United World College--India

We left our hotel in Mumbai yesterday--it was quite a place the Leela. I told the travel agent that we didn't need 5 stars, but if this was only 3 or 4 stars, I was hard to see why.... It was magnificent.

On 4 hour ride north and west to Pune, it seemed to take us an hour just to get through Mumbai--sprawling, with high rises everywhere. I guess when you have so many people, you just have to build up, because there is no way to house everyone on their own piece of land.

We arrived at the United World College around 12:30pm in the middle of pouring rain. The monsoon season is definitely here--i rained the whole way from Mumbai. The UWC is the site for our program next year, so we were eager to check out all the facilities and we had yesterday afternoon and today to get that done. The design of the buildings--with all of it angles and lines, makes a for a contrast with the land on the hillside. In th sunshine, I think the stone absorbs light and keeps things cool, but in the rain, it is slightly depressing to look at gray stone wherever you walk.

[b}The UWC system{b} is one of the most amazing educational enterprises in the world with 11 campuses all of the globe and a single unifying mission: inter-cultural understanding, environmentalism, peace, and raising all class levels to strong universities. Students have to have both academic ability and limited means, then they apply to the system though a series of interviews and essays, and the admissions directors of all the systems work to place students on all the campuses. The Shelby Lynn Davis Foundation provides much of the funding and even supports the graduates at one of 75 US colleges at 20,000 for 4 years upon graduation from the UWC.

Today we will meet with teachers and administrators see some more of the campus and then it is back down to Pune so we can fly to Bangelore.

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Part of trip: Matt--India

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