Christmas!!

Ok so I’m first gonna start with a confession. When I said that thing about people caring more about the wording I used in the previous blog, I stole that from a guy named Tony Campolo. He’s a legend. And I’m not 100% sure I spelt his name right. Anyway it’s been a while since my last blog so I’ll just say a little about what I’ve done. Anyway we went to Bangalore to visit their Oasis section, and had a two day holiday in Mysore on the way. That was a lot of fun. We went to the Mysore Palace, Chamundi Hill, and the zoo. The palace was soooooo cool! The amount of work and money they put into building it is intense. Every room has something different, but extravagant about it. Chamundi Hill is a huge hill with quite a tall temple on top. That was the first time I saw a monkey on this India trip. There were tons of them. We first saw one at the palace, but we saw one about 4 feet away on the way to the temple. And then one the way a really tall statue of a man about to kill a snake we saw tons more. There was like a whole family of them. Family? What do you call a group of monkeys? A pack? A mob? The Potter family? Sorry guys, couldn’t resist. Anyway this Chamundi Hill temple had something like a thousand steps from top to bottom. We did not do all of them. The auto driver met us after about three hundred steps at an extremely large bull carved fully from stone. From there we went back to the hotel we were staying at and my friends paid for a full body massage for me. It was quite an experience, and a really good gift. From Mysore we took a two hour train to Bangalore. Bangalore was a lot of fun. We got to see most of the projects they were doing, and also socialise (don’t worry, only at times we weren’t needed). At the time we were there, they just had a team from New Zealand arrive to help (similar to what we’re doing), and we hit it off with them. They’re all really, really cool. We went to look at the crazy shopping place they have over, and we also went to the Hard Rock Café, which was REALLY COOL!!!! And for the first time ever I voluntarily sang a karaoke song. I feel like I’m becoming a better person haha. The rest of the time from Bangalore up till now has been very calm, because around this time the exams start up, so we haven’t been doing anything with the kids except for football in the mornings and English classes in the office. Last weekend was pretty epic though. It was my friend’s birthday on Saturday, mine on Sunday, and Shanthi’s on Tuesday. I also played a Christmas gig on Friday night for a concert that the church put on. That was a lot of fun. Then on Saturday we celebrated my friend Ebe’s birthday by surprising him and then just hanging out and going for dinner with a ton of people. Then for my birthday we went to church, then went to a slum we haven’t been to before and gave away about two hundred backpacks to the kids as a church, then stopped by the fruit shop, then off to dinner. It was a really busy Sunday and we spent the whole of it with about 16 people. It was a lot of fun. Then from then we have been to other parties, we had a Christmas party, we even started a band and got a few gigs, which are still going on (we played in the City Center last night) and are pretty much just waiting till the schools start back up again so we can go back to teaching the kids and showing them more games. Sorry this blog isn’t up to standard, but I wanted to get something up before Christmas and it’s also been like a month since my last one. Oh yeah… MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!