British School in Tokyo Libraries
welcome
James Moloney, Australian Author
On Thursday, 8th December 2011 we are looking forward to welcoming the Australian author James Moloney to our Showa Libraries. As well as presenting to the children in Showa he will also be signing copies of his books in the Primary Library.
NO Coffee Morning in Shibuya
Friday, 9th December 2011
There will be no Coffee Morning in the Shibuya Library due to the PTA's Winter Wonderland Fair.
Christmas Extra Opening
Monday, 19th December
The Shibuya Library will be open as usual for the first day of the Christmas Holidays between 11:00 and 12:00 for everyone and their families from both sites. As usual there will be no limits as long as you can carry it home yourself. Everything will need to be returned on the first day back after the holidays (in any blue box on either site).
Happy Christmas Reading and enjoy the new year of the Dragon!
ALISON LESTER'S TRIP TO INDIA, 2009
Alison Lester, the Australian author, who has visited our school several times is currently touring India. She is sending us daily reports from trip giving us her impressions of everything she sees and does. As before with her trip to Antarctica, she inviting us to send pictures for her to use in a future exhibition to tour Australia. Your picture, based on her reports, needs to be in A4 format in black and white. Please hand your pictures into either library and Mr. Steven will send them down to Alison Lester when she gets back to Victoria. Don't forget your name and class on the back, please!
India Day 1: Friday, 27th November
I arrived in New Delhi yesterday and my first impression was of MANY cars. More than 20 million people live in New Delhi and it seems as if they are all on the road.
The traffic moves like a giant, slow school of fish, cars pushing in and out and everybody using their horns; toot, barp barp, bip bip bip, ta ta, it’s like an orchestra. Nobody appears to get angry; they just push a little bit and give way when they have to. One tiny silver car we passed was covered with tiny little dents, as though somebody had given it a good beating. My driver told me most of the taxis, trucks and buses run on gas, so the exhaust fumes aren't too bad, but it can take a long time to get anywhere. My friend Liz was stuck in a traffic jam once and her car didn't move an inch for two hours. I spent a lot of time on the road yesterday because I came in from the airport and then went to set up an exhibition of Are we there yet? at Bookaroo, a children's literature festival that's opening today at a beautiful arts venue on the outskirts of the city. I guess I was in the car for about five hours altogether but I was never bored because there was so much to see.
Amongst all the crazy cars, nudging past each other were little green and yellow three wheeler taxis, hundreds of motor bikes, some with a girl sitting sideways on the back, her beautiful sari waving behind like a flag, gravel trucks with teams of men standing in the tray, now and then a cow on the side of the road, a giant tractor pulling a trailer loaded with 20 metre lengths of steel rods that were dragging along the road, sending up showers of sparks, a man pushing his motor bike, with his two little boys on top, both wearing red beanies, a boy on his horse, standing still in the traffic amongst all the chaos, buses so full of people they were squashing out the windows, lots of bicycles some with enormous loads. I’ll list some of the things I saw people carrying on bicycles:
· eight gas bottles
· a stack of cardboard as big as a Volkswagen
· a monkey
· a sheet of glass
· bags of cement
· a pile of mattresses
· a stack of grass as big as a Volkswagen,
· 2 HUGE iron cooking pots
· a long piece of wrought iron fence ( this was two bikes )
· and a long length of storm water pipe.
The roadsides are crowded with people, wearing turbans, saris, groovy clothes, rags and a lot of patterned sweaters.
I’ll tell you more tomorrow.
With best wishes,
Alison
India Day 2: Saturday, 28th November
The traffic is still overwhelming but it’s not the same all over Delhi. Some sections of the city are bedlam, especially places where road works are going on. Most of the labour is done by hand and the people working on the road live right there, on the roadside, in makeshift tents and shelters, with their washing hanging on road dividers, cooking and sleeping with the traffic roaring by, just a metre or so away. Nobody is dressed in work clothes, as they would be in Australia. It looks as though they got up and dressed and then decided to do some construction work. Everybody is working, even little kids.
In other parts of the city the roads are straight and wide, with beautiful lawns on either side and rows of enormous trees. The traffic is quieter here too and there are not as many pedestrians.
There have been many cities built where Delhi now stands, most of them flattened in wars, but there are bits and pieces of some remaining.
The centre of Delhi was built by the British when they were here and it’s a huge space of boulevards and lawns with fabulous buildings of red and cream sandstone. These are the main government buildings and they're a mixture of classical western and Indian architecture.
