after a month and a week (or something like that)

Its been over a month since my last entry, so naturally a whole bunch of stuff has happened. The most important one it that I started school. Yay. My summer break lasted a mere 5ish weeks. the good news though, is that when I return, my summer will be 3 1/2 months!

Anyways, I attend Bal Bharti, one of the hundreds of schools in New Delhi. In India, once you get into 11th and 12th grade, you have to pick a stream, or group of subjects to take for both years. This system works for the very goal oriented people who know exactly what they want to do with their lives at the tender age of 16. I, however, have no idea what I want to do, so I find the system somewhat constraining. The amount and type of streams offed depends on the school. I was originally hoping to take Arts or Humanities, but it turns out that my school doesn't offer them, so I got to chose between Science (almost impossible, if you don't want to spend your whole year studying like a mad person), Computers (which I have absolutely no interest in) and Commerce (which was basically my only option). I was given the privilege of not completely following the stream though, because there were classes like accounts, informatics (typing strings of meaningless letters and numbers into a computer more then a decade old and hoping that you typed it in perfectly, because if you made even the slightest error (e.g. not placing a space after a parentheses) the information you wanted to pull up, say a chart, won't pull up and "ERROR" will pop up instead. I know that was a run on sentence, but who cares? Since I didn't want to take these subjects, and my family wanted me to have a low stress year, I got to replace the missing subjects with art, music, dance, and a few free periods. I'm actually quite happy with my schedule (which changes day-to-day), most of the time.

Art is kinda boring, but I know that its better then informatics, so you won't catch me complaining about it. My dance teacher is trying to teach me traditional Indian dance, but it turns out that 13 years of ballet can be a curse and a blessing. I actually really like my music class. My teacher is trying to teach me the Harmonium, and Indian version of an upright accordion. I have never done more then doodle around on a piano, so its all new for me, especially the whole play-with-your-right-hand-and-pump-the-accordion-thing-at-the-back-with-your-left. I still like it though and it's not quite as hard as I thought it would be, yet.

My three academic subjects are, Indian economics ( 1950-1990), English, and Hindi. Hindi is taught to me be two preschool teachers (my school is K-12 and has approximately 3,000 students), I get to sit one baby chairs and everything! My school is 6 days a week (yay), but for some reason I haven't actually attended school on Saturday yet. Past of this is due to the fact that I haven't been placed in a school house yet (there are 8 of them, and only one of me, so you'd think it would have happened after 3 weeks). This is important, because you wear a different uniform (yes, we wear uniforms) on Saturday, depending on your house. Normally the uniform consists of a white blouse, grey skirt, belt, grey socks, and these absolutely vile black sneakers (the boys, of course, wear gray slacks, instead of the skirt). In the winter we also wear a navy tie and blazer. On Saturdays, we are supposed to wear a white skirt and our house polo. My other reason for missing the three Saturdays so far, is that I honestly don't desire waking up at 6 on a Saturday to go to school, when my brother, who goes to a different school, doesn't.

I'm going to keep this entry mostly to school, but I feel that I should mention my trip to the Taj Mahal. I went on an AFS trip. We went on a tourist bus, which turned out to be great (even though I had been laughing at the same type of bus, they say "TOURIST" in huge white letters on the front, since I got here). The bus was really nice, which was good, because the trip took almost 5 hours one way. The Taj is absolutely stunning and 10 degrees hotter then anywhere else around. This is due to the large amounts of open space with no shade and the fact that the white marble reflects all of the suns rays right back at you, but it is totally worth the sunburned nose at the end. It you ever go, I highly recommend gratuitous amounts of sun screen and sun glasses (other wise you can't see anything because its all so white). It was so picturesque, so of course my camera had to die (I did manage to get 10 or so pictures, before it refused to turn on).

Naturally, more stuff has happened, but this will do for now.