Sun? In Mussoorie?

It has surprisingly been good weather here lately.  It has only truly been pouring during the nights.  I woke up at 4am yesterday to pounding rain on my tin roof.  I fell back asleep praying it would stop by the time I had to wake up at 6:30…it did. It has been a foggy but almost rain free week.  It makes me so much happier to be able to walk in the market, sit outside, and enjoy the mountains while I still can.   However, all the locals say it will start to get really, really, bad once August hits.  I am hoping to get out of here mid way through August. 

I have had 8 AM classes for the past 2 weeks.  It has been miserable.  My first four weeks here I didn’t have classes until the afternoon, so it has been an adjustment waking up early.  I wake up early enough to have breakfast and chai at char dukan, half way up to school, before finishing the half hour walk.  The shops are just opening when I arrive, and the owners (who live above their shops with their families) are preparing for the day.  The grandmother who lives at the one shop I always go to is always coming back from the temple and cleaning herself up as I wait for my chai.  The first few days she walked past me with a bucket of yellow liquid and I never really noticed.  She just dumps it over the bridge down the mountain.  It wasn’t until I actually thought about it that I realized, as I was just waking up and waiting for my chai, this old woman was wafting her giant pee bucket right past me.  I can’t wait for next week; I requested afternoon classes again.    

There is no municipality up here, so no one collects garbage.  There are some cans around the mountain that we were instructed to put our trash from our rooms in.  So, once a week or so I carry my little bag to one of the cans.  It wasn’t until a few days ago that I realized the cans are simply emptied down the mountain behind the can.  I watch in the mornings as men sweep the roads (where people just throw their trash) and dump it over the side of the mountain.  It’s appalling; the bridge near char dukan has an enormous mountain of trash under it.  I can only imagine what this place will look like in fifteen years with trash piling up everywhere.  The amount of plastic bottles is atrocious; the way people litter is horrible, and the fact that no one really seems to care is the worst part.  We have a compost pile at our house, but for the most part I have tried to minimize any other waste. 

Classes are going well, as always.  I can see myself burning out a bit as we get into much harder material.  I am excited though, because my friends turn to me in the bazaar when they don’t understand, and I am happy that I can have conversations with locals and actually fully understand what they are saying.  Just a few more weeks left in Mussoorie, hopefully the sun continues to shine!