Last few months in few seconds

To summarize, these are the things that happened since I have arrive to India.

First of all, the Mussoorie tour by couple of kind teachers who took time to show me around the town. They introduced me to couple of their favorite Tibetan stores, vegetable stops and the tailors they trust. It's all about connection and building relationships in India. If you know who to go to, you get good deals! Apparently if I let them know that I work at Woodstock, I should be able to get 20% off right away. Nice! Also when you make good friends with the clothing stores or the tailors, it becomes impossible to leave the place without their welcoming cups of chai. 

Main Bazaar in Diwali decoration

Chaaya, everyone's favorite little cafe. They have beagles!

In first few weeks some kind staff invited me over along with other new staff for dinner and gave us quite a few tips and advice about the life here. How to deal with the coldness, mold, monkeys, food, ATMs, so on and so on. The get together involved some seriously, amazing, delicious food. I really need to gain some proper North Indian cooking skill this time. No more faking like I know how to cook Indian food!

Sareena, a HR staff who helped me get to WS, cooking her AMAZING tandoori chicken.

Devan, Jesse, Karen and our host Sareena. We are all new and fresh!

And then on November 5th, there was Diwali, the Hindu festival of light. It's one of the biggest festival in India. I remember KIS been all beautifully lighted up with candles and we got a lot of sweets that day. You can read more about Diwali here since I'm too lazy to explain the whole story.

Well, I had never been out in a town on Diwali. After the school firework show some of us decided to be adventurous and go out to the bazaar. I kept on hearing that it's pretty dangerous because many local people will be quite drunk and when they see foreigner they could throw firework at us. But as always, I don't care what other people say, specially when it's about how dangerous India is. I wouldn't be here in India if I didn't want that thrill, would I?

Get ready for BANGGG!!

Mussoorie was all decked out for Diwali. Beautiful, isn't it?

So anyways we went out, and yea... to say the least, it was VERY thrilling! It was like walking through a war scene. We were constantly hearing huge explosion sounds coming from both behind and front of us. We couldn't really back off once we walked into the bazaar so we had we keep on going. Seriously, I love firework but most of the firework here is just this big BOOOOOMMM sound that scared the hell out of us every time. What was most scary about what we saw was that there were groups and groups of little kids without any adults watching them, who would be firing some really scary looking firework all by themselves. They were having a blast but really...

In front of the best sweet stop in Mussoorie. Very busy day for them!
In the picture: Me, Paul (Art teacher who also does amazing "stretching" Yoga class),
Hisayo (Japanese dorm parent! Sadly she recently left the school),
Caleb (A crazy dorm parent from Colorado!) and some Kiwi friends.

I also went camping with two other staff friends on November 12th. What a cold and funny experience that was! We camped at a place called Flag Hill. You'll see why in this picture.

Sunrise at Flag Hill (taken by Jesse) 

Apparently Mussoorie (or Dehra Dun?) is the first place in India Dalai Lama escaped to from Tibet. So there are many places here that have significance to the Buddhists and Tibetans and they are usually covered by prayer flags like this. It is believed that every time wind pushes the flag the prayer written on the flag is being read. Anyways, it makes the beautiful scenery even better.

The prayer flag, written in beautiful Tibetan

The two friends were Caleb and Jesse. Caleb is a dorm parent at boy's Hostel, and it's his third year here. He was kind enough to invite us newbies to join him with a Woodstock experience. Also it's almost impossible to say no to Caleb. He is very persuasive. Well, he is just good at making me feel how much fun I could be missing out on if I don't listen to him. If you see what I ended up doing this winter holiday, you'll know what I mean by that. Caleb is also the head lifeguard for the school swimming pool, and he has been using that as an excuse to pull me into all kinds of dangerous adventures. It usually ends up being fun so I'll stop complaining.

Jesse is a newbie just like me. He got hired much earlier than I did but because he only holds a Canadian passport, unlike me who has dozens, he got stuck in Canada for 4 months until India gave him an employment visa. He is a science teacher and I have to say he is as animal geek as I am. He likes to ride them all, and I like to touch them all. Actually his love for snakes are kind of scary. I was surprised to find out that Jesse's home is Sarnia, Ontario because Windsor (where I went for university) is quite close. He also taught English in Japan for a year. My new entertainment is to listen to him speak Japanese, but he makes fun of me all the time so it's sort of fair.

Caleb and I had to go back to get woods for fire... life of living in protected forest! 

Out plan was to be in the air... Anyways, snowy Himalaya in the back!

Tonights Menu: Miso soup, pasta, cookies, chips and some rum!!

Anyways, going back to the camp story... We made a nice dinner. The menu was instant miso soup, pasta with cream sauce and random vegetables, cookies and chips for dessert, and of course some hard drink - rum. I also taught Momotarou story's song to them and we all sung together with hand gesture. We also did animal sounds competition and as usual Japanese animal sounds were rated high since they sound nothing like it but funny.  

Despite the fact that we setup two tents, we ended up sleeping outside in sleeping bags beside fire. I was feeling much colder than those two somehow, so Caleb tucked me into double layers of sleeping bags. This process was hilarious... He had to roll me around and pick me up occasionally to get me in and I felt like a little baby.  

The stars were amazing too

I had to wake up early to catch the hike group. Why did I sign up to chaperon a Grade 6 hike after camping? I don't know. But seriously it got to be quite a weekend with all the outdoor activities. In order to wake up on time, I had brought my high-tech alarm clock that records things. Caleb and Jesse recorded a "pirate wake-up call" for me and it was some way to wake up. It's still in my alarm clock since it's pretty epic. Well, that's it for the camp.

