From Varanasi till Mumbai - a story about home, school, party and holidays

Sorry for being so lazy the last weeks...but here is my update:


Varanasi turned out to be a very nice place! From our rooftop we could see the Ghats and most parts of Varanasi: all those old, small dirty houses, the little lanes between the houses, which are too small for cars or rikshaws and in which we always got lost because they are worse than a labyrinth, and on the sky we could see hundreds of Kites and all the little kids standing on the roofs of the houses playing with those kites. The people were all so nice and the whole atmosphere of the city was great. Only our massage was a little bit less good than expected, but well, there are worse things in life.

After 5 days of basically doing nothing and two weeks traveling I had to say good bye to Tobi, David, Julian and Drea: I had to go back to Mumbai, because my studies were supposed to start on September 20 and the others wanted to start their journey into the mountains in the north…
I took a riksha to the airport; a 45 minutes ride through Varanasi and the area around it. On roads full of bumps, cows, people, four-, three-, and two-wheelers. And while I passed shops with chai tea drinking people in front of them, fields of tee and herbs in the background, people carrying big buckets full of stuff on their heads, kids playing with goats or cycling their bikes and while sometimes the bollywood music- trance-mixes, coming out of big speakers from the shops, underlined the whole scenery I smelled it: The smell of Tea and flowers and herbs I always thought India smells like the whole time and I’ve been waiting for since I started my journey. This moment I was so happy… I wanted to hug the Riksha driver in front of me, but was luckily still able to stop myself ;) .

The airport was scary, funny and fascinating at the same time: It was somewhere in the middle of nowhere and instead of a building it was made out of something like construction containers. Inside I felt like being sent back to the past: Almost no computers, the scale for your luggage was approx from 1950, the x-ray machines for the bags were rusty, the security locks in front of the doors were small locks they bought in some street shop I guess and when you left the airport to enter the airplane, they didn’t scan your ticket, but checked your name on a paper-list. I loved it! :)
A week later I will have learned that there is a description for those moments: TII – This Is India ;) (greetings to HOMIE and Tim).

After a 2 hours flight I arrived in Mumbai. It was a Friday and I realized that I won’t be able to register for my school before my actual classes start on that upcoming Monday. Hmm. I didn’t even know in which class I was, what time they start and in which room. Also I still didn’t register my Visa, which I should have done within the first 2 weeks after my first arrival in India, but well… I ignored all that and just went to school on Monday to see what will happen. – nothing. The people in my school were very helpful and within a few little hours I knew everything. Within those hours I approx made 10000 mistakes, caused by cultural confusion I guess: I don’t exactly remember what those were (my brain carefully erased them to prevent long term feelings of embarrassment), but what I remember is that I was a big joke. Anyway, I got my Whistling Woods T-shirt and my ID. Good enough, eh?

My classes started on the Tuesday after. I’m in a class with 5 other Indian guys and all I do from Monday-Friday (sometimes Saturday) 9.30-17.30 (sometimes till 19.30) is editing. Editing, editing, editing. Every week we get another topic (like continuity, time & space in cinema or sound) and then have different workshops and exercises related to that topic. Its good. And if everything works out I will soon start with an extra color correction course for apple color. …I just have to see WHEN I do that because apparently I am not allowed to skip any of the normal classes, which means that I would have to do those extra classes on every evening and Saturday that I’m usually free. Hahahaha, NO WAY! Well soon I will talk to them and try to convince them that I can skip something… I mean: I’m an exchange student…come on! I’m supposed to have lots of free time… no?
With my class itself I don’t have any contact really… I don’t even know the names from three of them. And that’s more than half of the class ;) . The problem is that our class is so little and they are all Indians and they speak Hindi. 80% of the time. …Even some of the teachers sometimes. With one of the teachers I am not even sure if that’s actually a teacher or, if not, what exactly she is. Her name is Anita (I think) and within the last 4 weeks I’ve heard her talking English TWICE. But I’m getting used to it… we also have a class once a week that is called “Film Appreciation”. What we basically do in that class is watching a movie. Well, the last film we watched was “Da Bang”, an Indian movie in Hindi – without subtitles. Great! Very international this “Whistling Woods International” ;)
But don’t think I don’t like my school. Besides this whole language problem and the classes that are so many, that I almost have no free time, I’m having a good time. Most people are very nice, the students I know outside my class speak English and are great, the teachers are very helpful if you have a problem with something and they take their time to explain things to you (different than some characters in Breda; I mean, come on, they are organizing some private lessons for me only because I wanted to learn how to use apple color, how cool is that? And how big is the chance that would happen at NHTV?), there is lunch in the cafeteria that costs ¼ of what it would cost at NHTV and, hey, we had a leopard on our premises :)

Mumbai in general is nice. There is this constant smell in the air, which is a mix of too many people, too many animals, restaurants, rubbish, excrements, humidity, spices, emissions and, when we come close to Royal Palms, the place where we live, the air adds some cow-flavor to it as well. …somehow all together it smells like “home”. :)

During my first week in Mumbai we had a party at our place: Kenz’ Birthday party. We had people from India, Angola, England, Holland, Germany and America over and were all dancing, drinking and having fun until 7.00 in the morning.
But those parties can also end slightly different, as we saw, when we all went to a party in our neighbor-building: it was not even later than 23.30 nor we were listening to loud music, when the police suddenly stood in the flat and told us to all line up in the hallway. They took us to the police station and gave us an inspiring speech about what to do and what not to do as a student. They said we should be proud and happy to study at Whistling Woods International and should live our parent’s dream, instead of partying (aha). The cops gave us girls some dirty looks and then they finally drove us back to the building. ..The next day I heard, that the police only came, because the guard of the building lied and told the police some guy from the party slapped him and the girls got raped… What a liar. Well T.I.I., eh? ;)

Besides that we go to clubs pretty much every weekend. They are nice… different, but nice :) . They play a mix of Bollywood and some “modern” music, and all the people in there are dancing; nobody just stands in the corner. The Djs are not the best ones, but at least the atmosphere is nice and that’s all that counts, right?
And what I like the most is being partying with some locals like Push and Ansh that know where to get good food at 5.00 in the morning that comes out of nowhere and is being served on top of your car trunk, or people like Dominic that work in a club and let you in for free, or friends like Nana and Kenz, that create chaos when its about planning in which club to go, but know how to party once they are there and know rich people which have the easiest jobs ever for Nana, Jessy and me, or Americans like Tim, that try to sneak a free drink through us girls, or random guys that follow your Rikshaw on a scooter, hoping for a good party, or guards that would rather let you sleep on the street than letting you into your friend’s building at night, or...

In between we also went to Goa for a week. First only Jaakko, Jessy, Tim and me stayed in Palolem, where we had to survive our first day as a “dry day” because it was Gandhi’s Birthday until 00:00. Also we met a nice Indian couple and spent some good-times-hours with playing Finnish card games. On the second day we moved to Baga to catch up with Homi, Nishant, Varun and Shasya. Actually we planned to stay there for only one or two nights, but then we got stuck somehow… we met Jesus in some Hippie bar, went on our self-made pub-crawl, met new people, went to a spice farm close to Ponda to sit on an elephant, did not buy bracelets or necklaces on the beach (only Jessy), went paragliding for AT LEAST 20 seconds ;) , had fun with the waves in the water, watched people searching for visuals, checked out the beach in Arambol and, yeah then we had to go back already: with an AC luxury night bus back to Mumbai J . There the rest of Team India (David, Julian und Drea) visited me! We went to Elephanta island, which has some great caves (haha) and we enjoyed some more decadence at some night clubs, before they already had to leave me again…



In short: I like India :)