In my free time...

Ahh, the weather is warming up and it feels like summer, only 3 more weeks of teaching, 1 week of exams and then summer holidays...it sounds wonderful! This past month has been a busy one with activities every weekend। I'll start with photos of the annual Win Mumby Basketball Tournament that happened last weekend. The school invites teams from all over India to come and play, so the campus is transformed into a sports stadium and all the staff and students watch the girls and boys teams play. I helped coach the girls team, unfortunately we lost in the quarter finals by 2 points, it was an exciting game and they deserved to win. The picture below is the Woodstock guys team playing, notice the spectators in the windows. (box seats)

Casey and I ventured out to the famous JP hotel for a morning brunch, it was a little different from the cafeteria. The grounds of the hotel are beautiful and if anyone comes to visit we will take you there for brunch.
I went for a walk this morning with Sharon, a visiting mural artist who is working with some of my classes on mural projects, and we found lots of wild irises. I am taking advantage of this blog and putting lots of flower pictures in it, I don't think that Casey would do this himself.
I also found a field of dreams
This past weekend was a Mela (festival) that Woodstock puts together every year to raise money for scholarships. It is a big production with different types of food stalls (Japanese, Korean, Tibetan, Indian), games, bands, cultural dances and lots of shopping. It is also a wonderful time to come and visit. I was in charge of putting something together with my grade 10's so we had an art show on the theme of Global Peace. It was a big success.
This was at the Japanese stall, we are pretty good at changing roles.
This is a picture of the Woodstock band in the Quad, an open area in the school, kind of like a town square. There was a Yellow Rose cafe up on the balcony which served tea and cookies, I am thinking that this should be a permanent fixture of the school.
In the evening there were dances done by students, the picture below is a fire dance with twirly chains. Another exciting thing...well you may not think that it's exciting, but Casey and I got new glasses when we were in Delhi. Casey got sunglasses and I got regular glasses. The amazing part about this was it was all done in one day, the eye examinations, fitting of the lenses and adjustments.
So when I am not teaching, in my free time I am coaching basketball, setting up art shows, doing pottery, planning big ambitious mural projects and yes, taking pictures of flowers. It feels busy, but I can't imagine things any other way.

some pictures of mussoorie.

so what is life in mussoorie like? well.... although it's become fairly normal for us now there are still times when we are amazed. the area around woodstock is relatively quiet, besides the monkeys on the roof, the men hacking in the mornings and the noisy students... we are surrounded by some amazing hills and forest. as you wander into town things slowly begin to change. it's about a 25 minute walk with amazing views.. unless you look just over the edge of the cliffs as they're covered in trash. once when all garbage was biodegradable this would have been fine, but since good old plastic has been here it's a pretty messy situation. the town is precariously perched on a steep ridge... woodstock being at the far east side, and the more and more you walk in, the more and more touristy things get. we have our favorite places by now... the best tailor, the small grocery store, the shoe man, the bread man, the pirated movie guy.. so we don't often wander into the depths of the cheesy-indian tourist section... but here are a few pictures of a rare daring adventure to the "west side".

the revolving restaurant (just like winnipeg!)

some students in p.e. class... some kind of aerobic workout.

mussoorie has a large population of tibetan refugees living here in a colony called "happy valley". with the recent happenings in tibet there has been some hunger strikes to try to raise awareness. the dalai lama actually spent time here when he first fled tibet... thought that was an interesting fact.

not sure about this one.... but you'll always see the indian tourists getting their pictures with it... isn't it amazing?