The Snows

Posting Sunday afternoon here ...

The snows have been visible from the chukkar the last few mornings ..so this morning I woke up early & headed to the top of the hill ... was there by 8 am.  The snows were glorious!  I walked around the back side of the chukkar between Sisters' Bazaar and Kellogg Church .. and then on the front side all the way to the end at the 'new' Lal Tibba viewpoint near Childers Lodge.


These are the views!  My camera is not fancy, but these are reasonable shots of the snows. The highest peak is Bandar Punch (ca 20,000+ feet).

After my walk I attended the service at St. Paul's Church .. built pre-1850 and recently beautifully restored. There were about 30 people at the service.  The church is part of the Church of North India, a union protestant organization.

While on my walk I blew Tom's ashes into the wind ... some towards the snows and some to the hillsides where he liked to walk.

Food

I've had the good fortune of being 'invited out of boarding' for a couple of meals recently.  Thursday evening I had dinner with a British couple who have been here about 10 years and happen to live in the suite  in Upper Woodstock that our family lived in for much of the time when I was young.  They have fixed up the suite quite nicely, and there is now a big sky-light into the big central room where the fireplace is .. so it is much more cheerful. The big old buffet that we had when living there is still in its spot. We had a dinner of poached fish [purchased frozen] with cream sauce, peas, and 'chips,' with a pudding for desert.  Also at the dinner was a fellow who has come to teach English for just one year.  He is a house guest until his suite is finished at Mt. Hermon.  I walked back to the school after dark with the help of street lights, a torch [flashlight], and motor-memory of the path.

Friday noon I was invited to dine with the A. family at Oakville.  They had also invited 4 women from the old Anglo-Indian community here .. a couple of whom I knew as they had worked at the hospital or the school.  We all had such a good visit and there were many interesting conversations going on simultaneously ... I was sorry I couldn't listen in on all of them! It was a grand lunch of rice, keema & karela curry, pumpkin bhujiya, raita and puris, with cake for desert.  I was quite stuffed and realized that even with all the walking I am doing it is going to be hard to keep from gaining weight.  Afterwards I went up to have tea with M&S .. and then to Prakash's store where I bought a carton of guava juice, an instant soup packet, and a packet of mixed nuts & raisins.

The food at the school is decent, though over the recent holiday it was mostly rice and dal for lunch and supper. At breakfast there always available is cold cereal, bread (and a toaster with which to toast it), butter, peanut butter & jelly, tea or coffee .. and sometimes suji (hot cereal), scrambled eggs or sc. tofu or cheese, potato patties, and this morning - parathas! Thursday noon when the parents were here for conferences there was a nice chicken curry and mattar-tofu.  Last eve I was not very hungry after the big lunch, but had a chapatti (how could I pass that up?) and some tandoori-style baked fish that was quite good, and an apple.

The Quad

The Quad [for Quadrangle] is the main center of the lower school campus, school offices, and dining facilities. Yesterday [Thursday .. still haven't gotten some time setting changed] the Quad was set up for parent-teacher conferences in the morning.  It was quite a tamasha [event/showcase/festival etc.].

The Quad without any activity.

 The Quad during the conferences

Other school building scenes - the oldest section of the school, built in the 1830s when it was a private hunting lodge; the lower ramp and business offices; the ramp up to the high school; the main high school classsroom building.

Cemetery

Yesterday - Wednesday - I walked up to the top of the hill and had a nice lunch with M&S at Mt. Hermon.  Then we went to the cemetery on the back side of the chukkar beyond Kellog Church. We shouted through the locked gate for the caretaker, and he let us in after I said which grave I wanted to see.  Then his daughter (or granddaughter?) who speaks very good English, along with another young man, whacked their way through the stinging nettle up to the top right-hand corner, where I knew the marker to be.  We finally found the marker - for a brother, James Brookins Warner, who died as an infant in 1947 - and for my father, James Nickerson Warner, whose ashes were interred there after his death in 1975.  I sprinkled a small handful of my mother's ashes on the site.

