Today's the third day of our stay in India, and also the second day of school at J.B. Petit High School for Girls.
The day started off very much like yesterday, where I woke up at six thirty, ate my breakfast in haste and set off to school. On the way to the school bus stop, my host, Divina and I encountered a lot of people--and animals. I spotted a goat following its owner like a dog would do--and it's not on a lead, which is a pretty amazing feat. Divina told me that there's a cow living in the streets nearby, and today I see somebody taking the cow for a walk. Indians consider cows as holy and sacred animals so no one would bother the cow; in fact, the cow's quite well fed and even has its own personalized collar, so I guess they do play a pretty important role in Indian culture. Dogs, crows and pigeons are all over the place, and so are the people. I have came to a conclusion that Bombay is a city that never sleeps because there are quite a number of people and traffic around 24/7. At 7 in the morning there's already a lot of cars on the roads and there's a lot of commotion and noise, which makes the best wake up call ever.
The school bus has to be one of the most memorable activities in this stay, because even early at the morning students in the bus were chatting with each other non-stop (instead of dozing off or listening to music on the iPod like the majority of Hong Kong students). It amazed me that everyone seem to know each other--even if they are in different grades. Add in the bumpiness of the ride and all the hilarious conversations going on, the bus ride is quite fun.
The brief bus ride was replaced by the Geography lesson at class 9B. I sat with my school buddy Anuschka and she was revising for her Hindi test before the lesson. She taught me a few Hindi greetings but unfortunately, I can't remember much of them. In return, I translated her name back to Chinese and I wrote her translated name on a post-it and gave it to her, and I did that for some of her other friends. We had so much fun.
After Geography, we had a yoga workshop. Now, we Hong Kong people are so fast-paced that we basically don't do much sports, but in India, almost everyone knows how to do yoga. Yoga is not just simply all about meditating and doing some seemingly impossible stances, but it's about calming your mind and finding your inner peace. Sounds abstract, no? But really, it's not complicated; all you have to do is focus on your breathing and empty your mind. We did some moves to stretch our back, and there's the yoga move where a person will walk on your back. That pretty much scared us all but after our friends from JB walked on us, our backs actually felt more relaxed. However, my favourite move is the 'dead man' yoga move, where you basically just lie down--and relax. It was so effective that I fell asleep. After the ultimate experience on yoga, I have decided to do the 'dead man' move every night to improve the quality of my sleep because I'm quite sleep-deprived.
Our next destination is the Prince of Wales museum, a beautiful building with tall domes and arches. Inside, it exhibits various historical objects and we had a good look at the paintings of India and the weapons. I have learnt so much about the various religions and cultures in India, and I have also known a lot more legends and more historical background of India from the paintings. The weapons are downright intricate and violent at the same time, so this makes an impressive trip.
The art workshop sums up our day at school. After lunch, we started doing Madhubani paintings, which originated from the time when an ancient India king decided to commission some artists to draw the marriage scene of his daughter Sita to the god Lord Ram. Madhubani painting is practised in Bihar, and is traditionally done by women around the town of Madhubani. The paintings are usually done with natural dyes and pigments, and they use low dimensional imagery. We had a nice time drawing and painting the picture in those bright colours.
The enjoyable day passed by pretty quickly, and I'm anticipating what's in store for me tomorrow.
Gladys Yeung 3U (37)
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