It’s a very green city, trees everywhere, even in the dusty chaotic parts and there are some big green belts of jungle too.
I’m sorry, this is a pretty boring episode. I promise the next one will be better.
With best wishes,
Alison
India Day 3: Sunday, 29th November
Hi Everybody,
Sunday was an enormous day. After I finished work a car came for me and we set off for Agra, about 120 miles south of Delhi. I wanted to go see the Taj Mahal. My driver was a nice young man called Ram Singh who didn't speak much English but he drove very safely. It took 5 hours to get to Agra and the traffic was as crazy as it was in Delhi, but more spread out. At times we sped along at 100km per hour and other times we crawled through big cities, jammed up against buses, motorbikes, tractors and cars.
A lot of the countryside looked wrecked, with the buildings in ruins and the ground wasted and weedy, but other parts were beautiful fields of canola and crops. I hardly saw any wire fences, most of the fields were bordered with stone, brick or earthen walls, many of them covered with large Hindi writing, advertisements, Ram Singh told me.
We passed modern multi story housing estates and tiny mud huts, way too small for a person to stand up in. Little straw huts were dotted about too, with pointy roofs like the three little pigs' house.
The tiny three wheeled taxis were on the highway too, bursting with passengers. As well as the inside being full, these ones had a back facing seat with four or five people squashed up together. Sometimes a group of men in turbans, sometimes women in saris, sometimes tiny babies were being held on somebody's lap in this precarious spot.
There were hundreds of lorries, some full of people, some carrying cargo and everybody was tooting their horn. there was always a surprise; a troop of monkeys ducking on to the road between cars to pick up nuts from the road, a man sleeping RIGHT on the side of the road, a cow eating grass on the central median strip as the traffic flew by, a stall selling motorbike helmets in the middle of nowhere ... most people looked as though they had travelled a long way.
We got to Agra after dark which was a shame as my hotel room looked out to the Taj Mahal, still it was a beautiful room, with the walls painted gold and red. My bed only had a bottom sheet, no top one, which got me wondering about who had been in the bed before me. I made a top sheet from a shawl and it felt good to have that between me and the germs of the previous occupant. I woke during the night to a massive Mexican wave of dog howling that rolled around the horizon like a thunderstorm. Later I heard wild wedding music and I will finish by telling you a little bit about weddings.
Ram Singh told me that there are many weddings right now because the stars are in the right alignment. The groom rides to the wedding on a white horse while his bride waits for him, her prince, to arrive. It usually happens at night. I have passed a few weddings and it looks fabulous. A special wedding band accompanies the groom on his white horse, playing wild music and dancing like dervishes. They have fabulous spinning lights, a huge one on a wagon behind the groom and small ones all around him. It looks fabulous.
Better go, with best wishes,
Alison
India Day 4: Monday, 30th November
I got up at 5.30am and met Ram Singh and my Taj Mahal guide, Pradeep in the foyer. It was cold and misty and there were already plenty of tourists on the move, heading to see one of the most famous buildings in the world.
The Taj Mahal was built by the Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died while giving birth to their 14th child. It took 22 years to build and 20,000 people worked on it. It is made from marble from Rajasthan, turquoise from Persia and diamonds from central Asia.
Pradeep told me that before the building was finished the poor emperor was deposed by his own son, the wicked Aurangzeb (even his name sounds bad) and locked up at Agra fort, where he could see the Taj Mahal in the distance. He died there without ever going back to the beautiful mausoleum he had made for his beloved wife.
Even though there were many other people at the Taj Mahal, I didn't notice them because the place was so overwhelming. The main building sits on a platform and seemed to float above the ground. While I was there the fog rose up from the river behind and it really looked as though it was floating then. The gardens were lovely too; huge expanses of lawn and big trees with walkways underneath and the buildings around the Taj were spectacular as well. I had a good time taking photos of the Taj's reflections in the lotus pool and just watching it change as the sun came up, turning pink for a moment in the morning light. It was very peaceful and beautiful.
After a couple of hours though, it was time to go. I had to get back to Delhi in time to catch a plane to Kolkata, so I said goodbye to Pradeep and Ram Singh and I headed north. The traffic in Agra was crazy too and we passed a couple of camels being led right through the middle of the city. They had angular designs clipped into their coats and looked as though they had come from far away.
