it's been a while

Wow… it’s been almost a month and a half since I last updated. I’ve diligently kept my new photoblog (http://eric365.wordpress.com) up to date, but I’ve been on the slacker side over here. Why? Well to be honest, things have just been kind of slow. Mid June rolled around the most of the students rolled out of town. A week or so later the clouds rolled in over the mountains and the rain started up. And it rained and rained. For all of June and first part of July my language school was closed. It seems like this city just slowed down to a creeping crawl.

I planned to get away and head north with a friend to his hometown for a while, but things got tense in that area of the country, travel shut down, and it just wasn’t going to be safe. So we stayed here.

We’ve done some fun things for sure though. Let’s see:

We had Prem’s boys over for a slumber party.

We took a day and went up to the nearby hill station when Lindsay’s friends came into town.

We learned how to make momos at Prem’s house in honor of my birthday (and I turned 23).

And I got a new expansion for Catan, so we’ve been played it a lot.

That’s the sort of things that have kept me occupied over the last few weeks.

This has also just been a good time of refreshment for me. In the beginning it was honestly a little frustrating. I had been SO busy for the previous couple of months that I didn’t really know what to do with myself. After a while though I realized that having some down time was good, and I’ve used it as a time to get myself ready for the busy school year that’s to come. I’ve done a fair bit of reading and relaxing, spent time encouraging the friends who’ve stayed here in town, and tried to spend time working on my language.

That being said, students are arriving back in town this week, so the pace of things will be picking up a lot from here on.

And with things being busier, I’ll hopefully do a better job of keeping you update on how life is going here on the subcontinent.

-एरिक