The cemetery is quite neglected - at least the older, upper part. It is all grown over with stinging nettle and many of the gravestones are broken up .. and most impossible to find in all the plant growth.  More recent burials have been either on the first level (probably on top of mid-19th century graves) or below the chukkar road. The A. family had met that morning to add Bob's ashes to the family plot not too far from the gate.

 We also got a good view of a Pine Marten [martes flavigula], relative of the mink, walking along the side wall of the cemetery. I think I only saw one once when I lived here as a child.

Odds & Ends

Here are some odds and ends from the last couple of days  --

I finally changed my computer over to reflect local time ... 10.5 hours ahead of EDT.  Now the postings will reflect the true date.

Monkeys last night on roof were Rhesus .. this morning were langurs .. such pretty creatures!

Also last night much thunder, rain, and some hail.

M&S have arrived and are at Mt. Hermon.  I shall go have lunch with them today.

Walked down to Midlands and back yesterday afternoon ... made it back up the hill from Ridgewood  in about 15 minutes which I think is pretty good for an old codger!

The lemon verbena bush is still growing at the corner of ZigZag cottage.

Suji [FYO - a toasted cream of wheat cereal] for breakfast this morning .. my favorite!

Some staff trickling back to offices today .. by this evening all should have returned as classes pick up again tomorrow.

Monkeys and trash

There are two types of monkeys on the hillside.  One is native to this area, the langur [in nature programs in the US I've heard this pronounced LANGer .. but here it is pronounced lungGOOR]. These are large gray primates that travel in the treetops and have learned to show dominance by leaping noisily over the tin roofs.  The other monkey is the Rhesus macaque which has spread to this area, but is more common on the plains.  The rhesus is seen as a pest .. they hang around the school kitchen and will sneak in through an open window to get food inside the house.  Much as some places in the US use Border Collies to scare away Canada Geese, the school now hires a man with a couple of langurs to scare off the rhesus monkeys!  I'll post a picture when I get a good one.

The trash bins around the school and along the chukkar have been designed to be monkey proof - otherwise there would be a big mess & trash collection would be useless.  The Landaur hillside is looking much better in terms of trash collection compared to 15 years ago .. not so much plastic on the khud [hillside].  However, there is a LOT of trash plastic along railroad tracks. One of the occupations of the dalits (so low in status as to be 'below' the whole caste system) is as rag-pickers who go hrough the trash and sort out by type ... plastic is separated and presumably can be sold to recyling venues some place.

[just as I am writing this one or the other of the monkeys is running across the roof above my head .. unfortunately some rhesus]

Walking alone

It struck me last evening that the other day when I walked to the bazaar, that was probably the first time in my life I had walked there alone.  My visits here since school days were with either George or Tom.  During school days, as young females, we were NEVER permitted to go anywhere alone.  We always had to go in groups and until our senior year, with a teacher as chaperone. It was so liberating our senior year when we could go to the 'buz' in groups of two or three with no chaperone.

I was wandering around the school property after dinner last night & trying out various paths and nooks and crannies .. and found myself hesitant to go certain places.  Then I remembered that in the youngest grades there were certain areas that were very strictly OUT OF BOUNDS and one could get into great trouble if one went into forbidden areas.

The freedom to move about is in some ways much the same but in most ways quite different.  This is the one of the few places in India that one can go about an obviously non-Indian and not attract attention.  This was still the case when I went into the bazaar the other day.  However, security measures are vary prominent throughout the school grounds.  At the Woodstock gate is a guard house with uniformed guard .. and another on the back side behind the kitchens.  There is high fencing right below ZigZag path and above the Media Center and Parker Hall area, as well as at the bottom of the stairs going from the Quad towards the lower dorms.  The gate there has been locked during the holidays. On the hillside there are markers denoting the edges of Woodstock property .. here is a photo of one near Edgehill.

There is also so much more traffic on Tehri Road.  It seems some sort of election is coming up, and in the late afternoons and on weekends cars with loud speakers blaring go tearing around the curves. This all makes it less inviting to walk that way. [FYO the traffic is autos and jeeps, motor cycles & scooters, small buses and trucks, and still the occasional mule or donkey as freight carrier.]