A funny thing happened late last night, after we had arrived in Kolkata. I was waiting for Eddy, my husband, to arrive. He was on a late flight, so I stayed up, writing and when I heard the door open I raced to meet him, in my floral pajamas ... but, instead of Eddy it was a stranger! The poor man looked terrified to see a big lady running at him and shot down the passage like a bullet. Eddy got in a bit later and this morning the staff were very apologetic. When the man and not Eddy arrived so late, they just assumed it was Eddy and brought him to my room!
Hasta la vista,
Alison
India Day 5: Tuesday, 1st December
Hi Everybody,
I just read through the emails I have already sent and one thing I haven't said, that I think all the time, is how busy everybody is, and how colourful. I think I might start wearing a sari when I get home, a different brilliant colour every day. They never get tight, either, if you get a bit fat you just wrap them around looser.
Kolkata is a bit like a beauty that has seen better days. Grand old crumbling apartment buildings with shuttered windows and balconies of wrought iron lace look over the streets, and there are some huge Victorian buildings built by the British during their reign. The streets aren't quite as chaotic as Delhi’s and there are trams here, like we have in Melbourne.
There are 35 thousand yellow taxis so the streets sometimes look as though they have been taken over by bumblebees. The taxis are an Indian car, the ambassador, square with rounded corners.
We are staying at the Taj Bengal, a hotel so posh that if you drop, say, a pencil, before you have a chance to pick it up, seven smiling staff will have scampered over to retrieve it and put it in your hand. If you have trouble with your internet connection you phone the cyber butler.
Yesterday we took a car and driver from the hotel and did a little tour. First stop was the riverside, where men were having their heads shaved and bathing in the river. As we stood there, feeling a bit embarrassed to have barged into their bathroom; I noticed something floating past, quite close. AAARRGGHHHH! It was a dead dog with two crows sitting on top, having lunch and a cruise at the same time.
We visited an old English church, St. Johns, surrounded by weeds and the caretaker played the organ. Eddy and Michael had a go too. It had huge pipes but the noise it made was moaning rather than musical. The walls of the church were lined with memorials to English men who had died fighting in India. One lost "his leg and his life". You couldn't help feeling sorry for them, even though they had no right to be bossing the Indians about.
I have been meaning to tell you about the cows, because I hope you will do some nice cow drawings. Cows are holy here, so they wander about as though they own the place. Sometimes you see one pulling a cart, but mostly they just hang about. They have a big hump, and the other morning in Agra, when it was cold, I saw a cow wearing a quilted rug, with a cut-out for her hump to poke through. I’ll send you a picture of one so you know what they look like.
There are lots of horses here in Kolkata too, mainly pintos. There is a huge park nearby and there are always horses there, sometimes tied up under the trees, eating from a nosebag, sometimes tethered or just roaming in the park, and sometimes pulling beautiful silver carts.
Better go, it’s late.
With best wishes,
Alison
Day 6: Wednesday, 2nd December
Hi Everybody,
Another day in Kolkata and it was a busy work one, so I don't have too much to write about. We did a school visit in the morning, big, old, four story buildings built around a quadrangle and thousands of little girls. In the junior school there was fifty to a class, and the rooms were tiny. The kids were packed in like sardines, sitting at little wooden desks. They looked as happy as larks, despite it being so squashy.
Afterwards we went to the University of Kolkata. It was on a busy street, teeming with pedestrians and lined with tiny books shops all selling one particular type of book (medicine, civil engineering, dentistry etc). There were stacks of books everywhere.
The university buildings were huge and very old, with wooden benches for the students in bare lecture rooms.
The traffic is still crazy and makes me tired, even though I’m a passenger. All the trucks have paintings on them and signs on the back, saying, please blow horn, or toot please. Eddy saw a three wheel taxi driver lean down and start his car with a pull cord, like a lawn mower. Maybe it was a two stroke engine. The buses are battered and bashed. They look as though the have tumbled down a ravine and then been put back on the road.
Yesterday afternoon we went to the Calcutta Cricket Club with Michael, who was giving a talk there. It was green and lush and completely surrounded by roads of roaring, tooting traffic behind high walls, Better go! Will write a better one tomorrow!
