work and the weekend

Work has been great. For the first part of the day, I work with the little kids, who although may be cute, are rediculously insane. As soon as the teacher leaves, they go insane, and its almost impossible to calm them down. It is also not a big deal to slap kids in the head and face here, as the teacher lets us know, although im not too comfortable with that at the moment. For this reason it is hard to get stuff done, and the language barrier only makes things more interesting. They know parts of the alphabet, so when we sing it it ends up sounding more like " A B C D glip glop gloo, L M N O P..." (literally).
the second part of the day work with the older kids who are between 8 and 14. They all speak more english, and its nice to communicate more freely. With them, we just work on more advanced reading.

This past weekend, me and the girls went to Pushkar, a small "spiritual" town surounding a lake. It looked like it was out of alladin. We took the sleeper train third class, and arrived in ajmer at 4 in the morning. We finally negotiated a price with the rickshawdrivers to get us to pushkar, although our driver (who looked like an Indian jim carey) was about to get a knuckle sandwich by me for being so rediculously persistent after we told him to piss off. He ended up giving us the price we wanted so it worked out.
Arriving in pushkar was sureal. They dropped us off at the town gate, and we had no idea how to get to the hotel besides the crude map that fellow volunteer Stuart had drawn us. As we walked along the streets, I literally felt like I was in a horror movie. The streets were competely deserted and silent, except all around us were hudreds of bodies of all the hobos sleeping on everything that wasn't wet or covered in shit. However, all the stray dogs and cows were awake and were glad to escort us to our hotel, which we eventually found after walking about a kilometer.
the hotel was sick, it overlooked the lake and a view that looked like it was out of a storybook. During the day, we did all that there was to do short of taking yoga classes. We walked around the whole lake (probably like two miles), saw the shops and temples. I also learned how to play basic sitar (after staying in the music shop for a unreasonably longtime without buying anything), and got an awesome drum lesson from this crazy dude whose father played with the greatful dead percussion section. The town is kind of sad in some ways because it completely runs on tourism. It is pretty much one giant bazaar,and everyone is trying to take money from you one way or another. There was nothing to do at night. The next day, I played more drums and then we trained home to the lovely CCS house. It was a good weekend. Next weekend we'll probably go to Rejekesh with a bunch of other volunteers.

Below: photos from Pushkar