Day 10: Do
I wore my new kurta today and we went to
visit F’s mentor’s sister’s nursery school in the Radhasoami complex.
The little
children were adorable and they greeted us in the smiling,
not-articulately-pronounced way of young children with “Radhasoamiiiii”. They
were doing Q-tip paintings, coloring forms with Q-tip-paint circles. I then got
to sit in with one of her classes and she did some English rhymes with them.
 |
| Okay, here are some of the mosaics, but cute :) |
Their school day was soon over but several were still there and hadn’t been
picked up yet, so I offered to do a movement verse with them. “Clap, clap, clap your hands as quickly as you can. Clap, clap, clap your hands as slowly
as you can.” Of course this sort of verse can be said with all sorts of actions
and they loved it :).
Then we had been invited by the Department
Head to a “farewell tea”. They had especially gotten Sprite for us, after
learning that we don’t drink black tea. There were also potato chips, some
cookies and some savory snacks (one sort had mung beans in them I think). They had
also ordered some more samosas from the university kitchens—yum! (Amusing tea
side note: F’s mentor, upon discovering all the multitudinous versions of tea
that Germans have (fruit, herbal, red bush, etc.) exclaimed “They've beaten
Indians at tea!”)
Each of the teachers introduced themselves
and we talked a little about our experiences there. The Department Head then
asked “When will you be coming back?” Ummm…we’re not sure. But it certainly would
be nice. It definitely felt like a sad thing to consider that we might never
return and see the friends we’ve made…
We also then sang for them; they had heard
from the two teachers (F’s mentor and the other one in that office) that we sang
and they wanted to hear it too :)
Day 11: Fr
Today I wore my brown kurta again and we
gave some advice to the English students with their theater practice. They were
doing such a great job! (Update: the theater festival went well and one of the
students even got a special award for her acting role!) Then we took pictures
with them and had hugs all around.
Then we were off to Delhi. A word to the
wise: have your boarding ticket printed out before coming to the airport OR an
electronic version on your computer/smartphone. Why would we suggest such a
thing? Because we didn’t have that. And needed it. Argh. That was a lot of
waiting…there was a separate entrance for people unprepared for this procedure.
(And in this separate area, no Wifi so that we could get aforementioned digital
boarding ticket…) There we needed to wait until someone from the airline manned
their desk. Luckily that eventually happened.
However the man disappeared again and about
an hour later, he still had not reappeared. We were feeling desperate and
frustrated—even though we still had plenty of time, this was not where we
wanted to do our waiting. Then finally a woman came and asked if we were the
passengers on the printouts—yes! *Relief + gratitude!* From then on, things went
fairly smoothly.
One of the first things that occurred to me
when we arrived back in Europe was the lack of color. Grey, brown, black,
brown, black, black, blue, black, grey, brown, oh-look-red!, brown, black….Ah,
I already missed the Indian colors. What an amazing trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment