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The Eagle Has Landed…

Monday, 29 December, 2008

So after much drama in Chicago, which, thank you O’Hare airport for reminding why I NEVER wanted to have you as a layover flight in the middle of winter, I arrived safely.

There was this really sweet girl on the flight named Mukta. She sat next to me and was really helpful — she is visiting her family for a month here and gave me her phone number and email just in case we wanted to get together.

When we stepped off the plane (and I hope I didn’t insult her when I asked this), I smelled burning…like things were on fire. It reminded me of Christmas at Tito Artur’s house — the smell of the fire in the fireplace…very comforting. However, now that it’s the morning after and the smell is always there, I might have to reconsider. I thought that it was a cold night, even though I was burning up from my flight…and it was evidenced by the people with bonfires burning to keep them warm. I think that contributes greatly to the smell of "burn".

Colin’s driver is pretty cool — he had a pretty rose and said, "Welcome to India!" Which was very sweet — he didn’t really have to do that. But once we got in the car, I actually considered taking a nap. I was that disturbed and scared. I don’t think I will ever drive here. No thanks. Remember driving video games where you could just zip past people and go? It’s like that here, but on the realistic scale. I had my seatbelt on and was clinging for dear life to the oh shit handle.

Lines and lanes in the road are arbitrary — it’s quite scary, yet utterly fascinating. It’s organized disorganized chaos. I wanted to whip out my camera and take pics, but didn’t want to appear to touristy just quite yet.

I arrived at the apartment around 11pm at night and showered…how it felt so good to shower after not having one for over 24 hours! I will be taking tons of pics of the apartment — it is quite spacious. Not as big as it looked in Colin’s pictures, but big enough nonetheless!

The woman who makes breakfast for Colin (Gowri, I believe) is really sweet and a lovely preparer of breakfast.  However, I don’t think Karen would be able to survive here — each breakfast item contained  peanuts. I can’t remember the name of the dish that I had for breakfast, but it was yummy — it looked like potatoes, onions and peanuts with some lovely spices. I had a couple of pieces of toast and an egg…I had a nice hearty breakfast so I’m feeling quite happy.

After my shower last night I fell asleep at 12:30am…at least that was the time I saw last before I dropped off into sleep. I woke up at 7:30am, ready to go~ Now it’s a couple of hours later and I’m suddenly sleepy. I hate jet lag, but I’m fighting it because I don’t want to have jacked up sleep patterns. I promised myself no crack whore ways in India! 🙂

I’ll write more later — I’ve got to organize my thoughts…Oh, there are some stray dogs in the complex and I wanted to take a pic of one tiny puppy that had dug a hole for itself to keep warm against the cold night in India. They said it’s going to get to about 71 today for the high and tonight it’s going to hit about 47 degrees…which is *still* warmer than when I left Arizona.

I’ll have to take pictures of the apartment and the apartment complex…it’s pretty interesting.

~ Carina ~
 

Day 2
So much to do

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