I'M FREE!

Big news guys! I am free of a cruel form of punishment known as Indus International School! Friday (the 25th) was my last day at Indus! I was withdrawn because of some weird complications with my school in America. So what happened was that when my mom went back to the mothership known as Mountain View, California, she called my counselor at Newport, which is my high school in America. She was originally calling just to see how the re-enrollment process goes, once we're ready to re-enroll me. But somehow that conversation turned into something different, and we found out that we should be focusing our attention on something much bigger than just when to enroll me again. My counselor told my mother-figure that if I finished the year at Indus, I wouldn't have enough credits to go into tenth grade with the rest of my peers. My mom did some thinking and found out that the credits could be made up here and there through summer school or extra classes, so that wasn't really a problem. But then we looked at Newport's syllabi for the classes that I was taking at Indus. That, my friends, was the major problem. I was already 4 months into the school year and I hadn't done most of the work that my peers (who were only 2 and a half months in) had done. So not only would I go back short of credits, I would go back short of knowledge as well. Since my current Plan A is to go into medicine, I need a lot of biology and chemistry to be prepared for med school and everything, but if I finished at Indus neither of my bio and chem credits would count. That being said, I'd have to take physics in 11th grade, instead of biology 2 like I was planning. PHYSICS. Yeah......no. I am most definitely not a physics person. Also, I'd be really screwed for math. I'm supposed to take geometry all year in 9th grade, but what do you know? Indus doesn't do that. They do this weird integrated math thing, which is super hard and kind of idiotic, so I would go back to Newport knowing no geometry whatsoever. Not a good thing.

Problems stacked up, and thus blossomed a big ugly garden of ugly problem flowers. This all happened around the middle of November. With all of these problems, I had a few options in short:
1) Finish the year at Indus. Risk being a 5th year senior and thus postponing my entire life by like 5 months or something. Also have to take math with the freshmen as a sophomore (socially and emotionally very bad)
2) Take the rest of the year off and hang out (sounds good so far, right? keep reading...), then go back into Newport as a freshman, postponing my entire life by a year. There's the catch, making this option also very very bad for obvious reasons.
3) Drop out of Indus (conveniently right before exams!) and do online school at this place called Keystone, therefore enabling me to do the two things I wanted to do while living here: volunteer and learn Hindi.

Which option do you think I picked? Let me give you a hint: given that I'm sitting here writing this at 2:17pm my time and planning to go volunteer at an orphanage on Thursday with my dad and his team of doctors, I can tell you for danggg sure I didn't pick to stay at Indus. I picked option 3, do online school. I started yesterday, which was Monday for me (I'm not sure what day/night it was for all y'all that are reading this outside of India). So far it's pretty chill. I can't do much right now though because I have yet to get my textbooks. My mom has some really awesome friends/coworkers who are carting them back to India from America for me (thanks a lot guys!) and they'll get here on Sunday.

My last day at Indus was pretty good. But get this--I took one of those idiotic formal uniform white shirts and let all my friends sign it. Seems pretty harmless, yeah? No. The head of middle school, who, I will be honest, is one of the meanest people I've ever met in my life, confiscated my shirt. You know why? Because I was defacing a school uniform. Okay, is it such a novel concept to have people sign an article of clothing that isn't even a school uniform after I leave school? Now it's just MY white shirt, what is she gonna do about it if I spray paint my skirt yellow after leaving the school? Whatever, that's Indus's people of authority for you. I'm not gonna miss Indus itself at all. The people that I met, on the other hand, I'll miss them a lot. Most of them anyways. I think it's super cool that now I know people from so many different countries of the world, and that's definitely something that I gained by going to Indus.

Ohhhh man, I just stopped and ate lunch then did some other random stuff, and I gotta say that Pau Bhaji is one of the most delicious delicacies ever. That stuff is so good. In Bangalore it has to come from a packet because there's no place to get good pau bhaji otherwise, but in Bombay it is so freaking delish.

OH! One more thing before I wind this up! Guess what! So before I went to Indus, I had these 5 tie-on bracelets that I never took off, 4 were from places that we traveled to and 1 was from a friend who made it for me just before I left. When I say that I never took them off, I'm being completely serious. Two of them had been on for almost 4 years, one for almost 3 years, and the other two for a few months. What do you think I'm gonna say next? You guessed it--Indus made me take them off. This had me very devastated, but since I left Indus I got to put them back on! Yay yay yay!

