Arrival

I am arrived! Woohoo!

So, how did it go? Overall: Good.

So my trip took about three days total. I flew from L.A. to London, London to Delhi, and Delhi to Vizag.

The flight to London was good, I flew Virgin Atlantic which means I got my own tv, an sleeping eye mask (whatever those are called), toothbrush/paste, sleeping socks and a pen. Which is nice. They fed us dinner and breakfast. There were a lot of French folk on the plane, headed home I suppose.

In London I had a six hour layover, so I chilled in the London Heathrow Airport, which is very large and filled with very expensive things. For the most part I read on my kindle. I did buy a sandwich that was good and expensive. No wifi or outlets though, which is something I think about but the rest of you will find to be a boring extraneous detail. After five hours we were given a gate so I went and checked into the gate and called my father with an international calling card. I met up with four others from my group there, they had flown from D.C. to London and had a 12 hour layover so they walked around London.

Then a 7 hour flight to Delhi. This was on Virgin Atlantic as well. The flight had barely anyone on it so I got two seats next to a window all to myself. At this point everything started being announced in Hindi and English. Once we hit Delhi we had to go through customs which wasn't bad at all. Then came our first attempt at getting somewhere in India. We had reserved rooms in a hotel inside the airport to sleep in because hour layover was over twelve hours and overnight. We headed out into the airport, then walked the length of it looking for an elevator to the fifth floor. We found one that took us to the second and headed up. There we asked around for the hotel, but got conflicting directions. Following someone's advice we headed outside and then saw a sign inside that said hotel. We tried to get in but the guard at the door wouldn't let us because our tickets were for the next day.

No problem! We have reservations at the hotel! Logically this should get us in!

Or just two of us.

Me and Andie got in but not the other three. Very logical. So we went to try and contact the hotel. We headed to the Information Desk and the woman told us to call the hotel and pointed us in the direction of some payphones. Now by payphones I don't mean a payphone, I mean like five phones with a guy you pay in rupees. Having no rupees I headed off to exchange. At the exchange desk the guy told me that a twenty was too big to exchange. Right. So I ran off to the next desk and found Taylor instead. Somehow he'd talked his way in and found someone helpful.

This helpful person told the Info Desk woman to call the hotel, which she did. For free. Finally someone from the hotel came down and got us and got our last two through the security check. We checked our luggage and got escorted through another like four or five check points. The security was all India army carrying handguns and rifles. Which was a little intimidating for us Americans. The hotel ended up being really nice and helpful.

In the morning we flew off to Vizag. This was the only flight that had any issue as when we got to Vizag it wasn't clear enough to land right away. The pilot told us we would circle and hope it cleared up. He said we only had about an extra 30 minutes worth of fuel and that we might have to go refuel elsewhere and come back. Luckily it cleared up and we landed safely with no issue.

As I've been telling everyone Vizag feels like a really green Tijuana. Buildings crammed everywhere, shanty towns interspersed with normal buildings, being by the ocean, the streets and lack of sidewalks. Everyone drives here without regard to just about anything. You basically just drive as aggressively as possible and ignore the lines.. and honk a lot.

We arrived to the houses and put our stuff away, there's two houses that the program owns. I'm living in this one with Colleen and Taylor upstairs and then our head cook Durga and her husband on the top floor with their baby.

I snatched this pic from the facebook page, I'll be uploading pictures from my camera probably this weekend.

Our first day we went out and bought some clothes, we crammed 11 people in one autorickshaw which was.. exciting? You can take an autorickshaw just about anywhere for pretty cheap. The are we'll be doing our projects in is within walking distance along with a post office and a bunch of kids schools. The neighborhood is really nice where we leave, Professor Nuckolls was saying that it's a really expensive and desired area of Vizag so that's cool.

Things that are different about India:

-my bed is a mattress on the floor
-the toilets are mostly squat
-no toilet paper
-bucket showers
-we eat our food with our hands

Not too bad, well, I'll miss TP, but I'm functioning. Yes. Lots of sanitizer is going on.

Things that I miss already:
-tacos
-breakfast

All the meals here are fairly similar, they're delicious, but breakfast was a pasta sort of dish and toast. So. There's that. There's no oven here so it's all cooked over burners and takes a lot of prep. I'll be following the cooks around at some point trying to figure out how they do things.

And that's about it! It's 11am here so I'm going to head out. Normally we'll have classes at 9 but those don't start for a bit. Right now they're just letting us recover.

Ciao!