't be sure. No one knows specifically what is wrong with her. She was attatched to an oxygen machine which she had to stay on for up to 18 hours a day. One! got permission for them to live at school and paid to hire an oxygen machine so she could continue her treatment. They have been living at the school ever since.

In this time Pavarti's health has greatly improved, last month she came off the oxygen completely. She attends class and happily interacts with all the students, teachers and volunteers. She's so funny and has a really evil cackle when she laughs, she climbs up everything and once you pick her up she'll cling on to you and never let go. Malesh is a wonderful older brother and is so sweet with her. He was a bit unimpressed when they first got the cat, but is quite proud of how much attention it gets.

They are both so amazing and I think its incredible that without One! Pavarti would not be here today. I hope they continue to flourish and I will miss them terribly.

http://www.one-international.com/

How to buy a battery charger in Mumbai.

Last week the battery charger for my camera stopped working. Its one of those little block ones so you can't just buy new batteries. It meant I wouldn't be able to use my camera for the rest of the trip. It is another, in the long list (see below) of electricals that have died in our apartment. But I refused to live without a camera and so began a very long adventure to fix my charger.

First I didn't believe it had just died. It we perfectly fine the week before. It had to be the fuse. Normally I would just go to dad who would look in a draw and sort everything out. But this is India, so I can't. After much questioning I found a little electrical shack next to the internet place I go to. The scary man there popped out the fuse and tested it, everything was fine. The charger was broken.

If I was in England I would have popped online, bought a new one and carried on with my life. But this is India and the post can take up to a month if at all. So I asked a few questions and found a snazzy airconditioned electrical store that might be able to help me. It was near where we live, so one afternoon after school I popped in to see if they could help. They couldn't. But they did give me the address of the Cannon Master Store or something that could. It was in Santa Cruz (15 minutes away) so I popped in a rickshaw and went there.

The Rickshaw left us at some crossroads where there was no shop called The Cannon Support Centre. After asking a bunch of different security guards I gave up and called the phone number I had. I explained where I was standing and they directed me to them. It turns out all we had to do was go through some guarded gates past a bank and up a fancy elevator to the 6th floor of a building where finally there was a small sign advising us that we were at the Cannon Support Centre. It turned out to be an office where they do something I don't understand. I gave my name to the receptionist and then someone brought us free candy and water, which was all very nice. Except when we finally spoke to someone there was nothing they could do. But they could give us an address of a shop that would sell the battery charger, Alfa. It was big they said. Everyone has heard of it. It was in Vile Parle (15 minutes away) so we popped in a rickshaw and went there.

The first rickshaw we popped in was driven by some idiot who thought we would happily pay him 350 rupees for a 20 rupee trip. We wouldn't, so we had a fight and got out. The second rickshaw was lovely, he dropped us off down a small lane full of vegetable carts, household items spread out on mats on the floor and cramped creepy looking shops lining the road. I was expecting something more PC Worldy. But there, amongst the grubby signs, was a little pink one that said Alfa. Our driver happily pointed it out. And then he pointed out another, next door, and another, accross and the street, and another further down and so on. There was about 7 little Alfa signs dotted all over the street. In a slight daze we got out and looked around. A vegetable seller offered to help. "Cameras?" we asked, "Alfa 3!" he replied pointing down the street. And off we went to find a camera charger. Alfa 3 was down a busy little alleyway. Busy because it hosted the Alfa gift wrapping department: 3 tables full of garish wrapping paper surrounded by people waving their Alfa bags trying to get their things done next. Skeptically we walked in and were suddenly surrounded by ipods and flat screen tvs and cameras. I got to the front of the counter slightly dejectedly pulled out my camera and battery to ask for a charger. The man behind looked at me, then he looked at the man beside him who bent down, had a rumage and pulled out the right camera charger! It was amazing! It had an English plug! He yelled over to someone else who brough out an adapter, tested it for me and I paid. The next thing I knew I was out on the street surrounded by the vegetable sellers again.

So in India all it takes to buy a new camera charger is 3 hours, 3 shops and 4 rickshaw rides. I almost got it gift wrapped!

.... I have since lost the new charger and now my battery is dead all over again with no way to charge it. At least I know where to go and buy a new one.

The funnest most awesomest weekend ever

So, after exams everyone goes a little crazy and does all the stuff that you haven't been able to do for weeks. I know after I finished exams last time I got super drunk and pimped some snacks. Well, the kids at our school get to do fun stuff too! And we get to come along!