With best wishes,
Alison
Day 7: Thursday, 3rd December
Hi Everybody,
Thursday was another busy work day. We visited a girls' school first up and were met by some gorgeous girls who waved incense under our noses, put a dot between our eyes, gave Michael a bunch of flowers and put a HUGE garland of blossoms around my neck. The flowers were tuberoses and they smelt fabulous. I felt instantly important, as though I was a horse that had won the show jumping at the World Cup or perhaps a Maharahji. I’ll send a photo.
Hundreds of little girls crowded around me, all saying, very politely, “Hello Miss, Hello Miss!” and I thought for a while they were going to swamp me, but a teacher battled through the mob and shooed them off. There were 4 thousand girls at the school!
After that Asha ( who is looking after me ) took me to the government college of art to do a presentation and I spent a couple of hours there, talking to the students and looking at their lovely work. Their building was a huge colonial one too, with a leafy courtyard in the middle.
I have become a sari watcher and love their bright colours. Sometimes I’ve seen two women on the other side of the street, one in bright pink, and her friend wearing mustard and the colours just sing together. Turquoise, hot pink, orange, lime green, any colour you can think of, is on the street as a sari. There are many different styles of wrapping. I bought some today and they are L O N G! Some are 7 metres long.
We had a session in the evening with publishers, teachers and journalists at the planetarium, a beautiful old marble building, unfortunately so close to the road that the traffic noises were deafening.
We went to bed pretty early because we had to get up at 3.50am to catch a plane to Bangalore.
Sorry this is a dull one again, I’ll make it up to you. Elephants and tigers ahead!
With best wishes,
Alison
Day 8: Friday, 4th December
Hi Everybody,
Friday was a long, long day. We had to get up at 4.00am to go the airport and fly here to Bangalore. For the first time, the roads were quiet. All the yellow taxis and three wheelers were parked on the side of the road and there was no tooting to be heard. What was on the road were dogs. Dogs everywhere, sleeping - our car had to keep swerving around them. It was Rafferty's rules at that hour, nobody was stopping for red lights and our driver had the pedal to the metal.
At the airport it was the same as airports everywhere, waiting, waiting. We had the very back seats in the plane and they didn't lean back, so when the people in front of us tilted their seats we were like sardines. I have never had such a squashed two and a half hours.
Bangalore has many parks and gardens. The streets are often shaded by giant trees and lined with pretty apartment buildings and houses. It doesn't seem nearly as crazy as New Delhi or Kolkata. There are lots of modern looking shops and office buildings. I think it is one of the world's leading IT centres.
Our hotel window looks out across the city and there are many gardens on top of the flat roofs.
Better go, with best wishes,
Alison
Days 9: Saturday, 6th December and Day 10: Sunday, 11th December
So, Day 10
Work was finished so Eddy and I headed south to a national park called Nagarhole to see some wildlife. We had a car and a driver, a nice man called Ramesh and the trip took 5 hours. We left early Sunday morning so it didn't take long to get out to get out of Bangalore. The countryside was lush and green with coconut trees, rainforest and crops of rice and sugar cane.
One of the first things we saw was an elephant wearing a beautiful red satin blanket, edged with gold which billowed out behind. Her face was painted with lovely coloured patterns and a big family were on her back, all in their Sunday best. Everybody looked happy and excited, even the elephant, she was almost dancing along the road.
The towns we passed through always had long lines of people waiting for buses or trucks, saris made splashes of bright colour and there were cows everywhere. The cows were the same shape as the cows up north, but here their horns sweep back and up, as though they're blowing behind. Most of their long horns were painted blue, green or red and I saw one pair with green electrical tape wound around them. I also saw some Friesen and Jersey cows. I guess maybe they have been introduced to increase milk production. There were mixtures too, black and white Indian cows with humps and backwards horns, and Indian cows with pretty little Jersey heads.
In Mysore Ramesh stopped to buy some flowers to hang on his rear view mirror and also to drape around his dashboard statue of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god.
I bought three metres of yellow chrysanthemums tied together with cotton. The flower stalls are very pretty. I’ll attach a photo.
We passed mosques, with their graceful minarets and onion shaped domes, and Hindu temples, as ornate as wedding cakes, with their pop-eyed gods painted all the colours of the rainbow. There were huge billboards everywhere, many ads for movies, with gruesome blood splattered villains.
