Merry Christmas!

Am back home from my trip to Salem and Yercaud... I had a good time and took lots of photos, some of which you can see on the other blog...
It was a good trip with lots of Biriyani and dosas and I was also rather bombarded with a lot of Tamil!! I think its actually the easiest south indian language to understand... so I picked up a few words which was interesting... Salem was HOT! But fortunately Yercaud was nice and cool. Its a small hillstation about an hour's drive from Salem and we spent Friday night and most of Saturday there... We visited some of the tourist spots (some great views from up there... ) and then spent time at a Children's home run by a family friend of Doris's where we took part in this project called 'Operation Christmas Child' There is an NGO in the US called Samaritan's purse that every Christmas time encourages young children to put together a box full of gifts and labelling it either BOY or GIRL with a specific age-range that then get sent to other less privileged children in developing nations by ship. Obviously by the time it gets to the destination, Christmas is long gone but nevertheless the kids REALLY loved it!! It was so much fun seeing the children tearing open their boxes and looking at all the treasures inside. It was even more fascinating cause all the stuff is American and they would never find it here so some of them had no clue about what they got!! I think its such a great project! Especially encouraging richer children to give something of what they have to others! It was really nice to see how they all stuffed their boxes with sweets and toys and some of them also wrote little letters...
My journey to Salem was great. It was supposed to be my first time travelling on a train alone in India because Doris was already in Salem but nicely enough Jonny who was in Bangalore visiting for a day happened to be going on the same train to Coimbatore where he would meet his parents and they would go on together to Kovalam. He was in S1 and I was in S5 and we got on at different stations but anyhow after the TT came by and checked our tickets we found a place to sit together and just talked the whole way. It was nice to catch up and just have some company. Travelling by train really is the best but then again this was only a four hour journey... :)
Anyway, Wishing you all a HAPPY EASTER!!
P.S. The title refers to the Operation Christmas Child thingy... I haven't lost my brains!