Thursday, September 17th... Monsoon in Kodai!

Thursday was our first full day in Kodaikanal. Its definitely much colder and rainier than expected! The warm coffee was a nice wake-up tho! We had planned to take a driving tour of the town, but this was cancelled due to poor visibility from the rain clouds. Instead, we spent the morning exploring and walked all the way around the big lake in the center of town. Though cloudy and foggy out, the natural beauty was clear! We stopped to take pictures of beautiful white trumpet flowers, lily pads on the lake, views of the surrounding mountains, couples taking peddle boats around the lake, and the cute dogs napping on the sidewalk... It's very peaceful here, and a popular off the beaten track tourist destination for Indians. We went back to the Kodaikanal Int'l School for lunch with some of the staff there. It was nice for us to have a whole separate level for a vegetarian-only cuisine! Paige, who's been eating only vegetarian food too, and I are glad that we probably chose the best country in the world to be vegetarians in!
It was nice to be at the school, and funny to think that the students there are completing the same IB program way up here in this hill station as we did at AIS in Atlanta! As Barbara told us, the school tries to keep the total of the student body half Indian and half non-Indian, and half Christian and half non-Christian. Besides Indian, other common nationalities are Korean, Thai, Bangladeshi, and some Europeans on exchange semesters or years.
We had a nice conversation with the school's Christian chaplain who's from Madurai about how the missionaries founded this school for their children and chose the location so that they could escape the heat and mosquitoes of the rest of South India. He was a very funny guy. He loved to laugh about what he saw on American television here, like CNN. (ATL represent) The fact that Obama killing a fly made the news made all the teachers we were eating lunch with nearly fall out of their chairs laughing. "Perhaps flies are rare there." One teacher speculated, while everyone laughed. The Chaplain studied to be a Presbyterian minister, but the school is non-denominational, Protestant. To this day, Catholicism is the predominate religion in most hill stations in this area. They discussed being Christian Indians, where 3 percent of a billion is still a lot of people, yet a minority in a Hindu dominated country. We discussed Atlanta, and learned that the President of Coke is an alumni to this school! He was suspended when he went here though and there are many anti-coca-cola posters around the school, protesting their role in depleting India's drinking water and poisoning its people.
Following lunch, we decided to buy warmer clothes so that we wouldn't have to repeat being frozen like last night! While purchasing our warm shawls we got stuck in a massive rain storm. It seems as if our plan to arrive in late september to avoid the monsoons failed, as they are just arriving now! Nothing dries up in the mountains. Our books all curl up with the humid air and our hair stays wet for hours. The monsoons keep all the flowers beautiful, and hillside lush and green. We huddled together under our umbrella, borrowed from our friend Jason, and got were honked at aggressively as we tried to avoid the river running down one side of the road, and the mud splashing up from the trucks, all marked with 'Jesus saves,' 'God is great.' 'Honk!' No need to remind anyone to honk here. We were laughing though, at how silly we must look, trudging through the monsoon. The afternoon rains only appear to last for an hour or so, so perhaps next time we will just stop and relax somewhere rather than thugging it out in the rain. That seemed to be everyone elses plan as were the only people who appeared to be rushing through the rain.
We were happy to get back to our cottage though, and get our sweet, hot coffee from Rani, and wrap our newly purchased warm shawls around us. Rani's mother, Uma, was also there, smiling and wobbling her head at us. She's very sweet. Here people rarely nod or shake their heads, rather they just wobble their heads often. We're trying to learn, but Naman says you have to be Indian to ever master it. Sighhh.