Three times a year the kids go away on field trips. They have 2 days trips and one overnighter. Saturday was one of their day trips. We all woke up at stupid o'clock (just like a real school trip!) and they piled on a bus (the volunteers caught the train as it meant we got an extra 30 minutes in bed) and headed off to a Water Park! I love water parks! Both the schools do the trips together but only the children who have had good attendence are allowed to go so we had about 50 altogether and I was given 5 of my own to watch over for the day. It was slightly petrifying at , most of them can't swim and my head started swimming with all the disasterous things that can happen when small children are near water, but everything was fine in the end. We all had a brilliant day in the end. Entrance to the park (which was 3 pounds!) also included breakfast, lunch, dinner, chai and all you can eat popcorn and candy floss! Amazing! The kids went a little crazy (understandably, you don't get much all you can eat candy floss living on the streets) but luckily no one threw it all up on the bus home.

The whole water park experience was very bizzare. It was quite small and only had a few slides (half of which were broken) but the ones it had were fun. Then in the afternoon they opened up an amazing massive slide which we were all only allowed to go on 3 times. I went twice and the realised I should probably be looking after children. It was one of the ones where you sit in a rubber ring and go flying round corners - people kept flipping over ands arriving at the bottom underneath their ring... it was a little dangerous I supose. The oddest thing (yet understandable) was that no one wore swim suits. They all went into the water fully clothed. Some of the teachers went paddling around wearing a full on salwar kameez or saris complete with scarf! We all wore shorts and t-shirt. Vikki got a comedy massive whole in her bottom and had to sit down for most of the afternoon. We all got incredibly bad sunburn. The children were amazed by our pink arms and white shoulders they kept poking the burn to see it stay white a while then fade away. We were quite the entertainment!

It was such a brilliant day, so much fun and the kids were ridiculously well behaved so I didn't have to do much work either!

Attack of the Volunteers or 'Ode to Amy'

So just over am month ago a new volunteer arrived at our apartment. Her name was Amy (it still is, ut shes left now so the past tence felt appropriate) and she was/is lovely. And now she's gone and I've somehow completely neglected to mention her at all. Now we have 3 brand new volunteers living with us (one with with us and two sleeping on matresses accross the street but doing everything else in our apartment) and it seems wrong to mention them and not Amy.

So, Amy... Lu described Amy as a little bit of all of us rolled into one person and it was completely true! She was clean! She loves Buffy and The Office! She will spend hours watching stupid clips on YouTube! She was basically the greatest person ever. With Amy we actually bothered leaving the house to see some sites. When you're somewhere for so long its easy to put off doing touristy stuff until later but because Amy was only there for a month she wanted to do it all right then. Which was awesome. So I got to see 'downtown' Mumbai which is beautiful and exotic: lots of wide open streets, palm trees and European style architecture. We saw Victoria Terminus (got a little Slumdog flashback) and the Prince of Wales Museum (now called something else that I can't spell). We shopped along Colaba Causeway and had lunch at Leopolds. That was really odd, when the terrorist attacks happened everybody who was sitting downstairs in in Leopolds got shot, and now it looks like nothing ever happened. We got the boat over to Elephanta Island and saw some caves and someone asked us to be in a Bollywood movie. It was all very awesome!

But then she left and we thought we had a dull month ahead of us until we left, but its turns out we haven't. This weekend out little flat has been invaded by boys. 3 boys! I've only just met them but they seem nice so far. Vikki and I have moved out of the sittingroom and into the bedroom so we can have an all girl space and Lu has bravely offered to share the sitting room space with one of the boys. We've also had a new pile of volunteers show up at the school so we're very overrun at the moment, I don't know what I'm going to do with myself!

I am a terrible teacher

Today I spent my time sweating and yelling at small children. Why? because I was in Nallasopara and its exam time.

It was ridiculously hot today, so hot my sweat stains grew so big they merged into one giant seat stain that decided to consume my whole body. It looked like someone had dunked me in water. I think I was dripping on the children's work. By a complete miracle the electricity worked all day, unfortunately I was in the one room that doesn't have a fan. Whenever one of the other teachers walked through they gave me an odd little stare and hurried on. Thankfully Vikki was just as sweaty, so we can blame it on foreignness and not my overactive sweat glads.

