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Published: March 12th 2008
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Indian Trucks
This is why the place is full of noise!! Every truck and Rickshaw have these signs So sorry for the slow ending to the final installment of our 8 month trip, but here we are. We arrived into Ahmedabad on time for once, after a great nights sleep with our newly aquired blankets. It was the complete result all round!! It was nice to be picked up by our friend Harishbhai (the man who looked after us on our last trip) after once again all the special offers from the rickshaw drivers of beautiful, yet cheap hotels.
Our return to the school was great as the more of the premises have been completed since our last visit.
Kris and I got thrown into the deep end at our arrival and were asked to take 3 lessons in the pre-primary section where the children had a very little grasp of the English language, so it made for an interesting couple of hours. Also considering we both prefer upper primary, being thrown into the deep end with 2,3 and 4 year olds was very amusing. Thank goodness for team teaching!!! It was a crack up walking into classes with the temperatures outside cracking about 26 degrees, seeing children wearing balaclavas in class.
Afterwards, Mr Raja, the principal of
my former school in London arrived and it was great to see him again and have a good catch up.
We drove down the coast toward Mumbai on the Sunday to a place called Tithal, where there is a beautiful Mandir beside the sea. The next day we went to Valsad, another of the English Medium Schools being built by the Swaminaryan faith and we caught up with a couple of the teachers who came to the training sessions last year. The school is both English and Gujarati medium and will eventually school about 2500 boys. We ate at the Mandir that afternoon and saw quite possibly the biggest Dosa ever, about 1 metre long. A Dosa is like a crepe and you can get a number of flavours to go inside it and is Kristyn's favourite Indian dish.
Returning to Ahmedabad over the following week we worked with the teachers at the school, doing demonstration lessons with each of the classes and having general question and answer sessions with the teachers. It was great getting back into it again and made us both look forward to our upcoming jobs in Singapore in April. We noticed a big
Must be cold outside
Nursery child wearing a balaclava with temperatures upto 25 degrees outside improvement in the English of the children since we were last there and we really enjoyed seeing a few of the characters that we had met previously. The children of the school put on a special assembly for us with a number of songs and skits which made us feel very special.
We ate lunch at Gandinagar Akshardham (another Swaminarayan temple close to the school) most days with one of our favourite men Manish, and we were able to order anything that we wanted, and were not to pay a cent for any of it. The generosity of the people around us at times was overwhelming and we both felt very blessed to be there.
We were then on our way to Mumbai. We left on a Saturday afternoon, again by train. But here is where we get some good luck with our travel. Through the faith, they organised and paid for our tickets. Good deal already eh, but not only did they pay for them, they had to get a letter from the Chief Minister of Gujarat district so that we could get seats usually saved for travelling VIP's!! Yes, VIP's. Although trains in India are not
the flashest of things, we did have nice big chairs with televisions (playing Bollywood movies) but were also treated to lunch and dinner!! What a result! Not about what you know, it's who you know!!
We were picked up at our arrival at Mumbai central station by devotees from the faith and they took us back to the residence next to the Mandir (temple) where the current Guru or spiritual leader is residing. I was lucky enough to go to his Dharshun where I received blessings from him for our work at Raisan. Last time in India he said to me (after translation) that he wanted me to come back each year to Raisan and work with the teachers and children. Kris was unfortuntely not able to go as the Saints do not have any contact with women.
Mumbai was a great city. It was probably the cleanest place in India that we went to,with wide streets with not many potholes! It is also the city where the majority of the Bollywood movies are produced. We were walking around the streets when someone approached us asking if we would like to be extras in a Bollywood movie. "Hell
Lunch with the Big Dosa
Kris, Harishbai and my head teacher Mr Raja (right) yes" replies Kris. He goes on to say that we should meet at this place tomorrow, it will be a long day from 8am to 8pm, and we will get lunch and drinks and will get paid 500 Rupees each for the day. Well, we were extremely excited at the prospect of wagging heads with the best in the business! Up at the crack the next morning, go to the drop point, and are met by a representative from the film company. We're taken to a restaurant, where we wait along with other foreigners, and wait, and wait and our guy takes off with the other foreigners leaving us sitting there. He comes back, hands us his phone and I'm talking to our "scout" from the day before and tells us that our shoot time has changed to 5pm and going through til 5am.
"No way buddy, you've wasted our time, no chance will we come back at 5pm. See ya!" was our response. We almost sounded like Bollywood stars already, throwing our toys when it didn't go our way. That was the end of our Bollywood chance at stardom.
Mumbai is one of those places that could be
Kris and her friend
She was Kris's favourite last time, and was so excited to see her again. She constantly checked on Kris to make sure she was happy, even though the language barrier was always there really beautiful had it not been for the air pollution and constant haze that covered the city. We checked out a few places over the 3 days we were there. We took a ferry to Elephanta Island where there were a huge number of Indian god carvings held within a number of rock caves, and a great carving of Shiva with three heads. We also visited Chowpatty beach for sunset, and was the place where Kris got a head massage from an old guy,which once again moved down to the shoulders, then hands in something that reminded me of that "event" in Varanasi. Now sitting beside watching this happen drew a large smile on my face as what goes around comes around it was was going to bite Kris in the butt! No such luck as she jumped in at this instant reminding the old guy that she had decided on 50 Rupees for the "head massage."
The usual taxi rides ended with the driver asking for an increased price but we were way onto them and never got taken advantage of in this instant. It even got to the point where we made a driver stop and get
School P.E.
In a local Indian School. Any time from 7:30am onwards out without paying as he wasn't taking us to the destination that we asked him. For those of you that have read the book Shantaram, we visited the bar Leopolds that is often quoted in the book. It was packed, obviously with all foreigners so we had a couple of beers, then moved on.
We stayed on a hotel in Calcutta before returning to Singapore and as the travel curse goes, things very nearly went bad. We asked for a wake up call at 4am as we had a very early morning flight to Singapore, but we thought that we would set our own alarm just in case. Well that was lucky, as no wake up call came and we would have missed our flight.
Flight to Singapore was much better than our flight there. Everyone happy - especially Kristyn.
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