11 hours to departure… Uh. Well, before I start making blog entries about the trip of this year I thought I should just make a small entry about the last month of my last trip!

As you probably know I spent the last month of my trip last year in the state of Rajasthan in India were I did some volunteer teaching. 3 hours from Jaipur there is a 'city' called Lalsot, 20 min out of that is a village called Billona Kalan and 10 min outside that one was our camp site. It was a temporary camp with brick huts covered with cow pooh and straw roofs. Please read this with an emphasis on temporary!! The electrical connection was not impressive and that is the reason why I was unable to make any blog entries the last month - in the time I was in the camp we probably had power 25% of the time… Max… Which meant rarely hot water for our morning rinse (performed sitting on a tiny plastic stool pouring water over ones head using a plastic cup) until they started boiling water for us, And which also meant absolutely nothing to do after 6pm where the sun went down and it became pitch black… Sometimes we had batteries for flashlights and for loudspeakers for music but sometimes we just sat around in the dark talking. Thankfully, we got along great and the people there made it all worthwhile. Also, we found great pleasure in the Indian beers and 5 o'clock quickly got dubbed 'beer o'clock'. So, we almost panicked when the election kicked in which meant a confiscation of alcohol in the city for bribe!!! Argh… No power and no beer!!! We quickly solved that problem, phew!

Anyway, the teaching was challenging but joyous. The kids were wonderful and adorable! I learned a lot about myself - my ambition level for one. I would very much like to do something similar again and then try to relax more. I had the 'idea' that I should prepare something new for every day - and after three weeks trying to teach them the difference between ABCD one tends to run out of ideas!! But that wasn't required at all. We also learned to relax somewhat and started reading stories for them - we would read it out loud in English, a staff member from the camp would translate and I would 'act out' the scenes. Great fun and the children loved it - especially my actingJ Quite gratifying he he! All in all it was a fantastic experience and I feel that I have grown as a person from it - what more can a person ask for then?

This time it is of for Laos and Cambodia with Anders - just backpacking around and enjoying the countries. Yipee!