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