Wrapping up- last picture post!

Some of my favorite pictures from the last week of school. The first half are from when we posed for the group portrait.

Akta. Oh, Akta. She's like a Bollywood movie star but hilariously silly. I love her to bits.

Dani and Patrick, as sane as ever.

Me with my BFF Chris.

A family portrait. Clearly Ruby is the father and Akta the mother. (Or do I have that backwards?) Also, Kate looks sooo sick in this picture.

Dani amongst the trees.

The rest of these pictures are from the closing dinner.

Kelli in costume.

Liza, Anna, and Steph get down.

Now for some traditional dancing:

Then Ruby and Priyanka showed us how it's done.

And now for the tabla class:

Aaand Guy playing the sitar:

And the Hindi class sings a song...

...And, uh, so did I. But I don't have pictures, unfortunately.

And so we reach the end of my travels in India. It was absolutely amazing. Left so much more of an impression on me than I had really grasped when I was there. I thought I knew no Hindi/Marathi whatsoever- but then I instinctively reply to questions of yes or no with "Ha" and "Nehi," and use "Donyevaa" (no way how to spell/Anglicize that) instead of "thank you." I've even adopted the head bobble.

If you'd like to keep informed of my travels in Italy for the spring semester (see, this is what I love about being an International Studies major), check out my other travel blog here. I promise I will update that one more regularly than I did this one!

Thanks very much for reading. Ciao!

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving (which is a long time ago now, holy crap; don't procrastinate, kids) was particularly awesome because my family came out to visit!

I love my sister and she loves me.

Aaaaand my parents!

It's very strange to be celebrating such an unabashedly American holiday as Thanksgiving in India. So the Alliance threw us a Thanksgiving dinner- or, at least, as close to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner as you can find in India.

But there was turkey!

Then I went to Mumbai with my family for the day after Thanksgiving, as it was the last time I'd see them before heading home.

It so happened that that was the anniversary of the 26/11 Mumbai bombings, so there was a memorial service by the Gateway to India.

And there you have it! Thanksgiving with the fam!

Kerala!

So now I'm officially back in the United states! Have been for about two and a half weeks, and I've just been too lazy to post. I was trying to wrap up by Christmas, but at least I'd like to get them done before leaving for Rome on the 23rd. (I'll be setting up a blog for that trip, too, and hopefully I'll post on it more regularly.)

So we had a week off for Diwali at the end of October/early November. I spent five days in Kerala, a tropical state along the Arabian Sea. They call it "God's Own Country," and believe me, it earns that name. I went with Chelsea and Dani, two girls that I like very much and who were wonderful to travel with.

First leg of our trip was to the city of Kochin. Kochin has lots of beautiful churches (Kerala was the home of St. Francis Xavier, the patron saint of the parish in Fairmount where my dad's family goes), but, more interestingly, it has a pretty substantial Jewish population. It's called (and I kid you not) Jew Town.

No, really, it's called Jew Town.

And here's my favorite thing that we saw there:

Yes, it's a massive golden calf. IN JEW TOWN. Cognitive dissonance ahoy!
Then we went to see a traditional dance show, which was really cool.

Another thing that's so incredible about Kerala is how many waterfalls you see there. Every road you go down there's another waterfall. It's amazing.

Me, Dani, and Chelsea.

Then we went to a lot of spice farms and tea plantations.



Obligatory Lilypad picture.



These are from a temple we visited up in the mountains:

Dani being adorable.

Aaaand then we got to what I thought would be the highlight of our trip: RIDING ELEPHANTS! Elephants are my favorite animals, so I was really excited to ride and see real Indian elephants outside of a zoo.
Unfortunately, the keepers were very cruel to these magnificent animals. We saw them beating them with sticks as we rode along. Now, this did not go down well with us, especially since Chelsea is a real environmental activist and all three of us are fierce animal lovers. 

Did you know elephants can cry? I didn't know that elephants cried.

Yeah, you can see how thrilled we were about that. We decided we had to come down and apologize to the elephant.

That made us feel better.

After that we went to a martial arts show, which was pretty cool.

Aaaaand we went trekking in a nature reserve:

For protection against leeches. I still haven't been able to clean off my sneakers.

MONKEYS.

Our wonderful guide.
Then we went on the famous backwaters in Alleppey. After a huge amount of searching, we managed to find a smaller houseboat that we could row ourselves (at least part of the way). (Houseboats can be really, REALLY big and expensive.)

Aaaand finally, our last night in Alleppey, playing in the ocean.

Chelsea, being a California girl, is very excited about the ocean.
And finally here are my feet in the Arabian Sea.

Happy New Year everybody! Two more posts, I promise.