स्कूल!

Finally, I am writing something! It turns out that I am much worse at keeping up with this blogging business than I thought I would be... I will try to get better ;)

I have been in India for two weeks now, and I love it! I have seen and experienced too much to write about all of it on here, so I thought I would talk a bit about school! The title of this post says 'school'- it is not the Hindi word, just the pronunciation. I tried writing it in English, but the website kept converting it into Hindi! So I guess all of the titles will be in Hindi from now on. hehe.

Every morning at about 7:20 my host brother and I get on the bus to go to school. It is quite the bus- the seats are velvety and orange, and there are brown and orange floral curtains on all of the windows! At the front of the bus is a little vestibule type thing with a little door leading into it. In it are two benches where you can sit, red velvet floral walls, some fake flowers hanging from the ceiling, and a small statue of a god on the dashboard. Sometimes the god is covered in orange mala- marigold garlands! Apart from being very very hot, the bus is pretty neat.


The other fourteen people on the program and I have been going to Amity International School, Mayur Vihar. Translated literally Mayur Vihar means Peacock Town! Apparently sometimes you can find peacocks in the areas with a lot of land. But I have yet to see a peacock. Anyway, the school is very nice! It has students from all grades, and is 4 stories high. There is a courtyard in the middle of the building, so when it rains it rains in the school! Some of the staircases are open to the outside as well. And if you are going to a sculpture class (we went last week and sculpted Ganesh!) you go past the fourth floor and onto the roof! It is very cool. Even cooler is the canteen where you can buy a samosa for 5 rupees, which is equivalent to about 10 cents. Yum.

Every day we have Hindi classes, which is awesome! We have two teachers, and they teach us the alphabet, proper pronunciation, and also grammar. We learn so much every day between what we are taught at school and what we learn at home that it is hard to retain all of the information! I am slowly retaining things- it is very exciting :)

Besides Hindi classes, we also have either yoga or games every day. The games are usually traditional Indian games or basketball. All of the security guards who stand near the gate of the school (where we sometimes play the games,) stand around and watch us. It's pretty funny- they were laughing a lot when we were playing dodgeball the other day... we weren't very good :) Every day we also have a different humanities sort of class. We have either instrumental music, dance, singing, sculpture, or art. It's very fun! Right now we are working on a dance we will perform in front of the school when we leave. I get to do a cool finger twisting twirling thing.

About halfway through the day we have a short break where we are allowed to eat a snack and relax. All of us feel like celebrities, because during the break tons of kids come into our room to talk to us! The kids are very nice and very, very curious. The younger kids especially come by a lot, and some of them call us 'didi' which means older sister! It is adorable. They know us by name too, which is really funny. I have had a lot of them come up to me and say 'Are you Hannah?' which is a little bit weird but also very cute! :)

I guess that covers most of the things about school. Except I forgot to say that we have uniforms! Polos that say 'Amity' and khakis. School here is pretty cool.

Introduction!

I have been sort of India obsessed for a while now, and I started trying to teach myself Hindi about a year and a half ago. Then I learned about this great scholarship program funded by the U.S. government! They really want high school students to learn lesser known languages and become more aware of other cultures,so they started this program that allows students to learn a bunch of cool languages in many different countries. Luckily they offered a scholarship to learn Hindi in India! After months of torture and essays and an interview and tons of paperwork I found out that I won the scholarship, which was very, very exciting!

So tomorrow I am getting in the car with my famliy and driving to Queens, where the other people going on the trip and I will be having a two day orientation. Then we fly to Delhi on Friday! We will be there for 6 weeks staying with host families, going to school to learn Hindi, and exploring and learning about India. I am pretty excited and nervous- not only am I going to India, it will also be my first trip out of the country! I am looking forward to experiencing many new things, and hopefully I will be able to update this thing somewhat regularly :)

Namaste aur Shubh Ratri! (goodbye and goodnight!)