On Tuesday, Aug. 16, we decided to make another excursion into Gaya in the afternoon. In the morning, of course, we taught at the school as usual — and had a little session in doing the hokey – pokey. The kids took down the Independence Day decorations from the previous day, including the big flagpole, and put them away for another year.

You Put Your Right Foot In

Doing the Hokey Pokey has proven to be an entertaining way to help kids learn the names of the body parts. They are always eager to play along as we put our feet, arms, elbows, head, ears and other body parts into the circle and shake it all around.

In the afternoon, we hopped onto a tuk-tuk and headed into the city, hoping to find some items we’d been craving at a mall. But the mall turned out to be quite a letdown — just a few stores, with more of a local flavor than the more international types of outlets we were hoping to find. We finally reached the conclusion that there are some things we were just going to have to do without.

But to compensate for that, there were sights and sounds you just don’t find anywhere else. While there was not a modern Western-style mall anywhere in the known universe, there were native marketplaces to make the camera dance with glee (not to mention the photographer).

On the way to and from Gaya, we passed by the tiniest of airports just outside Bodh Gaya. Traffic slowed to a crawl at this point — not because people were going into the airport to catch planes, but because they were just stopping beside or in the road to watch one that was about to take off. There were only three flights per day, and when they did occur, they were considered a spectacle by the locals. Our tuk-tuk driver even stopped along with the rest of them, and we were quite game to be a part of the event.

But alas, when the flight did depart, it was in a direction away from the road, so we didn’t have the experience of seeing it soar over our heads, as we hoped.

Incidentally, not long after this we’d be returning to this airport, quite unexpectedly, due to what one might call emergency circumstances, to catch one of those flights ourselves.

Birds on a Bicycle

August 16, 2023