Dancing

Today is the fourth day that Shruti (my host sister), Lata (my host mom), and I will go to dance practice in in the center of the colony we live in. The dace is a Garba dance for women that we are going to dance for an up coming festival. We dance in a circle, the steps remind me of western folk dance. Each step is punctuated with clapping sticks together. We learned the step initially using our hands and but after the first practice, we each have two sticks that are about a foot long and can easily be held in our hands. I'm very excited for when we actually preform the dance because I get to wear a traditional Indian costume!
I want to film one of the practices, or better, the actual dance.

The lighting was really hard for my camera to deal with so I only got a few pictures actually worth keeping and even most of those were not very good.
This dance is one only for the teenage girls as the steps involve more jumping and bending than the older women are capable of. 

This dance is done with "diya" (I can spell it in Hindi but not English) which are small clay oil candles that are lit during Diwali. We do not actually do the dance with lit ones although it would be very cool the oil and flames could spill too easily. The teenagers and girls are in the middle. 

I've had school for the past two days, but very little classes because lots of people are still doing follow up things for the exams. Yesterday, I had only one class all day and that was first thing in the morning. Today was a little better, I had a good bit of free time though.
The Indian school system is very intense! Yesterday, the other kids in my class got back their English Literature exams yesterday and the highest grade was and 80, which is really good! The exams was a collection of questions from throughout the semester that the students had all already been given the answers to. The exam was to answer the given questions word for word as they had been answered before. They also had to write an essay that the English teacher had previously dictated to the class, again word for word. It's not really my kind of leaning system. No one here dictates to learning styles. There is no learning how to learn things, just lots of memorization. It's very much a different kind of learning system!