But the yelling. Today I have mostly been shouting Chub! and Bhat Jow! which means Shut Up! and Sit Down! respectively in Hindi. I occasionally shouted Cheating! but they didn't understand that and carried on. One child got so used to me yelling at him (I briefly silenced an entire classroom on one occasion) all I had to do was glare and he scurried away from me. I am pleased and upset by this behaviour. I really want the children to like me... but they can be so annoying. I try and make up for the yelling by giving in to their requests for handshakes and high fives. I think this is working.

Anyway, I am a terrible teacher. Some of the children are failing miserably. In one of my classes only one child passed. I think its because I forgot to teach them the alphabet properly. I mean, no one has bothered, so not all the blame is on me, but when you're staring at exam pages you wrote where the alphabet tails off around J you start to wonder.

The frustrating thing is I feel like I've learnt so much about teaching and what to do and how to help and be patient... but none of it will be used again as I'm leaving before the new term starts. Not that I would want to stay and carry on, I'm missing flushing toilets and toasters too much. But still. I was watching them today (inbetween the shouting and yelling) and some of them I could see trying so hard and I just wished I'd tried a little harder and getting things through to them. One of the girls is a bit of a lost cause and last lesson we started working really hard at getting her to write her name and in her exam today... she didn't do it, but she got the first 3 letters right! Which is a start! Between all the depressing exam results we did have one happy moment. All our step 3 spontaneously started singing row row row your boat complete with actions (which we taught them!) so at least one thing stuck!

A clash of cultures

I spent last Saturday in the company of lots and lots and lots of white people. It was very strange, I don't see many and tend to stare quite a lot when I do. I wonder where they're from and why they are here. I spend most of my time at the school or hanging out with the volunteers and I'm on good terms with the man at the internet cafe (he knows my name!) and the man in the local shop I nearly feel like a local (except the other local still stare at me). So I've had a very limited amount of interaction with other foreigners in the country. The ones I have met have all been slightly odd and have a strange ex-patty vibe about them that I don't mesh well with. They're all in the country but not part of it. On Saturday night I spent a lot of time with those kind of people.

One of the old volunteers is now a teacher at the American School of Bombay (ASB). They had organised a fundraiser (poster above) for somewhere that flooded. They had entitled it 'Embracing India'. The fact that they're in India but have to have a fundraiser to embrace it really says everything about the school. The ex-volunteer invited some of our students to perform with her class in the fundraiser (they did an adorable dance to the Slumdog Millionaire song Jai Ho). So on Saturday we trooped along with a bunch of the kids to take part.

I think they all enjoyed themselves, they were incredibly well behaved, no one had to be taken out half way through to use the toilet and only one fell asleep. The ate a ridiculous amount of samosas, buscuits and juice and one threw up on the bus home. But for the rest of us everything was a little bit off. The school is incredibly rich and well supllied and is attend by the children of diplomats and the like. One classroom has more space and supplies than our entire school. The children seemed quite confused to see our kids, like they didn't really understand what India was made up of. The were preserved and protected within their little walls surrounded by shockingly green grass and just knew nothing of what was outside.

The whole fundraiser was very sweet and earnest, and I really don't want to be down on their effort, because it is a massive thing they're doing. But it was just so 'lets all spend the evening helping the poor and then waste more water making the grass greener outside'. Everything was made out to be so far away, like it was another world that was broken, not the one they were living in. The strangest thing was when they played a video of the area that had been flooded. People were wading through dirty water, they were living in little blue tented communities and didn't have access to clean water and medical supplies. The children sat behind gasped in shock, 'how terrible' they murmured, 'look at where they live'.

After the performance we took our kids home. Half an hour drive from the American School we dropped some of them off at one of the slums, another two we just had to leave on the street becuase they weren't entirely sure where their house had been moved to, a couple more went to the shack you saw a couple of posts below and the final couple we walked to a busy street corner. There, the rest of their family had already rolled out their sleeping mats on the pavement. They went to the toilet in the gutter and then curled up for the night. Without even a little blue tent over their heads. I wish the gasping children could have seen what was just outside their door.

For Grandad

On Sunday my Grandad died. He just celebrated his 90th birthday. It has been a hard couple of days, thankfully exams and having a mountain of children screaming around you are a good distraction from the sadness. I've had a lot of emotional phone calls with home. I feel very helpless being so far away. I love him and miss him terribly.

