Summer Break

Summer break in India started on 9 May and lasts until 1 July. Schools are closed now because it is the hottest time of the year in India. We are off 8 weeks -- no school and no Hindi lessons! Yeah! It is so hot here, after a few days of heat we get a dust storm and then some rain to cool it off. Dust storms are really bad - very windy and dust gets in your eyes and mouth.

This is how people stay cool in India: take lots of cold baths, eat ice cream and popsicles, swim, drink alot of water, drink nimboo-pani (lemon-water), stay in the shade, go to the movies, go to the mall, go to a water park called THUNDER!, go to the mountains. The largest mountains in the world, the Himalyas, are in North India. We want to go see them too.

Boring Turned Fun

We had a hot, boring afternoon the other day. Dad said we couldn't turn on the A/C because it wasn't quite hot enough. We were finished with our homework AND our reading. The pool was closed. It was too early to watch our favorite show, "Ben 10." There was just nothing exciting going on.

Then we went out on to our balcony. Hooray! The gardeners turned on the sprinklers!
We quickly grabed our umbrellas and ran out into the "blast zone!" The umbrellas make great shields and the sprinklers shoot water everywhere! It really cooled us off! Boring really turned into fun fast!

Swimming!

Its now really hot here in India. Yesterday it was 43 degrees Celsius (about 110 Fahrenheit). So that's why we always go swimming here. Since April we have been taking swimming lessons everyday after school. Our coach is very nice. He has us practicing the front crawl, backstroke, the breaststroke. On Friday we even did some underwater somersaults!

We have a really nice pool here where we live. On weekends and in the evenings we swim with Mom, Dad and some of our friends. The pool here even has a water and palm trees. These are some of the best things about India!

Turtles at Mahendra Prakash

While we were in Udaipur we stayed at the Mahendra Prakash Hotel. There were three reasons why we really liked this hotel. Reason number one was that they served us really good banana lassies and Evan got fresh chocolate milkshakes (although the first one he got had banana in it!).

The second reason was the pool. It was pretty big, blue and had cool water in it. It was hot in Rajasthan so Mom and Dad liked swimming in the pool too!

The best reason was the turtles! There were three of them living in the hotel's yard. We think they were a Mama turtle and her 2 babies. We had fun playing with them and even had some our stuffed animals, Newt and Nibbles riding them!

The turtles were a nice break from walking around and looking at temples and palaces. There are lots of temples and palaces in India!