2nd Blog

Today, Monday, we had our first official work day. I was going to wake up at 8:00, but instead I woke up around 7 and could not go back to sleep – maybe that’s because it is really like 9:00 pm in MN time. Anyway, I decided to go out and finish washing some dishes in the kitchen. While I was doing that I noticed through our kitchen window that a man was knocking on one of our neighbors doors. When Andrew answered the door, I heard the two mention cinnamon and I knew that this was the bread man that Emily had told us about the day before. I got really excited and made Megan come over and watch. We kept trying to get Andrew’s attention through the window to tell him to send the bread man over to our house, but sadly he didn’t see us. However, the bread man rang our anyway! I was so excited that I raced to open the door, we ended up buying two loaves of freshly baked bread, one cinnamon and one white, for 75 rupees – which is less than 2 dollars. Megan and I started our day off with fresh cinnamon bread and mango tea – it rocked!
After our breakfast, we went off to school for our first day. It was basically just staff meetings and tours of the schools etc. I am going to be teaching the woodwind lessons and directing the intermediate band and pep band. This means that I am technically a middle school teacher (even though I will also have high school students). So I went to the middle school meeting this morning at 9:00 and then the principal gave the new middle school teachers a tour of the school. Later I met up with the current chair of the music department, another strings teachers and the choir teacher. The chair took me on a brief tour of the music building and I found my office – which is sweet! It is on the third floor and the door opens to the outdoor balcony, it has windows on both sides that look out over the open air quad and the mountain. Also the floor is wood from trees that fell down after a huge storm that happened a few years ago. My office is way better than Megan’s – although hers is closer to a lot of the instrumental music things, like the ensemble room and instrument storage.
After checking out my office and all the sweet woodwind repertoire then entire faculty met for lunch in the middle school cafeteria. Then the new principal addressed everyone, which was pretty boring. And THEN the new teachers had to sit through an hour and a half of “computer training” which consisted of getting us logged onto the network and getting into our email. This really should have only taken 10 minutes, but somehow they dragged it out for 90… Thank goodness Emily and her friend Laura volunteered to take us to the bazaar after our workday. Megan and I both had a list of items we wanted to purchase – although we definitely did not get through everything. It takes about 15-20 minutes to walk down to the bazaar in Mussoorie, but it was so worth it. There are so many little shops just lined up along this tiny “road” and Emily knew all the best places to buy what we wanted. We walked a ways down the bazaar as she pointed out various items until we got to her grocery store (which is maybe a little bigger than my bedroom at my house in Annandale). Here she introduced us to the store owner and then we picked out what we needed. Tomorrow someone from the store will deliver our groceries to our house. Then we moved on to the place where she gets her fresh produce. Megan and I bought 3 mangos, 4 apples, ½ kg of potatoes, ½ kg of onions and 1 clove of garlic for 73 rupees (again, less than 2 dollars…) We had to carry those along with us for the trip (and by “we” I mean Megan carried everything in her backpack…) Then we went to the fabric store and picked out what kind of fabric we wanted to make our clothes (and my pillowcases) with. I brought along a pair of pants that I wanted copied and Megan and I both picked our fabric to have kurtas (the long Indian shirts) with and our neighbor James was also with us and he bought some pants and kurta fabric. Then we walked back to the tailor and described what we wanted with each fabric and then were measured. We will be able to pick up our clothes this weekend- I’m very excited! Tomorrow is another day of meetings ect. I think I might also bring my clarinet to my office and play through a bit of the solo/lesson music that is there.