Beautiful mountains

Dehra Dun in night

This post is getting to be to long so I will summarize the Fall 2010 semester in the next one!

A little bit about Mussoorie and Woodstock...

I change my mind. I want to write a little bit about where I am before I get into my trip stories.

So it is very cold here right now. Many of my friends don't believe me when I say that there are very cold places in India. Yes, we get snow too believe me or not. We are high up on a mountain and it is North India here. Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu was also 2000m high but that was in south. By the way Mussoorie is supposed to be the "Queen of the Hills" and Kodaikanal is "Princess of the Hills". HA HA.

Main Gate

WS Campus after snowfall

It's a little depressing for me to be at another cold place after finally escaping from freezing Canada, but Mussoorie is very, very beautiful. It is so worth it to suffer the cold. I wake up every morning around 6am and during my 10 minutes walk to school, the scenery of the mountains and the surrounding nature never fail to move me. It must be a rare luxury to be able to feel such way on the way to work. I don't think I will ever get tired it. 

I have been here only for three months so I can only tell you from what I've heard, but apparently February is the coldest month and we get couple of days of snow. I'm quite excited about that. There are enough kids around to pull off a good snow fight. 

And there is the monsoon season... Everyone here describes the monsoon like... a hell... with a little bit of amazingness. It's just going to be really wet, really dark and reeeeally moldy. (Mold seems to be the most depressing factor for people here. I'm not looking forward to that at all but at the same time, I'm a little curious how it would be like to fight mold everyday.) I hear that it's going to be constant rain for 2-3 months during summer. I can just imagine how it would be a nightmare for the music department in terms of instrument maintenance. Oh well, I guess I will just have to wait and see how it's actually like.

Mussoorie is quite a bit bigger of a hill station compare to Kodaikanal. It has bigger bazaars and school is fairly away from the main town part, which is nice. The school campus is in a protected forest, and that is the reason why we cannot cut down trees around here to light our Bokharis (wood stoves)! Mussoorie is in Uttarakhand, which is one of India's newest state that was formed in 2001. Here is a map. Kodaikanal is about a night train and 3 hours drive away from Chennai.

Mussoorie

From Delhi to the nearest big city, Dehra Dun is about six and half hours away by a train. From Dehra Dun to Mussoorie is about an hour and half hour by a car. If you ever watch my beloved Brad Pitt's Seven Years in Tibet, Dehra Dun is where they get caught by the British military and gets stuck at the camp. Because Mussoorie is a cooler and close escape place from hot and busy Delhi, it gets pretty crazy during the tourist season. If you ever want to visit Mussoorie, pick your time wisely!

One of the bazaar, Mussoorie

The school itself if 150 years old. Pretty old eh? It was founded by missionaries and it has been remaining here since then as a Christian school. It was also one of the very first actual international school in India. We have about 480+ students and about 40% of them come from various parts of India; another 40% are from other countries in Asia, and 20% are from the US and other countries around the world. 

The staffs are also from all over the world and it is a quite unique working/living environment. It'a a very small but very warm community at the same time. I am starting to feel the slight differences of being in such community as a teacher instead of as a student. I had always wondered about the teacher's social aspect of the life when I was at KIS, and now that I am one it's sort of strange feeling. I have to remind myself often that I am a teacher now! I can't get over how cool it feels to be "friends" with the dorm parents and other teachers. I also get to have tea break at the best spot on campus. Yay for being a teacher!

The tea break spot. 11am and 4pm eeeveryday!

School campus

Music building in distance

Quad classrooms

There are six dorms for students and most staff housings are around the school. Some of us have to walk 20-30 minutes up the hill to get to work. I have an easy walk compare to many of them. Well actually, fighting the monkeys on the way to work is a completely different story. I need to write about that some other time. It's pretty thrilling. I mean how many teachers around the world have to flight monkeys on the way to work or at the work even. I had monkeys trying to break into my office while I was giving a flute lesson. And the little brown ones are okay. It's languors that freaks me out a little bit. The big gray ones. Life is wild here. Just as I like it.

And apparently there are leopards here. LEOPARDS. I DO want to see them but I DON'T want to see them!! Yeah... no but I really do want to see them. Just don't bite me.

Anyways, the words (specially mine) will not be good enough to describe the beauty of the surroundings here. I hope some of these pictures will do justice to show you what I mean. (Most of these photo credit goes to WS! I stole them from the school website and their Picasa albums since I am still in process of getting decent shots of Mussoorie.) I should probably make another entry talking more in details about the school, about things I do as a music teacher as well as about uniqueness of Woodstock.

Until then...

Woodstock School campus

India, I'm back.

So I am back again. India, my second home.

Where I am now is called Woodstock School, which is an international school located on a 2000m high mountain that is sort of a part of Himarayas. The city we are in is Mussoorie and it is probably one of the most beautiful hill station I have ever seen. So far North India seems quite different from South India, where I lived for 3 years to study at Kodaikanal International School, Tamil Nadu. Different in good way though. You can't go wrong with India...well, at least for me. Ohhhh India, you have a special spot in my heart. I love you including all your smell, color, taste, noise, and mess. There is a magic here that keeps me enchanted.

Anyways, the reason why I'm here is because I was offered a music teaching job here at Woodstock and have been working since November, 2010. This is my first professional job and everyday is filled with thrill, excitement and a little bit of chaos!

I hope I can keep up with this blog so that my family and friends at all over the world can see what I'm up to. Also I am getting pretty sick of Facebook and I hope this will be a good replacement that will help me communicate better with my people! I will be doing a lot of travelling (hopefully!) during my contract here and I will be posting things about that. I have actually just come back from an exciting trip around North India that I will be writing about next (hopefully soon!) Until then...