Food Trucks and Garba

I will admit it---I spend most of my days reading for classes, brainstorming for assignments and attending classes. Let's just say...I don't get out much. However, there are many things to do in Philly! I've started to venture to different food trucks around campus and there's even a map of the food trucks! I sometimes spend more time looking at the options than I do actually waiting for the food, but anticipation sometimes fuels the fire, so to say...

Besides the food trucks, some people from IEDP got together to eat dosas at someone's apartment. Then there was the Garba dance event. Garba is a form of dance from Gujarat, India. Everyone follows the same dance steps in a wide circle around a lamp and/or photo/statue of the Goddess Shakti. There were a few of us who went, one from Gujarat, and apparently, they take Garba very very seriously. You have to be very assertive with your dancing space because people are serious about it. We joined in and then would end up "losing our line" aka the outside circle would just disappear sometimes or someone else would get in the way and ruin the groove...it was very fun and everyone was dressed up, which is partly why I decided to go. This was on Saturday night, followed by a full nine hours in the library on Sunday. (Thanks to the Pumpkin Spice coffee in the grad center, I was very productive.)

But, as I mentioned in my last post, it really is getting to be evident how intense the workload can be at GSE. I would almost like to dedicate all my time to the project/assignments for classes, but instead, we all must try to balance them with the regular reading. One project for my EDUC 514 class (Basic Education in Developing Countries, with Dr. Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher) is a group blog. Everyone chose an interest of theirs to focus on and in groups of 4-5, we are posting recent news about that topic, analyzing the article and connecting it to theories/classwork. It's kind of addicting though, because I love to read news and now I have an excuse to do it "for class." My group is focusing on Early Childhood Education, which conveniently overlaps with my Early Childhood Development class. :)

For next time...I hope to talk with some of my international student friends in the program to give their perspective of their time so far at Penn GSE.