More later, thanks for reading! :)

Volunteering at Angel's

Friday (the 18th) was my dad's birthday. We went to a restaurant called Barbecue Nation and had dinner with some close friends. After dinner, we went to their house and had cake, which was delicious. We were out really late talking and eating and having a grand time, and by the time we finally got home it was close to 1 in the morning. I didn't get in bed until around 1:15am, and I still had to wake up at 6:35 the next morning because it was a working Saturday on the 19th. I was fully planning on going, though in a very sleep deprived state, because Indus takes working Saturdays very seriously. However, sometime in the night while we were all sleeping, the power went out and nobody's alarm went off. For some reason, my internal body clock (which usually wakes me up on its own at 6:45 am anyways, regardless of the day of the week) didn't work either, so I didn't wake up until around 9am. Neither did my parents or sister, so we were all kind of behind on starting our days. At Indus, if you use your own transportation to get to school and you're late, you aren't even allowed in the school. If you take the bus and you're late, that's different because it's a whole lot of kids, so you're still allowed to go to school. Since we woke up so late, I had obviously missed the bus and therefore couldn't go to school since I wouldn't be allowed in anyways. This was good and bad. It was bad because I would be missing classes, and who knows what we'd be learning/reviewing in those classes. But it was good because I would be able to go volunteer at an orphanage with the rest of my family!!!

There were pretty much 2 main things that I wanted to do while living here for a year: learn Hindi and volunteer as much as possible. So far, because I'm so busy with school all the time, I haven't had time to do much of either. Anyways though, yesterday we went to a place called Angel's Orphanage to do physicals on all the kids. There were around 75 kids total, ranging from age 3 all the way to 18. When you first pull into the orphanage, there's a courtyard like place with trees and concrete benches and mats on the floor for people to sit on. Then behind that, there's a small building that probably should have been a 1 story building but somehow they stuffed two floors in there. The first floor if where they do laundry, cook, eat and hang out. The second floor is where the kids sleep. The lady who runs the orphanage will be referred to as S. S is a big lady who always has kids roaming around her. The kids love her a lot--you can see it in the way they act around her.

Our plan for the day was to set up stations for vision tests, height/weight/temperature, blood pressure, heart/respiratory rate and a general examination (ears, nose, throat, stomach, etc). We set up a table with 75 files for boys and girls, which was where the kids would start the process. I was manning that table, and they were to give me their name, date of birth, and age. It was amazing to me how many of the kids didn't know when their birthday was, and when they didn't know, S had to look through her files and find their DOB. Even then, some had nothing listed for date of birth. Anyways, after I wrote down their information and circled their age on the growth chart, they took their file and went to the next station, which was height/weight/temperature. Two girls who came along with us (the children of some family friends) were taking down the numbers at this station. After they had their height, weight, and temperature recorded, they went to my mom's station, which was vision tests. She told them to cover one eye and read some lines off the chart, then cover the other eye and do the same. The littler kids were really cute, and they would help each other by whispering the answers to the kid in front of them. They all knew at least some English, and when we were taking a break later in the day, a few kids went over to the vision chart and pretended to be my mom, saying "What is this? Can you read this? Cover the other eye. Hey, don't tell him the answer!" It was adorable. After they had their eyes tested, the older kids went for their general examination behind some curtains so they could have more privacy. The little kids had their blood pressure taken, then their heart and respiratory rates, then their general examination (which my dad was doing). At my dad's station for general exam, the kids were REALLY fascinated by the otoscope (the thingy that you look inside ears with). All of the kids, especially the older girls and younger boys, wanted to look inside everyone's ears. My dad was pretty tickled by that, and he always had a big crowd of ten or fifteen kids crowding around him. After they went through all these stations, they took their big brown file folders back to my table and we filed it away. It was really shocking to see how many of them had lice--probably around 55 of them had lice, and the other 20 were sure to get them sooner or later. It sounds bad, but my dad and some of the other volunteering doctors came to the conclusion that there was pretty much no use in treating it since it would be nearly impossible to get it out of that many kids. Once their file was safely returned to the first station, they could go sit on the mat and wait for my mom or sister to repair their torn shirts or pants or school uniforms.

The children at the orphanage were all adorable, and they were really friendly. As soon as we got there, the little girls and boys immediately came up to me and said "Hi akka, what is your name? Why you are here? You can play with us?" 'Akka' means older sister, so they were calling both me and my sister that. They were really good at entertaining themselves; they had a multitude of random games that they played with each other. The boys were a little rowdy with each other and they would sometimes mess around and slap each other or hit each other, but they weren't being violent, they were just being boys. We were all really surprised at how well all the kids got along. Considering that there were 75 of them, all in different age groups, they got along really well. The older girls were very motherly to the younger ones and were willing to play their games and draw on the whiteboard with them. It was amazing to see how perfectly happy these kids all were, but we found out that some had ran away a few times. I wasn't quite sure why you would do that if you were an orphan who had known nowhere but Angel's as home for your whole life, but then again I'm not really one to think that I have a clue what their life is like. When we were about to leave, the older girls made up a really cute rhyme for my mom--"curly curly hair and oh so fair." I thought that was really sweet. :) The kids even said that they wanted us to come back for Christmas, and I think we might just do that.

