Amazing India

Namaste Everybody!
Wow wow wow where to start! Everybody who follows me on facebook knows most of my updates with photo’s day by day.... for those who don’t: DO! Hahahaha No i will try to give a quick update about my first 2 weeks in India. We left Mumbai in a temporarily amount of 6; Andy (teamleader) Livy, Chez, Abi, Simon and me! Later Paul and Carlos arrived to complete the team. Although the train travel to Gokarna was not too bad I didn’t sleep all the 13 hours. Only the taxi drivers think we had ‘too much luggage’ (simon likes to repeat this phrase over and over again in his best Indian accent LoL). We had about a 1000 stops and every stop we quickly had to find something to smell because the toilet smell on the stations is impossible to bear. I found myself smelling peanuts, deodorant, cookies and just everything is better than that intense smell. We arrived in the middle of the night, with only 1 hour of delay. We had practiced how to get our 200KG of luggage off in the 1 minute stop and we managed with no seconds to spare. After again the taxi fun ‘tooooo much luggage’!! There started my first riksha experience, hahahaha, just like being in a roller-coaster in the night over roads that look like moon landscape. After carrying our entire kit down the hill we slept outside the yoga farm for some hours: What a night…. What an experience. But we forgot all about it when we walked to the beach and sea….. the Arabian sea and palm trees definitely make it worth it! In the yoga farm we have 1 little house and 1 bamboo hut. Some sleep outside, some in the hut and I sleep with Chez in our princess bed on the first floor.
We took 1 day to relax and get to know the place. Beach, restaurants, toilets, animals and most of all the different noises you hear all night. Animals we have seen so far: holy cows who just walk with us in the streets and chillax with us on the beach, dogs and cats everywhere, geckos as living wallpaper, rats on the train track, chipmunk’s keeping us awake all night, cobra snake in a basket, a praying mantas crashing in to Andy (no he didn’t scream like a girls at all ;) ) and the best are the monkeys everywhere around us. One day the monkeys got so curious with our loud training that they came to have a look. They just sat down in the trees around us and looked at us. One even wanted to join us by letting us hear his big scream. So cool!!! . And today they broke in our house and made a big mess of it!!!
We work every day now to prepare our show. We teach eachother skills, give workshops, play the kids games we will play with the kids and working on our performance. The theme of the performance is a day at school. At the moment we are improvising and exploring a lot with this theme. It is great to have Chez with us who has a lot of experience with street theatre and she guides us with many fun and functional exercises. Abi keeps us fit with her work outs, what is great base for all our skills! From Livy I am learning Hula hoop and poi. I teached a dance workshop and made a dance for the show. The show is almost done and we will perform it this Sunday for the first time here on the beach. We will perform for tourists and everybody who wants to see it as a try out and hope to get some money for the project!
The team is great, enthusiastic, energetic and so many different talents together! I am sure we will succeed our mission to share our passion for circus giving them the time of their lives. Also I think all of us will be able to fill our backpacks with a lot of fun and circus and life experience.
I can go on writing forever about what happened and what we have seen…… this week feels like a month worth of new experiences!! Anke