A letter arrived in the post here yesterday complaining that I'd fallen off the edge of the world because I'm never blog posting. Sorry!!! I've just been really busy! I forget sometimes that people at home are still watching what I'm up to so I'll try and fill everyone in a bit more from now on (happy Laura?). So today it's three weeks since I arrived at Devnar and me and Fidra tried to brave the manic streets of Hyderabad in search of the illusive Pizza Hut. It didn't go amazingly... We ended up down lots of little side streets getting absoloutly nowhere but nearly getting trampled by some rouge buffalo, eventually we found a rickety shop advertising Pizza and got very very excited but nobody there had any clue what we were talking about. So I've spent this afternoon tracking down the LKG class, who are about four, and forcing them to give me cuddles and make me feel better- some of them were definatley not impressed! 

The rest of this week has been devoted to teaching, tonight I have to sit down and write the English exam for LKG- no overly confident about writing an exam... Teaching has been going okay since we asked Lily Madam (the headmistress here) for a teacher to help keep the kids quiet but it's still very stressful. Nothing at uni will phase me by the time I get back I promise you. The most exciting thing that happened this week was that we had torrential monsoon rains every night which flooded the school- the children were having to wade through filthy water to get to their dorms and behind the canteen where we wash our plates after meals was 3 ft high in water. It was all very dramatic!

I posted about the Ganesha festival last time, and unfortunately we weren't able to visit the giant one in Hyderabad- we were told it wasn't safe and their were too many crowds but here are the pictures I took from this week: 

Sacred chickpeas we eat by the handful after saying prayers to the Ganesha idol. They taste good but not after the 6th time! 

Padma- our link person here and her husband saying prayers. Padma is the most devoutly religous person I have ever met. She insisted on taking control of the rituals to Ganesha every night and makes sure everything is done just right. 

Ganesha

Our trip into Hyderabad in search of Pizza trecking over the roads in this statefor an hour was not fun- hence my rather moody looking posture! 

BUFFALO!

Preparing to begin the prayers with this cheeky monkey!