Sunday is a day of rest and blogging

A sense of ending has come over me in the last few days. We are busy making plans for our departure, exchanging email addresses with new friends and finishing our gift shopping. We have six more classes this coming week. The focus will change from backbends to pranayama (breath work).

Even though I couldn't participate fully in last week's backbending “extravaganza” I know that my poses have changed and opened. I was not feeling well for a couple of the classes and had to sit them out. But the classes I did take were fabulous and pushed me to my limits. And the corker (as our new English friend would say) was that today I got an amazing private lesson this morning from a teacher who shall go unnamed. She took advantage of all the work done this past week, and zeroed in on the areas of my body that are still stubborn, stuck and unwilling. She gave me some insight into what needs to happen so I have some work to do.

Karen had a major breakthrough- she accomplished “dropping back” from standing into a backbend. She was very excited to have achieved this milestone, something she hasn't done since she was 14!

We are enjoying teaching our Spanish flatmate English sayings. His favorites so far are "pedal to the metal" and "easy on the eyes". I have discovered that while English knowledge is required to take classes here, the level of proficiency varies. Some students can speak only haltingly but can understand quite well, while others are fluent. I suspect that there are also those who really don't understand much English at all - they must be following along as best as they can.

Pune is preparing for the Ganesh festival. Marigold garlands festoon store fronts and rickshaws. Strings of lights are being hung and animated elephant statues (Ganesh shrines) are appearing everywhere. Large scaffolding structures are being erected in the middle of busy intersections for more displays. The traffic is already chaotic – it will be interesting to see how much more congestion will be created by these towers. I am not sure of the date of the festival, but I am sure it will be soon. We hope to get some pictures to share.

After a week of no power load shedding, we are back on 3-5 hours a day of no power. Our building does have a generator to run a few things, but it is noisy. Just before the load shedding began the paper ran a story that there was enough power and that no more power outages were expected. This is just part of the India experience!