Independence and other stuff. 18th August

Hey all, hope you had a great weekend.

So friday was Indian independence day, it was a great day (because we had no school) There was a flag raising ceremony and Indian performances, we heard some traditional Indian music and saw some cultural dances. It was also Korean independence day so there were some Korean performances by the Korean students, they were enjoyable. 

Yes, I did in fact get dressed in Indian formal wear ;)

After the flag raising ceremony we had a special lunch in the quad. The quad is a big open area that has no shelter from the rain, so due to it being monsoon, where it rains everyday, they set up tarp's to act as shelter from the rain. The only problem was that they didn't predict how heavy the rain was going to be. About halfway through the ceremony we start hearing a little tip tap on the roof of the gymnasium, quickly those tip taps of rain get louder  and louder until it was hard to here the speaker over the atrocious noise from the roof. Luckily there is shelter for the walk from the gymnasium to the quad.

This is what the quad looked like, and you can see the tarps. It was a great atmosphere and the food was great but all that joy soon turned to panic when the tarp's gave way due to the sheer amount of water. 

The walk back to dorms was probably the worst part. My friend Isaac and I decided to try be brave a face the rain and not wait for it to pass. We both huddled under my umbrella and started our journey back to dorms. I do have videos but there is some course language so just tell me if ya wanna see them but I won't post them here. But I do have a photo, there was a lot more rain in person. There was so much water it completely covered my shoes, and they took 2 days in the sun to dry out.

On Saturday we went into town again, my friend Mathai showed us this really good punjab restaurant which apparently had the best butter chicken, it was pretty damn good. Some of the boys needed haircuts, so 2 others and I headed for this little cafe. It was really nice and the best part was that they have wifi. We do have wifi at dorms but it has a stupid filter called "Cyberroam" which pretty much blocks 2/3 of the internet. So at this cafe we were finally free to check the internet without everything being blocked. Oh and the food there was great we got nachos that cost 60rs which is a bit over 1 dollar, and there was a fair amount of nacho's there.

On the walk back to dorms from the town the weather cleared and we got a good view of the dorm level of the school. The building I am in is the one closest to the camera with the pool out the front. 

After dinner we saw it was a good sunset so Cory set up the hammock and a guy called Reuben brought out his ukulele and played some smooth tunes, the mixture of a good sunset, hammock and ukulele was perfect, it seemed like a scene from a movie. 

When the sunset we played card games outside until bedtime, it was a great night.

Sunday was a pretty lazy day like always, I had homework to do which was read the Hindi holy text "Bhagavad Gita" for Indian History then write a summary and commentary on chapter 2. I thought it was going to be boring but it turned out to be really interesting. It talks about how to live a god-dedicated life and how to block out un-healthy desires. I got quite absorbed in it. There was also this optional Sufi music show at the school which i decided to go to. They did this beautiful rendition of "Imagine" by John Lennon.

Well that's all folks for today, i'm going to try get these blog's up at least twice a week. I hope you all have a great week.

Stay well,

Lachy Wild