Missing Michael

It would seem that India is greiving the loss of Michael Jackson more than the rest of the world. When we logged on to the internet this morning, we were greeted with a memorial to the King of Pop on Google celebrating his birthday.

The American version of the website did not have anything of this sort, so it must be the case that Indians miss Michael more.

Dave and Beth

Keeping Busy

Since moving to India, we've seen a surprising number of new movies. We don't spend money to go to the theater because most of those movies are in Hindi. We also don't buy many new releases of American movies, because there are very few places to do so. Instead we buy bootleg movies from guys on the street. It may seem a bit lawless on our part, but there really are few other options. A couple weekends ago, we bought the new Harry Potter movie on DVD in the bazaar.

As you can see, this also included the first five Harry Potter movies on the same disc. The quality is not spectacular, but how else would we be able to buy a movie two and a half weeks after its world premier. Our plan is to leave these in India when we move back to the states so that we can avoid any moral dilemmas, but it's fun to have them while we're here.

Dave and Beth

Caring Crafts

One of our more enjoyable responsibilities here in India is to coordinate the CARE program in the middle school. CARE is the school's community and environmental action club. While Dave was away at an MUN conference this weekend, Beth ran a paper reusing club at school. The idea was to use leftover paper to create jewelry, journals, and anything else that the students could dream up.

It was a rousing success and all of the girls (none of the boys signed up) posed at the end of the morning with their creations.

This was our first CARE event of the year and we're looking forward to even more--including some more community service to complement our environmental stewardship.

Dave and Beth

More Scenery

One of the great benefits of living where we do is the amazing scenery and the way it changes throughout the day. This afternoon, we looked down into the valley and saw a beautiful bit of cloud covering the floor.

Several hours later, we came back to almost the same spot and the clouds had risen a bit high as the sun was setting. The hills looked like little islands floating in a sea of clouds.

We are really back into the swing of things here at school now and enjoying teaching our material. The countdown has, of course, begun for midterm break when we can go traveling and explore somewhere in northern India.

Dave and Beth

Price of Fashion

Our dear readers can be forgiven for assuming that the first picture above is a photograph of Beth's feet. In fact, though, these are Dave's formal shoes that we bought in Jaipur especially for independence day. Thankfully, we were able to find something approximating his size, but they were still a little uncomfortable to wear. This, though, was the least of the inconveniences that we had to endure to look fabulous yesterday. As mentioned in an earlier post, Dave was sporting his new sherwani. This is a long Indian dress coat of Muslim origin. It looked quite smart and there were even a couple of other staff members wearing them.

One part that Dave did not enjoy was fitting into his new churidar pijamas. These are designed to bunch up at the ankles, but when they are held up for a picture it is clear just how impractical they are. The waist on these pants was about twice as large as it needed to be and the length is, obviously, a bit long. These weren't terribly comfortable to squeeze into, but they definitely looked good.

Beth is an old pro at wearing saris. She has tied them on enough that it doesn't really take her very long. The real problem for her is the bangles that she wears with a sari. You can see her glass bracelets in the picture below with our friends Jennie and Megan.

The problems started when Beth tried to take them off. She slathered her hand in lotion, but some of the glass bangles still broke. You can see the effects of these breakages on Beth's hands.

All of this pain and inconvenience was well worth it, though, because we looked fantastic.

Dave and Beth

Taste of Freedom

After the flag-raising ceremony yesterday, we had a great selection of vendors that set up shop in the quad for an all-you-can-eat extravaganza. To protect us from the rain, the whole quad was covered with a big shamiana.

At any good Indian function, you need somewhere to get your masala chai (though Dave stayed away from this and stuck to water).

The kids were excited about eating something different and out of the ordinary. They stood in long lines to get chicken, dosas, kebabs, naan, and many other delicacies.

This man was cooking up the kebabs which were quite tasty.

They also had a tandoor oven cooking so that we could have fresh-baked naan. It was amazing to watch him sticking his hand in to put dough on the clay sides of the oven to cook.

The aloo tikki was especially good, as evidenced by Beth's glee.

This vendor told us he'd been making this kind of bread for 22 years. He was quite adept at spinning the dough in the air like a pizza and then flipping it on the hot grill with his bare hands.

We also had plenty of sweets to sample including jalebis. These are a bit like the deep-fried funnel cakes of county fairs. After they're fried, they're soaked in a super sweet honey syrup mixture. The round ones are gulab jamuns. These are kind of like donuts that get the same soaking treatment.

It was a great meal with lots of variety. We may never get anything like this all in one place again unless we stick around here at Woodstock for another year (don't worry, moms and dads, we're not planning on it).

Dave and Beth

Colors of Freedom

We just got finished with our second Indian independence day celebration here at Woodstock. It is a really great experience to take part in the national celebrations of another country. The festivities themselves were very similar to last year. We had a speaker, we sang the national anthem, and a student raised the flag. The only real difference was that it was inside this year because it was raining.

After the ceremony, we had a food court in the quad for lunch with vendors from the bazaar. We'll make a post later about the jalebis, dosas, etc. that we ate, but we wanted to focus on the diversity of our school here. Students and staff are asked to wear either formal Indian clothes, formal western clothes, or their national dress. It is a great show of where students and teachers come from and gives everyone a chance to show off their best. Here is us with our advisor group students all appropriately attired.

