A little more of India...

Pictures
of
the
Hotel
in
India




A
Different
Angle...





Looking
Towards
The
Arabian
Sea

Anyone
Care
For
A
Dip
In
The
Pool
By
The
Oceanside?


Life was rough... and although the Hotel was nice, I must say that India was an eye opener. In all reality, my stay in India was too long. I got tired of people begging me for money. On day 4, I walked on the beach and collected some shells for Micker Mackers. While I was doing this, I had a beggar come up to me and ask for money. I gave him about 100 rupees which was a little over $2.00. To me it was nothing… but for him it was a couple of weeks worth of food. Sad really. Everywhere I went, I had people asking me for money. Little kids knocking on my car windows… “Rupees please sir….” Making eating gestures… then putting their hands together. As I was leaving a coffee shop after a meeting, I had a little kid hanging on my arm begging me for money. He had to be Jake’s age… can’t believe the poverty. You feel helpless because there are so many starving people and you can’t help them all. So that wore on me a bit. THEN, after having too much down time, the day came to give a presentation for the university. The program was supposed to be all set up… well, as it turned out, my program ended up landing on Id. (Pronounced “eed”) This of course is the Muslim’s biggest holiday. We knew that we were going to be around this time, but we scheduled the program on November 5th because Id was projected to be on the 4th. However, prognosticators and soothsayers were wrong. I found out that Id doesn’t occur until both the crescent moon and the star line up exactly right. This did not happen until the 5th which was the day of my program. As a result, all the public transportation shut down and I had a total of a “WHOPPING” 2 people at my program. Little frustrating. Although I had nothing to do with the planning… I didn’t travel all that way to talk with 2 people. Now the main reason why I was there was also to meet with agencies to establish a relationship with them so we could start to recruit more students from India. SO, at least that was accomplished. But to try and recover somewhat of a disastrous start, an ad was placed in the newspaper so I could continue to speak with people while I was there. So, after this, I was kind of turned off by India…

I did go to the markets and “dicker” for some shoes and clothes for Sydney. Women, you would be proud. NOT only did I get some really good deals, Sydney liked all my choices for her as well. Of course she looks beautiful. I’ll take some pictures at a later date of my gorgeous wife in authentic traditional Indian garb.

As I was at the market… I had a guy named “Vicky” follow me with his shoe shine bag saying, “Sir, your shoes look really bad. You need a shoe shine. Sir, I make you look like movie star.” How could I not laugh and give the guy an opportunity to shine my shoes. He was right, my shoes were bad. I purposely wore them because I knew the streets were going to be bad in India. So, I let him shine my shoes and although he requested that I buy him a shoe shine box to help his business, I gave him a good tip.

I did ride a rickshaw, however, it was a motorized one… they didn’t have regular rickshaws where I was at… mostly because if you were to let someone pull you around in a wagon, you would get “squashed like grape.” Traffic is pretty bad over there… but surprisingly, I did not see one accident while I was there. Traffic ebbed and flowed taking a path of least resistance and some how, mass chaos works.

The Rats in India are the size of small canines. Well, okay, they aren’t quite as big as dogs… but they are as big as rabbits. The night I left, I was waiting in the car for my friend as he was printing something off at a local cyber café and BIG rats with really long tails (seriously about the size of small rabbits) were crawling in the gutters and sidewalks. N-A-S-T-Y. Yuck.

Anyway, stay tuned. The trip gets better as I head to Nepal.