Creative Alert!

Creativity Blog is taking over from here for one of my classes. So If I'm posting a bunch of photos and talking about them in an artsy way... bare with me!

Gandhi's House

The man himself.
So this is where the "speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil" originated!? Gandhi had some monkey sculptures of it & thought it made a cool drawing.
My camera battery died so I took the time to do a drawing of Gandhi's house. Some of the Indian tourists/locals started to come up and talk to me when I was drawing. I should have put a hat out...but it seemed disrespectful to Gandhi's ways.

The Sun Temple, Adalaj well

This was a well 5 stories down.


A painting of the sun temple.
The sun temple "pool" where Hindus wash their hands/take baths before entering the temple.
The Sun Temple, Hindu Temple, 1,000 years old!
Dogs tend to find shade in India...
A little encounter on the highway.
What we deal with when we travel.
This guy hangs out on the roof of our dorm. He's about 4 ft tall when he stands. I call him Abu.

The Old City

We went on a heritage walk through the "Old City" in Ahmedabad a few days ago. (MICA where our campus is in the "new city". The first temple is a Muslim temple & the second, more colofrul one is a Hindu temple (see practicing Monks in orange). The market was neat to see, but nothing unique enough to purchase. It was mostly food they were selling. Everyone was really friendly and wanted their picture taken! I really felt like a foreigner here, a lot of the people have never seen a white person.

I have a lot more photos on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/?sk=messages&tid=1227270581292#!/album.php?aid=2050636&id=1307730065

I'm at this school called MICA (Mudra Institute of Communications Ahmedabad)

http://www.mica-india.net/

It's a graduate school and there's about 500 students here from different of India. They are all really friendly and smart!

Last night was the first time it rained in Ahmedabad in TWO YEARS...you can imagine the excitement of the students. We heard all of this yelling and chanting and went outside. All of the students were dancing and splashing around in the rain. We decided to join them and got dunked in 2 feet of water! SOOO MUCH RAIN. But it was a blast & they taught us some awesome Bollywood dance moves. We even listened to some US music: Pitbull, Shakira, Black Eyed Peas. (but I like their tunes better). The only bad part was when we got back to our rooms they were flooded and bugs everywhere -- eeeek!

Travel

Me, Eve (roomate), & Andrew in Frankfurt airport. 8am beers (hey we were jet lagged)

36 hours of traveling and we're finally here!

The route:
Kansas City--> Dallas June 28th (1.5 flight)
Dallas-->Newark, NY (Saw the New York sky line for the first time...phenomenal). June 29th (3 hr flight+ 2 hr layover)
Newark-->Frankfurt (8 hr flight + 2 hr layover+my first GERMAN beer!)
Frankfurt--> Ahmedabad (8 hr flight+Invictus+Avatar+The Rebound & Bollywood film "London Dreams"= a neck cramp)



So we arrived in Ahmedabad airport at 9pm. After customs & witnessing an airport fight between the locals, we made it to MICA. When I stepped off the plane I knew I was some place foreign. The air is thick here, much much thicker than Texas heat. It smells also. A mixture of dirt, India food, BO & cow dung. The bus ride through the city of Ahmedabad was humbling... I thought I'd seen homeless people in LA. Here there are people literally sleeping outside every 50 yards on the side of the street. Not to mention we saw a couple stray cows & camels. It was a 20 minute bus ride to the campus from the airport and it was silent, we were all shocked.