And the countdown begins

With less than a month left till I go to MUWCI, excitement is in the air as well as a flurry of activity. It’s a change from the relaxed atmosphere I’ve surrounded myself with these last two months, as I enjoyed my summer break, not thinking about the future or work or anything remotely stressful. 

Now with less than a month left, I’ve started making many lists of things to pack, comparing those with other co-years, and getting advice from second years about what to bring (most conversations were food centric, which shows my priorities). There’s regular stuff like clothes, photos, blankets and bedsheets, to make my future room seem more homely. Then there’s also weird stuff I’d never thought I’d need to bring like a kettle and forks, as advised by my darling fourth year whom I’ve known for nearly 7 years now. As I went through old photos deciding which ones I’m going to take, a wave of nostalgia swept over me as I looked at all the faces of family and friends that I’ve known for years. I felt a similar wave of nostalgia while eating dinner the other night, when my mom had made my favourite type of chicken curry, and it’s started to dawn on me just how much I’m going to miss home. Then again, that feeling may have just been hunger cause the chicken was smelling pretty good. 

One of the biggest things in going to miss about home is food. Therefore this summer I’ve tired learning how to cook some of my favourite dishes, so I could try making them at MUWCI. While I can marinate chicken and fish and prawns (with different ingredients mind you) the rest wasn’t going so well. There was one particularly eventful morning where I attempted making pancakes from scratch and I truly understood the phrase “no point crying over spilt milk” after I turned away for a millisecond and all the milk that was boiling overflowed. My mother however, did not see the humour in that phrase. Oops.

Apart from cooking, there’s also been loads of shopping involved. “Gathering” may be a better term though, because we’re trying to avoid buying any new stuff for UWC because                     

a) as warned by my fourth year, it’ll probably get spoiled               

b) we probably have an extra set lying around in our house anyway, or another family member does, so no point in wasting

However there are still things I need to go shopping for in order to accommodate the weather + environment (ie: more flip flops). It’s gotten to the point where I base my purchases on “hmm, will I be able to wear this at MUWCI?”.

In more exciting news, (please excuse that clumsy transition, my brain can’t think of a better one right now )  I got a call from my UWC Alumni mentor this morning. It’s a new initiative the UWC Indian Alumni have started, wherein which they’re pairing up Indian Alumni with soon to be (or current, depending on when you’re reading this) Indian first years. My mentor is Rashi and she called me up this morning, introducing herself, congratulating me and offered advice and support with anything I needed, whether it be classes or trivenis or basically anything. Though it was a short call (I was at my grandmother’s house), it was really nice knowing I had  this kind of support system. Included in said support system, are the second years who warmly welcomed me and my co-years on the FB group, and offered to answer any questions we had. They also offered advice, and the most common one was to enjoy our summer holidays and try not to think about MUWCI too much and focus on family and friends at home. Now with less than a month to go, I see the logic behind their advice and have slipped into something I term as “furiously relaxing”, where I’m trying to spend as much as possible spending evenings with friends, going out with family, reading books and watching all my favourite TV shows. So basically, Im spending this last month at home doing things I love. 
Right so it’s around 1 am and I’m really tired, so I’ll probably edit this in the morning and end with a suitable conclusion. 
Ciao! 

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Hello world!

Okay so I’ve written and deleted this post about 4 times since I started this blog, but I still haven’t been able to figure out the perfect start. I’ve been telling myself for months to write a blog, but I just never got around to doing it, due to irrelevant reasons. So thats why when I finally started this, I wanted the introduction to be perfect, hence the numerous deletes and re-writes. But it’s been 2 hours since I started and it’s honestly getting ridiculous, so I figured I’d go with the good old fashioned blurting-out-the-first-thing-that-comes-to-my-mind kind of post. And hey, thats probably what the rest of the posts are going to be like, as I document my next two years at the UWC Mahindra College (affectionally nicknamed MUWCI), and hence the name “Nikki goes to MUWCI”. Also, I liked the way Nikki rhymes with MUWCI 🙂

So now a brief explanation about MUWCI, UWC and why I’m writing this blog in the first place.
MUWCI is one of the 15 UWCs around the world. UWC stands for United World College, which is an educational movement started by Kurt Hahn. He believed that an understanding of different nations, peoples and cultures was essential for  world peace and a sustainable future, and that education was the perfect medium through which this goal can be achieved. Thus, the UWC movement was born. There are 15 UWCs as of 2015, spread out across the world, including Wales, Canada, America, Swaziland, Italy, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Costa Rica, Norway, Netherlands, Armenia, Germany and China.
For more information on the UWC movement : http://www.uwc.org/
Students from all over the world are selected by their national committees to attend each of the colleges. I’ve been selected to go to UWC Mahindra which is in Pune, India, where I’ll be doing the IB programme, a 2 year course for 11th and 12th grade. The thing I’m most excited about is the prospect of living with 200 people from all over the world, and thats why I want to document this journey, which the lead to the conception of this blog. I’ve heard from so many people that UWC was one of the best journeys of their lives, and that it’s an intense and unforgettable experience. Apart from it this blog being a place to document this journey and look back on it once it’s over, I also want it to be a source of information for prospective students, who would like a look into the day-to-day lives of MUWCI students. Reading through other people’s blogs was one of the most useful ways I learned about what it was like living in the different UWCs, and helped me make a relatively informed decision about where I wanted to go. So hopefully this blog will be useful for others.

And so dear reader, whether you’re me from the future, a friend from my old school, a caring family member, a prospective student, an alum reminiscing about their days at MUWCI or simply a random stranger, welcome to my blog, and read on!