The road got quieter and quieter as we travelled south. Here is a list if some of the things we saw along the way:
two woman in crimson saris carrying huge piles of grass on their heads (again, as big as Volkswagens)
white oxen pulling a plough across a field and white herons following, eating the grubs turned up,
a man riding a bicycle with about 60 green coconuts on the back,
- a man riding a motorbike with a stack of 30 plastic chairs on the back,
- two men on a motorbike with three goats squeezed between them,
- trucks broken down using stones for witches’ hats,
- a hawk dropping like a stone into a field of rice.
Towards the end of our drive the highway was very quiet. There were hardly any cars but lots of people with their cattle and goats, walking along the road, not flinching as Ramesh roared past, tooting like a maniac. When we turned off to the national park the road was so potholed we had to creep along very carefully.
Gentle hills were spotted with big trees and divided into patchwork fields of cotton, rice, sugar cane and many other crops I didn't recognise. We passed through tiny villages where the water supply was a single hand pump and every house had cows, goats and chickens. Their fences were serious barricades of wire and wood because this is tiger and leopard country. Most fields had a high tree house where a lookout could stay at night and raise the alarm if elephants or big cats were around.
Everybody was working hard, all the fields were being ploughed with oxen, sugar cane was being cut by hand and groups were threshing ( I think that's the word ) rice and other crops, removing the grain from the stalk. We saw some threshing machines, but also groups standing in a circle, bashing sheaves of rice stalks on to the ground to dislodge the grain and in some tiny villages ladies had spread their crops onto the road, so our tyres helped break up the stalks.
We stayed at a hotel on the edge of the Kabini river flood plain and went on a boat safari that night. The water was still and we saw spotted deer, mongoose, crocodiles, peacocks and elephants. A mother elephant and her calf swam across the lake just in front of us, their trucks poking up like snorkels.
I’ll stop now and tell you more later.
With best wishes,
Alison
Day 11: Monday, 12th December
Hi Everybody,
Yesterday we did two trips by jeep into the Nagarhole National Park. There are 63 tigers living in this park on about 600 square kilometres of rainforest so our chances of spotting one were pretty good, but I have to tell you now, we didn't see a tiger. We met people who had just seen one, and saw the footprints of a tigress and two cubs but weren't lucky enough to actually clap eyes on one.
There are only a thousand tigers left in the whole of India, so they are extremely threatened.
We travelled through the park in an open ute with stepped seating for 6 people in the back. The guide was in the front but the cab had a hole in the roof, so he could stand up and search for wildlife and explain this to us.
We saw a pack of wild dogs, loping through the forest. They looked a bit like foxes on steroids, a lovely red colour with black points. They were unafraid of us and sat nearby, stretching and playing while the alpha male checked things out. They work together patiently when hunting and even tigers are afraid of them.
There were lots of spotted deer, which leopards like to hunt because they are small enough to carry up a tree, where the leopard can eat them, out of reach of the tigers, who can't climb trees. The tigers like samba deer and we saw them too, big dark brown deer. I’ve seen these on the high plains at home, where they are feral animals.
We spotted lots of birds and watched a mongoose, wild pigs, elephants and two types of monkeys.
I looked for leopards in the trees so hard that my eyeballs hurt but I didn't see one.
At the end of our afternoon safari we were heading home and I was feeling disappointed and thinking, we didn't even see a lousy leopard, when, right at the entrance of the park, our guide, whispered, “Look! Quick! A leopard!”
The light was very dim but we could see a big leopard very clearly through our binoculars, staring straight at us from about 20 metres away in the undergrowth. As we watched he came towards us then calmly walked along the edge of the forest, parallel to the road we were on. He was fabulous, with big black rosettes on golden fur that faded to white under his tummy and his walk was fluid and powerful.
As we watched three other safari trucks arrived and it was chaotic then, with the drivers jockeying for the best position and people shouting out. Not surprisingly the leopard vanished into the night.
Ramesh drove us back to Bangalore this morning, so we bumped out past the tiny villages and the patchwork fields and I was still looking for a tiger. I think Ramesh was eager to get back to Bangalore because once we reached the highway he started driving like a man possessed, tooting at people and cows as he whizzed past them, skidding around curves on two wheels and playing chicken with buses and trucks. It was good to reach Bangalore in one piece.
Unless something amazing happens on the way to the airport, this will be my last email from India. Thank you for being part of it. I hope you will send me some fabulous drawings that I can make into an exhibition. Please hand your pictures into one of the libraries in school so they can be sent down to me in Australia.
I’ll let you know how the pictures progress.
With best wishes, Alison
Updated: Sunday, 6th November 2011
