WildyWeb: two Scousers in India

Music and Travel

Well, the gaps between postings are getting longer. I need to find a way of writing less and more frequently. I'm inspired by the wonderful photos on the blog of a fellow staff member. Check it out here.

Two main things to write about this time round. First, music. One of the reasons why the blog was neglected was that all my efforts were going into recording songs for Worldwide Woodstock Day. This led me to reorganise and upgrade the music pages of this website and make the songs more easily accessible. Mostly that has meant uploading everything to www.box.net, from where they can be played or downloaded. Coupled with the interest in Worldwide Woodstock Day and linking the songs to the school website, this has resulted in (wait for it.. ) 420 song downloads from the Woodstock album, and another hundred or so from the other online albums. Of course, they are the free ones - nobody's buying the "Million Seeds" album from Amazon or iTunes! Give it a few months and I'll give that away as well.

The other main event this month iwas the Activity Week trip to Chandigarh and Amritsar. I wasn't planning to go, but an extra chaperone was needed at the last minute, so I was drafted. The timing was perfect; we arrived at Amritsar on the day of Guru Nanak's birthday celebrations, the one dqay in the yerar when the temple is lit up. Courtesy of a parent, we were invited to the only hotel which had a clear, bird's-eye view of the temple. Hence the photo. We had a visit to the temple next day, as well as Jalianwala Bagh, scene of the infamous Amritsar massacre. In Chandigarh, we were stunned by the rock garden (no further comment) and visited the various museums, designed (as was the plan of the town) by le Corbusier. Really, the building IS the museum.

Back to Woodstock to a security scare which continues to date. An arrested terrorist mentioned that they had had the idea of targeting "elite schools" in India; courtesy of the press, that became "Woodstock School is a terrorist target", so we now have armed police surrounding the campus 24/7. Still, it's nearly Christmas, and we're off to Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan, so we should get some peace.