Pune 2023 - Dance, Food and Leeds Beckett Hall

We started the day around 9.15am. For breakfast we had an Indian style sandwich, toast, and lots of amazing fruit. We then got on the bus at 10am to the ISMS college which took around 20 minutes. This was the first time I’d seen the college and it wasn’t what I expected at all. It definitely exceeded my expectations: the room they had for us was amazing, with pictures covering the walls of Leeds Beckett and action shots of the Leeds Rhinos and Leeds United. Everything was so new and the aircon was amazing after the drive in the hot bus; the college is so colourful and bright. The first thing we did when we got the to the college was a lecture with Dr Hermant Gaidhani, who outlined for us the history of sports in India, including its Olympic record. Despite the large population India has only ever won two gold medals, mainly because in the past parents wanted their children to have more academic jobs rather than jobs within sport.

After the session we had lunch in the cafeteria and chatted to some more of the ISMS students. After lunch we had some time to explore around the college, so Liv and I went into the gym and had a little workout to test out the gym equipment. We attempted to do some muscle ups with some of the boys, using machines that I’d never seen before so that was fun to try out. After about an hour of free time we went into the yoga room to learn a traditional dance from the ISMS students. This was so much fun and very energetic – I love how much they love to dance and enjoy teaching us all the moves. The girls and I were quite quick learners so managed to get a lot more time to practice and perfect the steps; this was probably my favourite part of the day!

Straight after we finished learning the dance we went into a yoga session, which was much needed after the dances. I’ve never done a yoga class before but I’ve always wanted to try it so I was really looking forward to doing it. It was very relaxing and interesting to learn how to do the breathing. I think I’ll definitely start going to yoga classes when I get back to the UK after doing the classes here. We did yoga for an hour then got on the bus back to the hotel to get showered and eat our tea. We had a few English options for tea which we were all quite excited about. I think our bellies couldn’t handle all the spices within the Indian cuisine, so it was nice to have a break from that for one night. We had some potato balls that were really nice; Jack had a full plate full of them! We then had a walk down to a little park that Shalini wanted to show us so we could go there when we have some free time! We ended the night with some nice cocktails in a bar that we had gone to the night before.