School Trip to Lonawala

On Friday I was up bright and early with Conor as he had a field trip to Lonawala. We were up at 5.30am and at school at 6.45am. The children have been studying "Big Bad Body" which has been a study of the human body, different body systems, healthy living etc. The field trip was to get them out of the pollution of Mumbai and out to the countryside for a hike!

Lonawala is about 2 hours out of Mumbai on the main Pune road. As we were off to Dubai for the long weekend (Gandhi Jayanti on Tuesday so a public holiday and no school on Monday and Tuesday) we had to be at the airport at 4pm. As the coach was due back at the school at 4pm Conor's teacher said I could come along on the trip in our car with Ravi. We could then leave early from Lonawala and go directly to the airport. Luckily Shannon (my good ol' Texan friend here) was chaperoning the trip too and so she came in the car with me and we had a natter and a gossip.

One of Conor's teachers has a weekend house on the outskirts of Lonawala and so all 3 classes descended on her house before setting of on the hike. The weather was disappointing though-the clouds didn't lift so the hike was shortened because we couldn't see all the children! The hill was steep and slippy and I think it was the first time some of the children had ever walked in the countryside! We had a few tears and a few falls but I'm sure it was character building.

The person who had the best time was Ravi! When we got back to the teacher's house he told me that they had a "very good arrangement for the drivers". They'd been given breakfast and were looking forward to mutton and chicken for lunch. They were also watching a "very funny" Hindi comedy film on the caoch video. It was difficult to drag Ravi away when we had to leave early for the airport!

The children got very excited about the crystals they could find on the hillside and some of them came home with water melon sized chunks of rock! There were also loads of furry caterpillars that we had to avoid as they make you itch if you touch them.

It was a great day out and made such a change. As you drive out of Mumbai you can feel your spirits lifting as you see all the greenery and lose the traffic.

Expat wife goes techy

Welcome to the world of high tech expat wife. Not wanting to be outshone by my husband, I've decided to do a crash course in website design and blogging, thanks to Blogger.com

I'm sitting in the Business centre of the Grand Hyatt hotel penning this first "post". http://www.mumbai.grand.hyatt.com/ But why are you swanning around in a hotel doing this, I hear you cry! Well, perhaps that will explain what an expat wife does all day......

I had a hair appointment booked with the nice hotel hairdresser Christiaan Georgio (Greek/Australian, trained in UK at Vidal Sassoon in the eighties. Could he be the very trainee responsible for the Duran Duran asymmetric cut of 1985? Only my parents Kate, Poppy and Fiona will probably remember that.) When I arrived we looked at my hair and noticed that, unbelievably, the grey hadn't come through yet. He said there was no point in colouring it so we just cut it instead. So here I am at the Grand Hyatt with several hours to spare.

Why don't you go back home then and do something useful?



Well, today we have torrential rain. Khar Subway is flooded and when I called Ian as I came out of the hairdressers, he was still on his way to work having been stuck in big traffic jams after dropping me off. (The photo is taken from the entrance to Khar Subway, a road tunnel under the main railway line and one of the few crossing points West to East.)

Better to ask Ravi, our driver, to pick me up from the hotel which is only a 15 min drive to school and save both me and Ravi a lot of sitting-in-traffic stress. But of course that means I have two and a half hours to kill at a hotel.

Not wanting to be accused of wasting time....what do you DO all day? I went through my things to do list, came here to the business centre and set to on some American Women's Club emails. Then looked at my personal emails and then turned my thoughts to this.

As I understand it, a blog is a type of diary entry so I won't go on much longer. Better to work on the blog design and template and ask for your feedback....what do you think of it so far?