Oh the flight over!! It was actually really good! The kids settled in and played games and watched movie's and slept like champs!! They had a lot of fun on that 14 hour long flight!! Evan decided he wanted to stay awake the WHOLE trip so he did! It was almost 30 hours he stayed awake! I've never seen him crash as hard as he did the night we got to Hyderabad! He slept and slept and slept!! It was great!
The first picture of all four of them outside the Marriott hotel. It smelled bad and I could barely get this picture, but they managed ok!!
This was our first trip to Shilparamam and our first "caught in the rain" moment! We didn't have many, but this one was fun!! All the vendors had their tarps out and we dashed from one stall to the next. Probably one of my favorite times there. This is our go to souvenir shopping place and it only took a few times of going before we made friends there!! So much fun!
We were in a hotel for a full month! However there was no reason the kids couldn't start school! So one week after we arrived they started at their new school! This is them at the end of the hallway at the hotel.
Here they are taking the elevator to school!!
And then the LONG car ride! From the hotel it took about an hour to get to the school! Not too long, but really crazy trying to get used to the bumpy ride in such long segments!! The ride home took 1.5 - 2 hours because of traffic!! Those were long days for me! I would ride with them to school, go back to the hotel. Spend about two hours and then head out to pick them up! I spent about 5-6 hours in the car!! Yeah, crazy. I would have went to the malls or shopping some, and some days I did! However, the craziest thing is that nothing opens until 11:00 AM!! So I would have almost two hours of trying to kill time before something opened!! (Now I know how to do that better, but back in the beginning it was tough!)
Here they are outside of their school. They attended the International School of Hyderabad, or ISH. It was really the only option in Hyderabad for what we wanted for them and turned out to be the best decision we made!!
So not only was it the first day in a new school, but it was my babies first day of school PERIOD!! Their first day of Kindergarten!!! Andrew was so excited to see a skeleton in the classroom! Oh, and those clothes don't fit them anymore. Partly because they have grown and partly because clothes in India still shrink!! They aren't made for drying in a dryer! (my dog wasn't made for clothes on a clothesline either, so it was easier to buy too big of clothes than to yell at him for pulling the clothes off the line!)
Running up to me after her first day at school. . . she was so happy! (they had PE and she never changed back into her normal clothes!)
I'm sure Andrew was just as happy, just not so easy to see!! They both had good first days and made some amazing friends!
We went to this big Buddha statue in the middle of the lake here!
It was fun but of course we turned into the attraction!! This happened a lot while living in India! Addison was especially targeted as an attraction. We took it well for awhile.
Construction in India was always interesting. I was mesmerized that they could use sticks to create scaffolding and still feel safe working! Somehow it did work and they built many buildings using stick scaffolding!
In October there was a huge Ganesh festival. Ganesh is the God of good fortune/luck. It was explained to me that you pray to Ganesh before a new adventure or a new job or really anything new so that you would have the obstacles of mis-fortune removed for the path.
Anyway, in October they have a large Ganesh festival where thousands of these statues line the streets. For about 5-11 days the people go out and buy them and on certain days of the celebration they take the statue and immerse it in water. For the bigger statues this means they put them in the lake. This allows the portion of the Ganesh spirit that lives in each statue to be released for the statue itself.
This is a festival towards the close of the holiday that we were invited to by one of Josh's colleagues.
Here are the cranes they used to lift the large Ganesh's into the lake.
It really was an interesting holiday to learn about!
These are the water buffalo that roam around the streets of Hyderabad. They find food anywhere they can! They are super skinny and it shows when buying any kind of meat in the stores wether it's chickens or turkey or water buffalo!! The garbage is piled into different piles throughout the city and then the city rotates through every few months cleaning up each site.
We stayed in the Marriott for a full month when we first arrived in Hyderabad!! Of course the whole staff knew us by the time we left! They even made us a cake!!
When we moved into our new house it looked like this. EMPTY!!! We still had about 6 weeks before our sea shipment would get to us (though at the time we were only hoping for 2 weeks!!)
So our solution was to go out and buy bean bags for everyone to have a place to sit!! We were quite the site most places we went!
