Wheelchair assembly training

I'm now into the fourth day of the wheelchair training course in Bangalore. The first couple of days were pretty slow – sitting in class learning the basics of wheelchairs. Yesterday however, we finally got to actually build things, and to play around learning some wheelchair skills. That made things much more fun. The building was particularly useful for me, as we were given a metal jig to help with cutting the chair bases down to size. Until now, I have been doing the cutting and drilling measurements by hand, which have made it much less exact, and much slower (and meant it was the most time consuming step). I figure with this jig I will be able to make one of these three wheel chairs 1-2 hours quicker. That's great.

In the wheelchair skills, I started to learn how to do wheelies – an advanced skill, that when mastered, allows the user to go up and down small steps and over obstacles without any help. I was just working on learning the balance point of the chair – the instructor said I should be comfortable sitting with the front wheel up for 5 mins or so, before working on other skills like moving forward in the wheelie position.

Bangalore is a nice city – lots of parks it seems – and the temperature is really comfortable. It hasn't rained yet, and probably doesn't get warmer than high twenties. Coming from the start of monsoon in Pokhara, both are a welcome change. It's also a strange mix of east and west. Last night we went to M.G. Road (short for Mahatma Gandhi, of course) which is the shopping strip. Looking up, I felt like I could be downtown in any western city – all the name brand stores were there, and the lights and busyness were the same. However, the hustle and bustle at street level still had quite an Indian flavour to it. I feel a bit like I've come half way back to Canadian culture, more advanced and busy than Nepal, but still with a very Asian feel to it all.

Strangely enough I'm eating more like a Nepali here than I do in Nepal. At the centre where we are staying, we're being fed dal bhat tarkari twice a day. At home I might only eat it once or twice a week since I have other options too, but I'm enjoying it here.