My Field Trip to Mandya and Ramanagara

"Field Trip 2 hours away from Bangalore!!!!!! That's crazy. " , I yelled as I read the email that my school had sent. It was a trip to a sugarcane and silk factory and obviously my parents let me go. I was ecstatic the day before the trip and was jumping around and wondering about what snacks to buy. I was so hyped up that I couldn't study or do my homework and I slept early and woke up early for the first time in my life that my dad thought it was the apocalypse. We left school at about 7:00 in the morning. And as we went, we turned on the speakers and started playing music. We were vibing and singing so loudly that the people in the road were staring at us.When it was snack time everyone got so much snacks and we were sharing everything passing stuff back and forth. It kind of felt like playing pass the parcel with snacks.

We reached about 2 hours later in Ramanagara a town for silk production and rocky hills, also known for the movie Sholay.and we first went through the silk cocoon market where people bought silk cocoons. My friends were touching it but I was too scared too. The stench was horrible but I tried my best not to act disgusted as the people there looked pretty used to the smell. I found out that there were yellow cocoons and white cocoons but the white ones have better quality. Racism is even in cocoons and I don't need to tell you how my friends interpreted the superiority of white cocoons. Next, we went to a silk farmhouse where we saw how different stages of cocoons were stored and how they were boiled in hotwater and spun into silk. There was a farm behind the main silk production area and we saw a few cows there. We named them Shripad Harrington, Jack Wick, and Bob Byers. We named a cat John Jacobs. They nodded as if they accepted their names.I learnt a lot about silk there but I struggled to tolerate the smell.

Next we had lunch at the Kamat Hotel. I was extremely hungry and stuffed up around 9 Puris for lunch. We left for the sugar factory shortly.We reached Mandya.A town known for sugarcane farming, with the famous KRS Dam and Brindavan Gardens nearby.We saw all the sugarcane that came in at the sugarcane factory in humongous trucks. Then we weren't allowed to go near the machines which produced sugar and we saw the different qualities of sugar which were seperated based on how fine they are. We got to taste fresh sugar which tasted extremely scrumptious. I asked our guide questions and found out that the sugarcane was bought from nearby villages and the sugar was sold in markets and to other companies. During the production of sugar, they also produced Jaggery. The byproducts in the production of sugar were sodium and ethanol.The processing started from crushing sugarcane to extract juice, removing impurities from  juice , evaporating it to form syrup, crystallizing the syrup into sugar crystals, separating crystals from molasses using centrifugation, and finally drying and packaging the sugar. They didn't use the waste sugarcane in a powerplant to power the factory like I had read other factories do.

We returned after a wonderful educational experience but without the rain gods on our side. It rained heavily on our way back but we did not care. We let the music boom in the speakers and enjoyed even more on the way back that we started feeling stupid when everyone stared at us in the signals. At one point even a traffic police yelled at us so we paused for 20 seconds and started singing again. One of my classmates was sleeping through our shouting and we didn't like that. The first time we yelled that the bus was crashing and he woke up extremely scared but the second time we made everyone in our bus surround him and sing at the top of the voices that he woke up. When he did everyone started cheering. Overall , this field trip was the best field trip I've ever gone to with both learning and fun in it. Its fun to go with family and friends and educational too. If you are ever looking for a good time in a boring weekend well now you know where to go.