Other kids cleaned up quite nicely as well. Where else but Woodstock will you see Tibetans and Koreans wearing their national costumes, a South African wearing an Indian kurta, and an Indian wearing a western double-breasted suit.

We have a lot of Korean students here. Most of them wear their Korean clothes, but one of our advisees decided to stand out from the crowd and wear a chuba instead.

We also have students from Thailand and families from Tibet.

One of our fellow teachers was wearing his traditional Persian clothes and here two of our advisees were wearing clothes from Nagaland and Tibet.

Here's another Korean dress and a Japanese kimono. The other picture is a traditional Bhutanese costume.

Beth also got a chance to pose with two of our students that have moved on to high school; one from Nepal and one from Germany (too bad Beth didn't bring her dirndl). We also have students from Thailand and Taiwan.

These boys were a bit embarassed to be shown in their Nepali clothes, but they looked great.

It is amazing how many groups of people are represented among our small student body. It is wonderful to see the pride that they can take in their cultures while still being respectful and appreciative of others. The freedom that we have in India allows us to share with each other and learn from each other.

The final part of this post is our annual Indian dress-up day picture. Dave had a new sherwani made and looked quite sharp while Beth was wearing one of her fancy saris (pay close attention to Dave's shoes).

Dave and Beth

With Great Power...

One of the highlights of every school day is tea time. This is, as one would assume, a time for all the staff and students to get some refreshment at about 10:30 in the morning. The students usually go down to the cafeteria to get some pakora, cookies, or muffins from the kitchen. The middle school teaching staff usually retires to the office to see what the snack of the day will be. There is a calendar on which everyone is assigned a day to bring snack. Last year, our friend Jared instituted a formal grading policy for tea snacks. It involved the award of gold or black stars depending on the quality of the snack. Some of the staff complained of the arbitrary assessment that their snacks received, so Jared created a rubric like any good teacher would.

When Jared left, he passed the torch to Dave who now has the great responsibility of evaluating daily snacks. With some friendly reminders, no one has forgotten their snack and several gold stars have already been awarded. We are hoping that the trend continues so that Dave isn't forced to start handing out black stars and earning ill will from his colleagues.

Dave and Beth

Creepy Crawlies

One of the benefits that Beth has found in being a science teacher here at Woodstock is that everyone loves to bring her specimens. The other day we saw another giant spider in our house. Beth caught it and brought it in to show her science students. It was a great success and the animals have been coming in often these past two weeks. We haven't been able to get pictures of all of them, but here is a sampling. There have been beetles and leeches:

Spiders and caterpillars:

And, of course, snails and centipedes:

Beth has instituted a rule that anything brought in to the classroom will be released the same day. Hopefully this gets students excited to find more critters and keeps Beth from becoming the caretaker of hundreds of animals for the middle school.

Dave and Beth

Mossy Walls

One of the nice things about monsoons is that most things get covered in mold and mildew, but not everything does. Some things, like this pushta (retaining wall) outside the high school get covered in a pretty, green, fuzzy moss.

Dave and Beth

The Games People Play

Interestingly, one of the great pastimes for our students here at Woodstock is Four-Square. This is a game that we can remember playing in our elementary school days, but our students take it very seriously well into middle school. Every once in a while we try to join into the games, but it never works out very well. For one thing, we are an easy target and the other three players tend to gang up on us. In addition, the students tend to make up weird rules as they go and it's hard for us to keep up. Usually, we just watch the action from the sidelines.

When students are not playing Four Square, there are many other activities to keep them busy. One of them is a classic Indian game called kho-kho. We won't try to explain the rules of the game here, but we can teach you the next time we're in the states.

We can assure you that it is as fun as it looks.

Dave and Beth

A New Crop

The title of this post is not entirely accurate. We do have a bunch of new students in the middle school, but it has also been great to reconnect with our returning students. To get a feeling of how the old and the new have mixed together, here the most recent picture of our advisor group.

We ended last year with 11 advisees. We lost one over the summer and gained 7 more so we're up to 17. We also gained a new student teacher to help us keep all of these kids in line. It is amazing how much things can change over our short six week summer vacation.

Dave and Beth

More Partying

It is very difficult to pass up a good party here in Mussoorie. Each year, the middle school students and staff celebrate new beginnings with a welcome back dinner. It was great to see all of the students, both old and new, getting together for a good time.

There was, of course, some good food. Dave looks to be eating a seekh kabab in this picture, but we also had some yummy chili potatoes.

And like any good party, we ended with some dancing. Most of the songs were of the Bollywood persuasion, but we even got a chance to cut a rug to some Thriller in honor of the late King o' Pop.

It was a great ending to our first week of school. Now we need to prepare for our first FULL week of school.

Dave and Beth

You Are What You Eat

While we were visiting the bazaar this weekend, we decided to take a picture of the vegetable display outside our grocery store.

Those that are paying close attention may be wondering what the green offerings are in the foreground of the picture. Ordinarily, we simply call in our order to Sardarji one day and he has them carried up the hill to our house the next. On the weekends, though, we get a chance to take a closer look at the goods offered for sale. When we asked what these were, we were told that they were local fiddlehead ferns.

These aptly named plants are collected only for a short period this time of year because the monsoon rains make them plentiful. They aren't farmed, so they are a bit of a delicacy. We picked some up but Beth has been tentative about cooking them...Sardarji told us they taste like asparagus.

Dave and Beth