Addison and Andrew had a project at school to help there Mom with a chore. So they went outside and picked up all the flowers off of the grass.
and we made a lei for their teacher!!! Ms. Sri was a really great teacher! They loved having her for Kindergarten!
Evan's class got to go out and paint some trees. It was really cool to see them all painted up so nice and colorful! What a fun class!
This is the water fountain at night at the front of our complex! So glad I got this picture because it wasn't much longer and water was too scarce to be using it in a fountain! Don't think we saw it on many more times after this!
This is Kumar. He was our first driver. He was only temporary though, so we had to get a different on since he lived to far from us. He was such a help those first couple of months!! We stayed in contact with him the whole time!
I finally gave in and got a sofa for the den area. They figured this was the easiest way to get it into the house. I just thought it was interesting to watch! No one got hurt in the process either!
Addison would find flowers at the markets and loved making them into necklaces!
I would find produce! Super cheap produce!! All of this was around 10 USD!
Our swimming pool at the complex was really neat! We wanted to swim there so much! The timing of when it was open was really weird though, so this turned out to be the only time we went swimming there. It was really beautiful though!
Addison and her cute friend and teacher learning a stick dance. . .
The International Day was a lot of fun at the school! There were about 300 kids from about 30 different countries going to their school so it was fun to see all the different kinds of food!
This is part of the dance that these two girls put on. They were so so so GOOD!! Both were incredible dancers! Incidentally, one is Filipino and one is Indian!
Dessehra is another large holiday in India. We were out shopping and Evan thought this was a cool photo op area! So there you go!
Each of the kids were involved in an assembly with their class, telling what they were learning about. Brayden's class did an amazing job and I found this traditional outfit for him to wear!
This was another presentation he gave in his class on gender equality.
The middle schoolers created this game on the floor for everyone to play. It was pretty cool!
Dewali is the festival of lights!! In celebrating this, everyone sets off whatever fireworks they want!! I went and bought what I thought would be enough fireworks and larger fireworks, but I quickly learned I should have gone bigger!!!
The zoo was a fun experience. We enjoyed going and seeing how they have things set up and the different animals they had.
That is until we became the main attraction! We ended up with a huge posse by the end and just left half way through just to try to avoid how big the group was getting!! It was only fun about the first 5 minutes when there were only two younger boys tagging along! I think this was the last time we entertained any pictures or group followings. We were pretty firmly "no thank you" from here on out!
This is us getting ready to watch the new Star Wars movie! They had really pretty decent theaters in Hyderabad!
I went with some other expats to this wonderful little restaurant that had a great view of the city! The funny thing was when I went back a couple of months later they had changed their menu! It still had the food on it that I wanted, so I ordered it, like I had the first time I was there. It came out different on my plate! I said, "this is the same item" and they said "yes, but it's a new menu". I said "did you get a new chief?" They said "no". I said "then how come this risotto tastes different than before?" They said, "it's a new menu, mad'am". ?????????????WHAT????????? ok, so yeah, that's typical!
Some of Addison's cute friends from her class. She really had some great little girls in her class and they all got on pretty well! Such cuties!
One of the girls was from England and towards the end of the year Addison would try to talk with her accent! Yeah, that was cute. It helped that they also looked so much alike! Both super white skin with beautiful red hair! oh and of course kitten paint on their faces! They thought they were twinners here!
So for awhile the water guys were just not bringing water to our house! We had called them about 20 times in the two weeks we didn't have water, but alas, I just went with another company. In the meantime, this simply what was easiest!!!
One of Brayden's homework projects was to make a healthy snack. So he chose Granola, which he had to make himself. He loved it and did a pretty good job!
Of course school isn't complete without a field day! Brayden does a good job running. He's not fast, but he is a good sport and did a great job doing his best!! He got 4th in this event
and third in this event! They had some fun events as well that he enjoyed and overall had fun!
This blog wouldn't be complete without the banana's starting to grow!! Brayden cared for this tree and watched it grow from a small baby tree. Once they were big enough to eat we found out they were cooking bananas and not sweet eating bananas! Poor kid. He lost interest in them after that!
