Hey everyone!
We are at a hotel with free wi-fi so I have more time to write this blog post. Wow, have we been busy this past week! We've had classes every day, as well as two holidays to celebrate at the ECC: Halloween and Diwali. For Halloween we went all out and decided to make a haunted house for the kids of the ECC staff. Global groups have done things like this in the past, but we like to think that we went a step further this year. We converted the Dialogue House (the hostel where we're staying) into a full-blown haunted house in which we were all characters. We bought face paint, wrapped ourselves in toilet paper and sheets, hung sheets from the rafters, hid behind screen doors, made chair tunnels, etc. We even painted Kelsey's face green and had her stir a "cauldron" and cackle a little bit. It was funny and the kids absolutely LOVED it! We tried to make it a little less scary for the younger kids by telling them that once they said Happy Halloween to the monsters that we would turn nice and give them candy. My post was at the end of the chair tunnel and I got a couple of good screams. Then after all THIS, we brought the kids and their parents into the classroom where we'd organized a cake walk, coloring, face painting, and music. It was a PARTY! Then at the end we took them outside and set off some poppers--I have no idea what they were actually because I stayed behind to start cleanup, which was quite a daunting task since the kids threw their wrappers every which way and their crayons as well. It was such a fun night, and we were so exhausted after doing all of this for the kids that we kind of forgot to do anything for ourselves! We played a round of the game Mafia and some people watched a scary movie, but lots of us ended up falling into bed.
The very next day, we celebrated Diwali (a Hindu light festival) with the staff at ECC. The ECC celebrates all religious holidays because they are ecumenical and they have Hindu staff. Actual Diwali isn't until November 14th or so, but the ECC always celebrates it early with the Global students. Usually it's quite an event and they set off fireworks and play games, but it was raining that whole day so we put on our brand new saris and went to eat food and listen to a speech about Diwali in the cafeteria. We hung out with the staff for a bit and then took pictures for a half an hour in our saris. It felt like prom--there were so many different colors!
The rest of this week has been full of classes, and today we went on an excursion to Mysore. On the way we stopped at two temples, one involving walking up the side of a mountain (literally) on 500 or so steep steps to a Jainist temple. It had the largest statue in India (if I heard correctly) and we saw a worship ceremony going on when we got there. It was a little strange for us because there were some naked people and they were worshipping the statue of a man who was not even a god, just a leader of the people back in the 900s when it was built. So many of us decided to go sit outside and look at the jaw-dropping view of the Indian countryside way below us. It was beautiful. The second temple took more than 80 years to build and is still unfinished (called the Halebid Temple) and it was extremely intricate--small elephants, mythological scenes, and other elephants were hand carved all over the temple and they were the most painstakingly detailed stone carvings I've ever seen.
Tomorrow we're visiting the Mysore Palace and might be riding some elephants... can't wait! Our stay in India is almost over and I'm getting sad to leave because the people are so nice here. However, I can't wait to see my mom in Thailand!