Almost A Zombie -A journey to South Asia

Now India. We arrive ears popping over the city of Bangalore. I changed into my yellow skirt in the bathroom, and a small women surprises me sitting on the bathroom. She wobbled her head a little at me, and I smiled at her and moved on. There were little birds flying around the inside of the airport like they do in the Mall of Georgia. So after we got through customs we went to pick up our luggage. All of our luggage made it through Hallelujah! Even Brock’s!

We stepped outside into the cool Indian dark morning, and we immediately captured then gaze of 150ish Indians, just staring blankly at us holding various signs. We walked back and forth in front of the fence looking for friendly Indian faces holding a “12Stone” sign. After the 3^rd time looking with no success I decided to call Roger. Up until this point I had only e-mailed him. A friendly man answered the phone.

-- Hello, is this Roger?

-- Yes, it is me. Are you already here?

-- Yes, we’re just waiting out front outside Baggage Claim. You can’t miss us. (again, we were the only white people around)

-- Well, we are actually just in the parking lot, so we’ll see you in just a few minutes.

…

A friendly looking Indian man and a white man walked up to us, and introduced themselves.

The boys went with Scott and us girls hopped into Roger’s Bolero. I asked Roger all sorts of questions, while the girls sat quiet in the back and took in the scene. In the quiet hours of the dark Indian morning, and sun hadn’t risen yet. But traffic still proved to be erratic and exciting. The girls were silently freaking out in their minds, at the seemingly “close calls” and weaving on the road.

We got to our house.

[Victory Dance]

They showed us how to work the foreign shower. The water heater is called a Geeser (like Geezer, aka: derogatory slang for a weird old person). Grace was the first one to try, but ended up with an icy shower.

We unloaded our luggage.

Sooo tired.

Surprise! There was a Hindu prayer closet in our house. Ugh! I was so mad (at the enemy), and kind of scared. I did not want images of idols in my teams resting place. So I prayed over the house, which brought us freedom. And made the girls feel better.

Breakfast was at 8 am. We were allowed to sleep before breakfast, but I didn’t fall asleep because I unpacked my stuff and explored the house. At this point 41 hours since the last time I was in a bed Roger's wife made us toast and eggs, and gave us itty bitty bananas. He told us that there was such thing as red bananas, which I had never heard of before.

This day is really a blur. I have never been so sleep deprived in my life.

Took us to commercial street to look for clothes and keep us awake. The goal for the whole day was really just to keep us awake so that we could become readjusted to the new time zone. I felt like a Zombie, but still tried on a couple things that I didn’t buy. We went to some other little store with bronze statues of Hindu avatars filling the front. I brought a camel bone elephant key chain there. And Brent was so funny, he was freaking out about these elephant with little elephants inside, and these little trick boxes (juju boxes).

We came back with maybe 2 hours to kill before dinner.

I laughed/cried in front of Rebecca and Brock because I was so exhausted.

We all sat on our beds like zombies (Grace tried her hardest to keep us awake.) and I accidentally fell asleep. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven.

At 53 hours since last time in a bed I collapsed into my bed, 8pm… but woke up early because my internal clock was off and I think there was a neighbor dog fight right outside my window at 5am.