Meeting Everyone

The next day at Ispiice, I was one of the first to wake up. I got dressed and washed my face and still had time to read in the living room before everyone was awake. I was reading Nancy Drew for a while and then started looking through some of the French fashion magazines under the coffee table. I don't know any French so it's a good thing they take good pictures! Then I picked up the Beginner' Hindi book and studied that for a little while until breakfast. For breakfast we had toast with jam, peanut butter, nutella, or marmite and corn flakes. In India they have different kinds of corn flakes with bananas and mangos. They are good but very sweet! Everything in India is either really spicy or really sweet! The chai in restaurants is really sweet and so are most Indian desserts and the green, minty, crunchy things they give you after your meal at restaurants. I'm not a big fan of the minty things. I think it tastes like something they use on your teeth at the dentist, coated in sugar. A little while after breakfast, we packed the bags of toys and drawing materials to bring to the daycare center. We only stayed long enough so that I could meet the children and get used to the daycare. The daycare is just one cement room with a porch and metal roof. It is really small and dark inside so during the warm months the children sit on the porch floor around little tables that we bring outside. When I got there, some of the children started to cry because they are not used to seeing new people and they get shy and scared. The kids are all very well behaved. They don't ever fight or throw things like I've seen in preschools before. They just sit and color like they're supposed to! The hard part is keeping track of them all. There is only one daycare teacher and lots of kids and without a way to keep them all contained in one place it is a challenge. When we leave, we have to take the toys with us because if we left them at the daycare then they would either be destroyed by the next day or taken home by one of the kids and never seen again. So after we packed up the toys, we went back to the house and had lunch and I wrote some of my blog (it took me 4 sit-downs to finally finish) and we played a million games of uno with all of the staff people (a good opportinity to learn Hindi colors)! After a few hours at the house, I left to go meet the girls that I will be teaching English to in the afternoons. We meet at Anju's house after they are done with school. Anju is one of the students. The girls are aged 10-20 years old and have different levels of knowlege in English. Anju is the oldest and speaks the most English so she helped me understand the others. The classes are held on the patio at Anju's house next to their family's little shop. Aside from English, I will also be teaching them IT skills on the tiny netbook computers that they share and like to use for playing the jawbreaker game! They were very nice wanted us to stay longer and of course, wouldn't let us leave before having chai! Then we went downtown so I could get a cell phone to use while I am here. Indian cell phones are really cheap but the only way to get minutes on your phone is to bring cash into an airtel store and give them your phone and they will give you more minutes. The phone that I got is nice and simple because I don't need anything fancy just for calling home. The phone has English and Hindi letters on the buttons but the voice notifications on the phone are all in Hindi so whenever I get one, I have to have someone translate for me! After getting the phone, we came back to the house and Aoife and I decided to go to Mcleod, the bigger city near Dharamsala and Sidwarri. It was a 40 minutes bus ride into the city and I can't say that those buses are much more comfortable than the one from Delhi! There are more buses that leave during the day so I don't know why they have to cram the bus full, past it's maximum capacity! The buses are either really old or really broken because they don't even beep when they back up. Luckily they have a man in the back of the bus with a whistle! He is also used for when they drop people off the bus. Once they are inches out of the way of getting killed by the bus, the guy blows the ear-piercing whistle and then the driver slams down the gas pedal. Once we were in Mcleod, I was a little disapointed to see that it was mostly stores and street vendors selling Tibetan crafts and souveniers. We went into one of the Buddist temple's but it wasn't much to see because it was being renovated and there was construction equipment and wood shavings everywhere. We went to the Dalai Lama temple and saw all of the mats and speakers set up like they would be if there was a big event going on. We went inside and saw all of the art and statues and people praying and then we asked someone if the Dalai Lama had been there and they said that he had just left earlier that day but that he was coming back later in the week. I'm hoping that I might have a chance to see the Dalai Lama at the temple sometime while I'm here! The temple was probably my favorite part of Mcleod. After going to the temple, Aoife and I walked around, looking for a good place to have dinner. We found a Tibetan/Indian restaurant that had a rooftop dining area with great views of the mountains and the city up in the rocks! Since being in India, I hadn't had anything that I would consider extremely spicy and I was surprised because I was preparing myself for testing my endurance with spicy food. The hotel in Delhi deffinitly toned down the spices to suit foreigners but even the restaraunts we went to seemed like they just assumed that foreigners don't like spices. So when I ordered the chana masala at the restaraunt in mcleod I asked for it to be extra spicy. It was really spicy but it was really good! There is more flavor when it is more spicy! So when Aoife saw that I could handle really spicy foods she told the Ipiice cook, Neraj (i'm not sure if I spelled his name correctly), that he could put in as much spice as he wanted to. Most of the time he make two batches of what he cooks. One has less spice for the volunteers and one has more for the staff who are used to really spicy food. We took the bus back to Dharamsala and I could write a lot about the bus stop but right now I really want to catch up on my blog posts so I won't write about it. As you could imagine, it was pretty dumpy! From there we had to hike up a lot of really steep, stone stairs that went up the side of the mountain. It was dark and you couldn't see far ahead of you so I didn't know that there was another part of the city way up there that you could get down from by driving down a little road on the other side, until we got to the top of the stairs where the taxi stand was. In Dharamsala, you don't just get in the taxi and pay the amount that it shows on the meter. We asked how much it would cost to Sidwarri and tried to negotiate a little but it was getting late and it was dark and we didn't want to be standing out there for too much longer. So we took the taxi home and by then, the guys were back from playing cricket and I was exhausted so I went to bed shortly after writing more of my blog which has been monopolizing most of my free time lately, so I hope everyone is enjoying it!