Gather 'round, children, for I have a story to tell! A story of comedy and tears, but mostly comedy with no tears.

So as many of you may know and many of you may not, I live in India. I am not Indian but American and I attend the American Embassy School (Actually, it is an international school. But that is another funny story). Life here in Indian ex-pat community is pretty good, and quite normal. AES is pretty much like a small (but rigourous) public school in the States, except it never gets cold. We listen to about the right kind of music, I would imagine, and our fashions are only a little bit behind.

Anyway, I while ago my US History teacher (very cool teacher) made an arrangement with a teacher friend of hers in the States for a cultural exchange kind of thing. I think how it happened was the Stateside teacher mentioned to her class about her friend in India and the students got interested in what life was like for students here in India. The idea was that the students on both ends would get a big box of items that reveal things about life where they live along with a description of the items. (There was also optional stuff like polls on random subjects and other things, but that is mostly irrelavent to this story.) The boxes would then be mailed to the students at the other school. Fun! ... Eheh.

Today was the day that our class saw the box for the first time. We were quite excited to see what the students could have sent us, but when we opened the box... Well, the only way to put it is HA HA HA HA HA HA!

A Partial List of the Contents of the Box (With an Emphasis on Comedic Value:

• Nail Polish. I guess this could be to show us what fashions are the most popular? No. The description was "Nail Polish for your fingernails." Mmm Hmm.
• A Pair of Jeans These weren't even special fashionable jeans. They were plain, light-blue jeans. I think they thought that we don't wear pants here, but wear traditional Indian clothing ... ?
• A Radiohead CD Well ok, this one isn't as funny, but I'm still confused as to how Radiohead represents the music scene in the US.
• Ready? The best one of all: A Packet of Mints: What? Even better, the description read something like "When you put these mints on your tongue they have a cooling sensation and make your breath fresh."

It was very funny seeing how much they did not understand the concept of an international school and what it's like living abroad. So fun!

I don't really have a good conclusion to this. All I know is that I got a free Radiohead CD and that's good in my book!

You should send back similar items in another box (except with indian brandnames/labels of course).

oh man... so fun
and i can totally relate. growing up in Zimbabwe all the americans i talk to think i lived in a hut, wore a loin cloth and rode lions to school....
when i tell them i had intarweb access there comes a look of shock on their faces...
when i tell them more people have cell phones over there they really think i'm lying (=

mints... heh

Send them a (This is how the name sounds to me, I don't know how its spelled, but I heard he was big in India) Dollar Mindi cd:D

Well, we already sent our stuff a while ago so we can't plan how to shock them, but I think that they'll be pretty shocked when they get our box now anyway. And we thought we were sending boring stuff.

Send 'em a proper Indian curry. Hopefully by the time it gets there, it would've gone off and stink.

hehehe

What did you send?

I don't really know what we sent, as I didn't really take part in the whole thing (it was extra credit), but we probably sent them a CD or something with music, clothes, I don't know. Probably about the same stuff they sent us (sans the stupid stuff). I really wish I could be there to see the expressions on their faces when they see our box...