I never really knew my Grandad, but I think I understood him as person. I will miss him watching over me as I made a mess of mowing the lawn, the gleeful look on his face whenever he got a big score playing dominos, the way he used to sneak into the back room to listen to the racing results and seeing him waiting by the gate whenever we went to visit.

He was wonderful.

Ages ago when I first got here Uncle Paul said to post pictures of all the food I'd been eating. Around that time I wasn't really eating anything, throwing up a lot and having 'loose motions' so I didn't have much to show. Now I eat a lot, too much really, and I'm fattening up! In the evenings our 'maid' cooks for us. Depending on how she feels it can be amazing (parathas with vegetable curry) or terrible (plain noodles with one pepper). We've taken to forcing her to put at least four different vegetables in our food, she resisted well but we've finally crushed her. Sometimes when she comes first thing in the morning we're all still asleep and she starts making wierd things in the kitchen. One morning we were confronted with a plate of spicey noodles, another we had a mountain of eggy bread handed to us after we'd all finished eating. The oddest one was some pickle made from the sour fruit that grows in the tree outside, she left it out in the sun on the roof and then presented it to us. It was horrible, we left it in the kitchen for 2 days and then threw it out.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the food I do eat. Everyday at school I have this (though a much smaller portion). Coinsidentally this is the plate of food I had on the day of my 'episode' and I threw the whole thing up again about 30 minute after this picture was taken. Its rice with daal and the most incredibly spicy vegetables I have ever eated in my life. I usually have a tiny portion just to make the food more interesting. One day I got a crazy idea in my head that I would start building myself up a massive tolerance to spicy food by just eating loads of the vegetables everyday. This lasted one day. I had about a palm sized portion, started feeling funny half way through and by the end I was red and sweaty, my nose was running and blood was pounding in my ears. We eat with our hands at the school and my fingers as well as my mouth were burning. They are evily spicy. None of the teachers think this though, one of them rejected them once as she wanted something spicy.
At Nallasopara we only get bananas and biscuits because there's no gas to cook, except on thursdays when we get Samosa Pao from the 'restaurant' across the street. Samosa Pao is awesome. Its a massive samosa that you shove in a bread roll. Pao means bread, you pronounce it pow and I love it because if someone ever asks me what I had for breakfast I can say Peanut Butter POW! like I'm in batman or something! here is Samosa Poa. Its actually Vikki's because I devoured mine before remebering to take a photo. She'd already bitten it and decided it was too spicy so she gave it to a dog. She loves the Nallasopara dogs.

On Saturdays we take the kids to the beach or park and get dinner at a cafe after. We rotate Marsala Doosa (crispy pancake filled with yellow potato stuff, odd donut shaped polenta things and Pao Bhaji. I don't like the donuts. I love Pao Bhaji and not just because of the Pao which they butter on both sides! Top, bottom and middle! Its the tastiest thing ever. Here it is!

I also quite like the Doosa. So much so that I've yet to remember to take its picture. The cafe also does incredible fresh juice. When you order the juice you see them go and get the fruit off the shelf to make it. The pineapple is good, but the orange is heavenly, it is the greatest juice you will ever drink in your life. I have it every week and whenever I do I think of how jealous dad would be if he knew how good the juice was. Here is my juice, I had a little before I remebered the picture. Pineapple is in the background.

We goout to dinner sometimes and quite a lot we get takeaways (anther reason why I am fat). Mostly falafel or pizza. Once we made a terrible mistake and got Chinese. I ordered soup. It came in a plastic bag. I will not be ordering chinese again.

A bit of a reality check

Since I started planning to come to India I've know that I would be working with street kids. Since I got to India I've been constantly confronted with the poverty and the shanty houses and shacks the cover any available space. You can't escape any of it. We live in a pretty well to do area and all the allyways around our building are full of little corrugated iron and blue plastic structures, the street that we drive along to get to school is lined with them and no railway line is without its little hut communities dotted along it. But yesterday it really hit me, and it was kind of a shock. What I never realised that most of our kids are street kids not slum kids, and theres actually a massive difference between to two. When people live in a slum theres a communitym support, electrcity and security. You have to pay to live there. But on the street you're subjected to anything and everything. Theres no protection for your home or whatever few belongings you have. Its so easy to forget where the children come from and what they go home to. In the school they're all just regular children who need a hug when they cry and who you shout at when they're being annoying.

