Contrasts of India

The family of one of my students has a house in Lonavala.  I guess they hold a staff picnic there every year.  The school vans picked us up at 6:45am and took us to the school then we all got on a big bus from there. It was a very pleasant 2 hour drive - most of us dozed off on our way there.  The drive was gorgeous once we got out of Mumbai and Navi Mumbai. This is what it said online - It is popularly known as the jewel of the Sahyadri Mountains. Lonavala is set amongst the sylvan hills of the Western Ghats and is a popular gateway from Mumbai and Pune. It looked like the foothills of mountains you would see in kentucky/Tennessee.  Their house was beautiful and had lovely views.

I got to go hiking up the "mountain" with Waciuma, Mario, Naren, and Yadav.

Naren pretended he spear hunted a squirrel.  I pretended to eat it.

We had lots of yummy food - parsee eggs, biryani, chichen tikka, paneer tikka etc.  The drive home took about two and a half hours and we stopped in the town of Lonavala to get chikki. 

Just so that you can truly understand why I appreciated this day so much I will attach some pictures of a walk from my flat to the school :)  What am I going to do when I move to a country where I can't just walk in and hire a gunman!!  ha!

 You'd be super impressed if I could attach the sound/smell track to this!  and of course I didn't take any pictures of things that would make me look ridiculous taking it - like people peeing on the street, the guy who was asleep on the stairs at the train station, people sleeping on the street, the sad chickens trapped in their death cages, the filthy stores....

so many different things to see and experience in India - some great - some not so :)