More later, thanks so much for reading!

It's been a while! I need to fill you guys in :)

It's been a really long time since my last post, sorry about that. I've been super busy with school and trying to fit everything into the day that I need to get done so I just haven't had very much time. But anyways, there's been a lot of random things happening lately.

I'll start with school. School hasn't been that good as of late. It's really hard, for a lot of reasons. One reason why it's super hard is that the kids here have been learning these concepts for about 3 years longer that I have, so they know the stuff really well. I mean that literally--my sister's in seventh grade (two years younger) and she's pretty much learning a slightly diluted version of the exact same stuff as me. Another reason is that most of the students in my grade have been here for at least two years, so they at least have some idea of what to expect on the exams. I, on the other hand, have never taken exams like these in my life. Also (this is the thing that makes me the maddest), some of the teachers don't exactly teach all the concepts very thoroughly. They might touch on it once or twice, but you never actually learn it fully if you don't go home and learn it on your own. So that's why school is pretty hard for me right now. A friend that I've been talking to a lot after we met in the musical that we were both in (We Will Rock You) says that it will get easier and not to worry too much about it. He's also from America, so I trust him, but I'm still waiting for the time when it finally gets easier. I hope it doesn't take too much longer!

Now let's talk about stuff that DOESN'T have to do with Indus International School, because really, nobody wants to hear too much about that place. We had a 10 day break towards the end of October for Diwali, which is the festival of light. Since one of our goals in coming to India was to travel a lot, we took this opportunity to do so. On October 22, the final show of We Will Rock You finally happened, and it went amazingly. We didn't mess up hardly at all, and the dance scene (which was kind of the featured thing) went over perfectly. It was tons of fun and I met a lot of people during the many long rehearsals. True, now I have during-lunch support classes and I have to miss PE for the next three weeks because of the play, but it was still really fun.

On the night of the 22nd, we flew out of Bangalore into Singapore. We got to Singapore at like 5 in the morning, and since it was a red-eye flight we were all really cranky and tired. We had breakfast with some family friends at this tiny little shop, which is where I discovered a really amazing thing. It's called kaya, which is this extremely delicious coconut jam on some soft bread. It doesn't even taste very much like coconut, because my dad liked it too and he hates coconut. After breakfast, we went back to the hotel and slept for the majority of the day. Once we woke up, we went to China Town for dinner. Thankfully, our family friend (let's call him V, though not the same V as in one of my other posts) has lived in Singapore for a while and he knew exactly what to get us for dinner. We had some really delish food and drinks as well. V was a huge help during that trip--without him and his family we wouldn't have known what to do! We were in Singapore for about 2 1/2 days, and then we went to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

That's an interesting place. It's kind of like a mixture of Singapore and India, but WAY hotter than either of those places. However, that place is extremely amazing because they have both KRISPY KREME AND STARBUCKS there. We ate so many donuts, it was insane. And we got Starbucks lots of times. :) It was really awesome and we saw tons of cool stuff while we were there, and ate tons of good food (of course). After being in Kuala Lumpur for 4 days, we flew back to Singapore for like 5 hours, then flew from there to Bali, Indonesia. We were only in Bali for two days, but I would have stayed a lot longer. It was so relaxing because we didn't plan anything to do--pretty much all we did was stay at the villa we rented and swam all day. Amara and I stayed in the pool for literally 6 hours straight one day, which was amazing. If you want to have a super relaxing holiday, go to Bali, it's awesome. I don't think they have Krispy Kreme or Starbucks there, but still, it's a nice place. We then flew from Bali back to Singapore, then from Singapore back to Bangalore. It's a miracle that the Singapore airport people didn't know us by name after going there so many times in such a short amount of time.

After being so relaxed for a little while, we went back to the stressful norm of school. My mom, however, didn't even get to go home after that trip. We had our driver bring her her pre-packed bags, then she headed off to California on a very late night/early morning flight. She's been in California for like 11 days, but she's finally coming back tomorrow! YAY!!! Pretty much as soon as school got back in session, we started studying for half yearly exams. Amara and I both did pretty badly on most of our mid-term exams, so we started studying way in advance in hopes of doing better on half yearlies. We've been doing extra work and studying for pretty much all of our classes every night so we can be more prepared, but I'm still really scared for half yearlies. Oh well, wish us luck!

Thanks for reading, more later! :)