I've mentioned our maid before, stroppy but lovely. Shes 16 and always very well put together. Her mum works at the school and all of her siblings (she has 8) go to the school. I know the whole family quite well. Her older sister is pregnant and managed to find me a blanket and a pillow when I had a bit of an 'episode' at school the other week! Anyway, yesterday we went out to the open yard where we do exercise, but it was really hot so one of the teachers suggested we go down to the sea where there's more shade. As we wandered down, our maid's little sister pointed out her house. Its the one in the photo above. 11 people live there. 11. I was just comletely blown away, I still am. I saw slumdog millionaire, I wasn't expecting much, but I was expecting 4 walls, something resembling a door. But this is just props for a roof. I have no idea how they survive here. I have an apartment, that occasionally has running water, a bed, fans, a closet to keep my clothes in and I look and feel like crap 90% of the time I'm here, and the other 10% only happens half an hour after each shower. They all sleep outside, theres room for about 4/5 people tops under the roof. How do they cope during the monsoon? I don't really know what else to say. Seeing her house is the first time I've come close to tears since I got here.

Shout outs!

Firstly to mum and dad for sending an awesome box of eastery happiness to brighten up our dying apartment. We made pink and yellow eggs to eat for breakfast on Easter Sunday and whipped ourselves up an easter tree which is in our family photo below.

And secondly thank you thank you thank you Katy for your Canada post. Vikki figured the chocolate was meant as a cruel joke but we never made it to the shop on Sunday so it ended up being our only easter chocolate and so was much appreciated (and also why the others didn't make it into the picture).

Thank you for the post, it brightens up our day!

Thanks for the sympathy!!!!!

I'm so glad other people think that the world becomes slightly less happier when your laptop dies. It makes me feel slightly less pathetic. I will pass on the sympathy to the others, we're all suffering together.

For anyone keeping track, the broken items in are apartment are:
1. Television
2. Plumbing
3. Toaster (we hold bread over a naked flame to make our toast)
4. Desktop computer (flooded)
5. Desktop computer (dead on arrival)
6. Laptop
7. 3 dining table chairs
8. Washing Machine (we store cutlery on it)
9. Fan in bedroom (you have to give it a good push to get it going)
10. Lego brick speaker for ipod
11. The big speakers we found to replace the lego speaker
12. Every single flyscreen (they're held together by duct tape)
The fridge made a valiant attempt at dying on sunday, it was fixed though, we only lost a tub of ice cream.

For anyone placing bets on when any of these things will be repaired I'd start looking around 2010. I will die of shock if anything gets done before we leave.

Did I ever tell the story of the toaster? Its really not that interesting. The holdy down mechanism was broken when we got there so our maid (an adorable but stroppy teenager from the school who cooks and cleans for us... when she can be bothered) used to jam a spoon in the lever to make it stay down. I found this shocking until I had to stand there for 5 minutes holding it down while the lever dug into my finger and just started jamming a spoon into it too. Anyway, one day the ants (that infest our apartment) swarmed into the toaster and our maid decided the best way to tackle this was to spray it with bug spray... about 6 times. So since then we're all a bit against using it.

In case the post seems a bit depressing I do have good news! Last night we spent a jolly hour checking our hair for lice and we're all nit free!

A bad blogger at exam time

I have to say, I am feeling slightly ashamed by my lack of blogging. I just had a lottle scroll through katy's blog of her adventures in Canada and she really does kick my ass at posting things. She's done about 4 posts in the last 2 days! Anyway, my blogging is probably going to get even worse as yesterday our lifeline in the apartment, the laptop, died. It is extremly sad, well maybe not that sad, but at least quite sad. The tv was broken when we arrived and now with the laptop dead the most exciting things we have to do is read a book and play cards, its like being in olden times. There will be no more DVD watching for us and now we have to trek over to the internet cafe to do important things like check gossip blogs and facebook. We've got a bit of a computer graveyard going on at the flat now: one dead laptop, one dead desktop, and one desktop that could have worked if it hadn't have been on the floor during the flood.

Its actually happened at the worst possible time. Exams are in a couple of weeks and as the 'teachers' we have to write the crazy things. Yesterday I spent about 5 hours sitting on the computer desperately trying to think of different way to test that the children know the alphabet. I have 4 exams to write, all for the little kids. Their English is not so amazing and they can't read much beyond the alphabet. They can speak it ok, so their oral test is fine, but the written one is going to be hard for them. We're suposed to arrange the test so everyone can get at least 40% so my first four pages involve tracing the alphabet, coping 3 letter words and writing their name out. I'm praying they'll all manage that. The volunteers have a crazy folder system in place so they can keep each other informed with what has and hasn't been taught, but this hasn't been kept up to date so we're just teasting them on the things we've taught them. I'm sure it'll be fine!

