Trip to India Post 2

I guess the best place to start is the beginning. My trip here was extremely uneventful. Two flights, both a little more than 8 hours each, a layover long enough to pickup McDonald's french fries and suddenly we were in India. Luckily I had two great travel partners and was able to sleep most of the way (shocking, I know!) so it was a really easy trip here.

The driver picked us up - Mr. Farah White actually, but I assured him that was me, and we headed to our hotel. It was the middle of the night, but even at that point I was just doing my best to take it all in. We got to our hotel and were immediately impressed, case in point, a few days later our professors came to meet with us, saw how nice our place is and changed hotels. We really lucked out with the hotel thing here!

I spent most of Sunday sleeping, again, shocking, but did join the girls out for dinner. That's where I got my first real "taste" of India if you will. To be honest it was a little overwhelming. The driving is like nothing I've ever experienced before! Before we left I figured I've been in a taxi in NYC, how bad can it be? Let me tell you, NYC has nothing on India! It's like the drivers are playing chicken with one another. It's a little scary, but you do get used to it.

We ended up going to church street, which seemed to be a pretty happening area and walked around. I felt like I was in Times Square, but even more crowded and chaotic. We ended up at a Portuguese place, and it was actually pretty good, either that or I was just starving.

Day two was Monday and we began work at 10:30am (I love Indian work schedules!) My roommate and I started out the day with a workout because well, when you wake up at 4am (awesome jet lag) what else are you going to do?

First day of work was good. Got a tour of the facility, did a lot of listening, and learned a lot. Our host even took us out for lunch where I had my very first Indian meal...I actually even liked two of the dishes - one was chickpea and the other was potato. It was a neat meal where they gave you little tastings of everything and then you could request more of whatever you liked. Perfect for a first timer like me.

Did I mention the weather is beautiful here? Because oh my gosh, it's amazing. It's been anywhere between 60-80 degrees outside with very little humidity. Quite a difference from the weather I left back in the states!

Ok, back to my recap. After lunch we headed home to regroup. To be honest, up to that point I hadn't been feeling all that well, but I chalked it up to jet lag, but by that afternoon I was feeling pretty rotten. Unfortunately the sick feeling continued to get worse and worse for the next few days. Monday afternoon through Thursday morning are pretty much a blur to me. I made it to some work functions but spent most of the time in bed unfortunately. I missed out on quite a bit, but luckily for me my teammates were really understanding and happy to fill me in on everything once I was feeling better. I'll write more about what happened once I got better in the next post, for now, it's time for me to do a little dance around my room if the colts can hold onto their lead for another minute (yes, I did get up extremely early to watch the play by play of my boys against the jets, I think that's what you would call a true fan.)