a/c

thursdays are the day of prayer for the sisters at the mother house so they give all the volunteers a day off. since some of us are nerds and love harry potter, we decided to go see it at the cinema here. after a good traffic jam we arrived to the taj mahal of malls, it just comes out of the nowhere and we felt so under-dressed walking in...you have to walk through security to go in and it was 4 floors. the higher caste of people are the only ones who are allowed to go in so it was a bit mellow. however, they had toilets and a/c...so we were pretty giddy about that. before the movie they have everyone stand up in their assigned seating and do the national anthem. it was quite the experience...your locked in the the cinema..all but for the intermission when people come in and sell you popcorn. we thought it would be quite the memory to say we saw harry potter in india and only paid like 3 bucks in american dollars.

we asked people what was going on, and they said it was a protest...we heard stories of past protests from or friend that is here so we made sure to get out of the way and hurry home. when we walked into our hostel, the manager was watching the television and the news was on showing the street we were on and all these buses on fire. a total of 15 buses were set ablaze yesterday, we were told that today is the other side of the party's turn to protest and that meant that everything would be shut down, buses, taxi, metro, food, stores...however, this one restaraunt would stay open on our street so we could eat. when i woke up this morning, it was so quiet and calm, we are hoping it remains this way the rest of the day...and hopefully all will e peaceful and settled. since metros and buses were closed down, volunteers couldn't make it to their destinations to work at.