Don't worry, I have my Diet Coke

So, Catherine commented on my McDonalds blog about India not having Diet Coke. No one ever comments, so I don't really check it, but Dad pointed it out last night. I was going to reply to it, but then I thought a subject as important as Diet Coke really deserves its own post. Also, life has become rather normal so I'm running out of things to say.

First up, Diet Coke completely exists. I was drinking it last night when my dad told me about the comment and I'm drinking it now at the internet cafe. Some of the condensation just dripped on the keyboard.

I really don't want people thinking that India is all curry and kingfisher beer and lacking anything you've heard of just becuase McDonalds when crazy and scrapped most of its menu. Actually its surprisingly easy to get hold of any western delights you fancy. Our local shop, which is tiny and on some suburban back street, is part Indian part Selfridges food hall. It sells skippy peanut butter, and cadburys and the fancy balsamic vinegar and Knotts Berry Farm Boisenberry syrup and Aunt Jemima' pancake mix and that 'fancy' pasta that comes in a blue box. It even has a lone jar of Marmite that taunts me every time I go in. Most of the American stuff is even cheaper than you can buy it in England (not the Marmite, its a tiny jar and 3 pounds so I'm trying to resist its charms). Everytime I go in the shop I find something new and exciting to destract me.

So, don't worry, I have my Diet Coke and also pretty much all the other food I used to eat at home. Even bourbon biscuits!

Pimp My Rickshaw

I'm assuming everyone knows what a rickshaw is. If you don't, they're basically a 3-wheeled motor bike that someone shoved a box on top of. They are one of the major forms of transport in Mumbai (and most cities) and I catch at least 2 a day to get to school and back (average journey cost: 20p). They're an exhilerating and petrifying way to travel and I love them!

Sadly there are no good pictures to illustrate this post, rickshaws are very small and cramped and the drivers are often irritable little men who do not appreciate waiting around for a foreigner (who didn't tip) to take photos of them. I did google "rickshaw pimp" which led me to this little beauty http://www.pimpmyshaw.com/ a slightly more extreme version of what I'm talking about!

Rickshaws in all of the India I have seen look exactly the same on the outside: black, yellow and on 3 wheels. They whizz about all over the roads and all you ever really see of them is a little black blur rushing past. But once you get inside a whole other world opens up. Every single rickshaw has put a little bit of effort into pimping and personalising their little vehicle. Its crazy, like a mountain of colourful vinyl washed up shore one day and someone said finally, now the inside of my rickshaw can be fushia. Some just go with one bright bold colour all over the seats and ceiling. We've been in red, blue, green, yellow, black, brown, purple and my favourite gold glitter vinyl covered insides. Others mix it up by adding a colourful trim around the edging. Many choose to take this even further by making their trim a thick band of, what can only be, discarded carpet from the 1970s. My favourite ones are those who do all this and then add little motifs to the backs of the seats: hearts, dolphins, shapes, all neatly colour co-ordinated with the rest of the design. And just when you think there is nothing more that can possibly be pimped, some of that shove a massive set of speakers on the back ledge and play you Bollywood music if you ask nicely.

There is a little leap of happiness in my heart whenever we hop into a new rickshaw and we get to see what madness has unfolded within. I wonder who does it for them. Is there a special place where you pick designs or is it whatever the wifey at home had lying around? It makes you wonder about the stern man driving up front. How can he look so miserable, yet have decorated his handlebars with fringing and chosen a lime green and yellow colour scheme for within?If only I spoke Hindi I could learn these secrets.

Where have all the ovens gone?

No one in India has an oven. This is a bit of a sweeping statement and based solely on the four other apartments I have been in, but seriously, not one single oven. It can't be true becuase I've seen Betty Crocker cake mix in our local shop which very much requires an oven. But still, where are they? Are they in hiding? Is there some kind of rota system that our apartment is not in on? I just can't understand how a mainstay of every kitchen ever has been completely forgotten by a whole country. Instead we have a massive camping stove attatched to a vat of gas. and this is what all the other apartments had as well. Massive gas camping stoves.