Having fun in Pondicherry!

To all of you following the blog who might wonder why the blog is suddenly in English, we are writing in English because we might have the opportunity to become the official ’bloggers’ of Kulturstudier in India. Either way it is also a good opportunity to practice our English. Today is the 11^th of February and we just came back from our first ‘real’ lecture. Now school is starting and even though there are lots to read and group work to be done, we all look forward to it, since ‘Peace and Conflict Studies’ is such an interesting field.

This first week in Pondicherry has been full of great experiences and we would like to share some of them with you!

We arrived in Pondicherry late (!) Saturday night. We were supposed to arrive in Chennai at 11 pm and then afterwards drive to Pondicherry, but due to flight problems we were two hours late and didn’t arrive at our house in Pondi until 3.30 am. Luckily everything was taken care of and we were dropped off at the house where we met the security guard and found our room. We all stay at the house called Maison Raja which is situated in the city center. Here we stay on the rooftop in a nice apartment with another Danish girl and two Norwegian girls. 

Unfortunately we were all ill when we arrived so Sofie and Katrine spent the first two days in the apartment sleeping. Luckily the ‘Kulturstudier team’ took good care of us and Tuesday we were better again (well, good enough to go to school) and excited to explore the city and visit the study center. During the first week, all of the students from ‘Peace and conflict studies’ and ‘Religion and Power’ have had lectures together. The lectures addressed India and South Asia and explored topics such as politics, culture and religion. During our travel in North India we had met many new things and had all sorts of questions which luckily our teacher Suddha could help us answer during these lectures. The first week was also full of other activities. Naturally, we did stuff together in the house, met new people, went out to dinner, went to the market, but on Wednesday we had ‘Saree night’. The Saree is a dress/long peace of beautiful colored cloth worn by many (most) Indian women, and this night we were going to learn how to wear it. Next Wednesday we are all going to wear Sarees and we all bought one – We do though have to admit that we are still not sure how to put in on. It is really complicated!!! Buying a Saree was so much fun. We went to a store which had really many Sarees and only male shop assistants who didn’t speak English. Just the act of choosing the right Saree was difficult because the men kept coming with new suggestions!

Kulturstudier is arranging a lot of activities for us. Every day there is yoga in two of the three houses that we stay in, there is Indian cooking class, Tamil language courses, Bollywood dancing and for Sofie traditional Indian dance. The city is very different from what we have seen in North India so far, actually South India is like a whole other country. It is more silent and peaceful here, it is easy to walk around the city and you can walk to anything. Since we are 80 people attending the two courses we are constantly talking to new people and making friends, many evenings are spend at the rooftop next to our apartment talking, laughing and getting to know each other. It is also here people from our house go to sit and study.

The study center which is situated at ‘Kailash Beach Resort’ outside Pondicherry is an amazing place. The bus ride there is really interesting as we get to leave the busy city and drive through small villages. At the Study Center we have both breakfast and lunch which we all find very tasteful. Our lectures are held near the beach in a hut and we also have the opportunity to use the swimming pool, play beach volley, relax in the hammocks or go to the beach. We can recommend the pool as we spend most of our Friday afternoon here, just relaxing and swimming and enjoying the sun.

When we reached Friday we were excited to have some days off. On Friday evening we had a welcome dinner with all the staff at ‘Kulturstudier’ at a nice restaurant and most of Saturday was spend with relaxation and reading at the rooftop. Saturday evening we all did a fun activity where we had a race around the city. Each team had to answer some questions that were placed around the city, and to go from place to place we took Auto Rikshaws. That was a crazy and really fun experience, and even though we were in a hurry and didn’t really get to know the city that well, we all feel like going back to some of the places – for example the Ganesh Temple where you can have a blessing from a real elephant. Maybe you will hear about this in the next blog J

This was it for now. You will hear from us soon again. We hope you are all having a nice time at home – from what I have heard the weather in Denmark should be a bit colder than the 30 degrees Celsius we have here in Pondi.

Hugs from Mathilde, Katrine and Sofie 

Animals that we have seen so far: Elephant who gives blessings, spiders (that live in our room), enormous amount of mosquitos, cats, crows (and they like to hang out just outside our windows).

More pictures from this week
Pictures from where we live