An aerogram from India

Over the past few weeks we've been busy helping my mother to downsize and move house. One of the things we discovered is that she has kept every postcard and letter that she ever received from me. It was because of this that I stumbled across this old aerogram that I wrote to her the last time I lived in India, thirty years ago. I was curious to see what I'd written about way back then when I was working in Jammu and Kashmir. Here are a few extracts.

From Sonamarg in Kashmir

We walked up to a glacier.  Once there it started to blizzard - lumps of ice were hitting me, so I hurried to the bottom of the valley and sheltered under a lorry or horse manure.  After it stopped raining I got in lift in the back of the same lorry to a Dak Bungalow where I stayed the night.  It was so cold I was wearing every stitch of clothing that I'd brought and was still shivering. 

Each of the towns and villages here has a different craft.  We went through one village that only sold cricket bats!  In Kashmir there is a lot of wood carving and papier mache - each box brightly pained with a scene from mythology.

In contrast this is what I wrote from Agra where I travelled for a visit

In Agra it's 48 degrees C in the shade.  At night it's still in the upper 30s.  The journey to Agra was exceptionally long and tiring and took about 38 hours by bus and train, including about a 2 hour queue for a train ticket at Jammu.  The train journey itself was hot and sticky - not much air gets into the carriages and the air that does is burning hot.  At Agra station I got a lift to the hotel in a horse drawn cart.  The two boys who drove it decided to race everything else in sight.  I can tell you Ben Hur had nothing on us!  The hotel was full but they let me sleep on the roof which was nice - relatively cool and with a view over to the Taj, but the best thing about the hotel is the food.  Most of the time I've been relatively careful about eating - no fruit etc - now I'm relaxing a bit.  I drink the water and today even had a mango.  I've been healthy up to now too, though somewhat dirty and sweaty.  In Agra there is an electricity and water strike!  The water is turned off from about 1 - 6 pm and the electricity from ab out 3-5pm and for an hour in the evenings  The afternoons are like being in a sauna with no fans to circulate the air and not even the luxury of a shower to cool off by.  And to think that in England people actually pay to sit in little rooms and sweat!

At the time I wrote: "So much news but I can't write half of it down because it's sights and smells".   I'm planning on doing a better job of recording our adventure to India this time around.

Leaving Switzerland

We set off from Switzerland on Saturday to fly to San Diego (the first stop on our whistlestop tour of 4 countries this summer).  Our lovely friend Sue had given us some money to treat ourselves at the airport.  We bought a connector to attach the iPad and an SD card but then also had some left and were persuaded to try a new drink:  white wine with vodka, guava, orange and peach.  It was presented really nicely and we were tempted - so we bought a bottle to drink when we got to San Diego to celebrate the next stage of our lives.

Packing Up and Shipping Out

Last week was a pretty tough one for me.  My family and I (and 4 packers) packed up our life here in Switzerland into 160 boxes and these were loaded into a 20 foot container which is now sailing down the Rhine to Rotterdam and in 10 days time it will be loaded onto a container ship and will set sail for Nhava Sheva, in Mumbai.  It will be sometime in early August before we see our belongings again and until that time we will each be living out of one suitcase.  Sometimes it's good to reduce right down to the essentials - it helps you to appreciate what is important.

Moving from Switzerland, the country that for many years has been top of the quality of life index ratings, to Mumbai where the population of the city is 3 times the size of the country where I'm currently living and over a million people in the city live in slums, is likely to be a challenge - I think of it in terms of night and day.  I'm buoyed up by the support I've got from my new school, by the excitement of returning to the cutting edge of education and of educational technology, by the feeling that I'm valued and that I can make a contribution.  Actually I'm more excited by the possibilities of this move than by any move I've ever made before (and I've lived in 7 countries).
Today as I was packing I was feeling quite depressed.  I wrote a post on Facebook about how I felt seeing my entire life being packed in to boxes.  This is the reply I got:

Your whole life doesn't fit into boxes, it never could. Your life is all over this great world in the hearts and minds of your precious family and all the kids you've taught and all the people you've worked with. Bits and pieces fit into the boxes but your life...never.

