Busy Bee's in Mamallapuram

Team Awesome is in full force! We haven't even had a moment to post...

This weekend we spent Saturday in Pondicherry, a city just south of Mamallapuram. We started off with a visit to the Gandhi statue, followed by Lea, Drew, and Rick's first rickshaw ride to a sea side cafe. We ate a meal of very delicious sea food. Then, we took a heritage walk through the old French part of the city. On this, we discovered a beautiful park where there were many families playing and enjoying the afternoon. After the walking tour, we visited Swim Beach! Swim Beach was very exciting, but there was so much more to do, we had continue on. We drank delicious chai, back at the park where we were all surrounded by hundreds of Indians wanting to have their pictures taken with us. It was a little taste of fame! Drew meet a French-Indian friend at the park and hungout with him because it was his birthday while the rest of us, visited a local bookstore. By this time, our taxi was ready to pick us up and on our way to meet it, we discovered a local festival in the streets and the Gandhi statue to be lit up by beautiful lights.

Yesterday was a day full of fun. We shopped around the city and made friends with many local shop owners. In the afternoon, we took an exciting boat ride to see the ancient underwater temples. We had dinner at our favorite restaurant Namaste, and went to sleep early to be fresh for our full day of teaching.

Today, we started teaching the Grade 1 and 2 students and it went better than expected! We ended up teaching 3 classes, more than 100 students! The small children were very excited to learn about water safety and CPR. They all learned CPR very quickly, and it gave us all a wonderful feeling of accomplishment. The students said they were going to teach their friends and family the knowledge we shared with them, which makes us even more proud. We hope of the rest of the week so just as well, if not better.

-Lea and Bree