A tale of two cities

It has been more than a decade since India's wealthiest state, Maharashtra, sought to purge a colonial legacy by rebranding its flagship city as Mumbai.  The receding of colonial empires and the fall of Soviet communism sprinkled new names across the world map.  If the outside world still wonders what to call it, it is because the city itself has no answer.  It's hard to find Bombay on the lips of a bureaucrat or the address of a parcel.  It is equally hard to catch a taxi driver or investment banker uttering Mumbai.  Bombay and Mumbai have become indicators of the city's kaleidoscopic diversity:  Mumbai is what you write, Bombay is what you say;  air tickets say Mumbai, but luggage tags read BOM.

Bombay is the city of seekers.  It has long attracted outsiders - merchants and migrants, Christians and Muslims, Indians from all over.  Bombay is open-armed and rootless.  Mumbai, by contrast, is the city of the rooted, of working-class Maharashtrians and of the political establishment they elect.  Mumbai is the commercial and financial capital of India.  The Bombay Stock Exchange is the oldest in Asia and the second largest in the world.  Mumbai is home to 40% of India's wealthiest business people, and real estate is more expensive than Manhattan.  The world's first billion dollar home was built in Mumbai.  On the other hand Dharavi is Asia's largest slum - home to over a million people.  Over half of the people of Mumbai live in slums, in one-room tenements.

Bollywood began in Mumbai in 1899, about a decade before Hollywood.  Bollywood makes 1,000 films a year, double that of Hollywood.

(text taken from Love Mumbai by Fiona Caulfield)

Making new friends

Often you have to wait until you arrive at a new school to make contact with the other teachers there.  However going to visit ASB in February gave me the opportunity to meet with the other new tech coordinators who will be moving there too.  I'll be on the new campus, and Jim and Sharon will be coordinating the tech in the middle and high schools on the existing campus.  We'll all be living in the same apartment complex too.

First glimpse of my new school

I went to visit the school in February - I was so lucky that ASB agreed to fly me out to Un-Plugged and I could see for myself what a dynamic place this will be to work.  One morning I went to visit the new campus - the building site!  Yes, this is really going to be ready by 1st August and opening with 500 or so students.

This is the architect's model for Kohinoor city.  Right in the front of the model is a new shopping centre and then behind that (the building with the pool on the roof) is the school.  The buildings behind the school are the sports club and hotel, and further up the street the large building is a hospital.  I'll be living in one of the apartments here.

 This is what the school looks like inside.  Lots of open spaces.  The architect's plans show how this will eventually look.  No classrooms as such.  Glass dividers that can be moved around.  "Campfire" spaces for whole group work, "watering holes" for students to work together in small groups, "cave spaces" for individual work.  A real 21st century design for learning.

First visit to Mumbai

First impressions of Mumbai were that I'd come to a completely different country than the India I remember from 30 years ago.  Of course it is very different, and of course I was never in Mumbai.  The photo above is taken in Juhu looking out over the Indian Ocean.  

A meal out in a great restaurant by the sea.  I noticed amazing sunrises and sunsets - a big sun in an orange sky.  I think the colour could be something to do with the pollution haze though :(

Bandra - greener than I imagined and lots of tuk-tuks which reminds me of Bangkok.

Getting Ready to Move

Christmas 2011

Three years ago we were living in Bangkok, and in pretty much the same situation as we are in now - sorting out, throwing out, packing up.  In the middle of the chaos of this moving business I looked back to see what it was like before, and surprisingly I seem to be more organized than I was then.  This time three years ago I hadn't organized a shipping company, hadn't booked flights and hadn't visited the country that was to be my home for the coming three years.  This time around I've done all of these things!

Christmas 2011

But things will be different.  This is the first time in over twenty years that both children will be away from home.  I'm facing the prospect of the "empty nest" with mixed feelings.  How wonderful it will be to be independent.  How much I will miss being a mum on a daily basis.  It seems like the whole family is on the move.  Joal to work "somewhere" for Lloyds, Rachel to Scotland to university and Mum to sheltered accommodation near my brother Kevin.  The last time we were all together was last Christmas - but now we are scattering to the winds.  Joal will spend the summer in the USA as a camp counsellor, Rachel and I will be on the other side of the USA in California at the ISTE Conference, Lex will be back in Holland visiting friends and family.  Next Christmas, the next opportunity we have to be together, seems an awful long way away.

Mumbai will certainly be different from Switzerland.  I'm exchanging rural beauty for a thriving metropolis.  I'm exchanging a work experience that has been less than positive for a new job at one of the best and most forward looking schools in the world.  It's a time of change, of new possibilities, of a new life.  Follow along and share my new adventures in India!