On to Delhi!

So its Wednesday, were in Chennai, we leave today for new delhi. Six days from now we will be in the USA.

We decide to take it easy, pack up our bags of trinkets and relax until our flight which was at 2 or so. We ate some peanut butter and crackers . I ate one of the 4 protein bars I had left… that should tell u how good the food really is here. Ive eaten only 1 protein bar in 11 weeks. But I was tired of carrying melting caramel and chalk tasting supplements in a wrapper.

The room is packed we called a taxi and left the room. Peace Chennai, thanks for the drum.

At the airport, we went through the standard nonsense, finding the ticket stands, where we were supposed to go, how to apologize for being dumb and for being American. We get settled, find our gate and there is no food or any stands selling trinkets or food. So we head back down stairs to find something to eat, even though were not hungry. More just bored. And we have 2 hrs to kill. And then the flight got delayed. And then delayed again. Coooool. Our classmates David and Emily were supposed to be meeting us in delhi as well. And I thought their flight was later than ours. False. But dint learn that till later. As we are leaving Chennai, I see an airplane that looked like the plane from Air Force One. Odd. Whatever, I tried to get some sleep. I didn’t realize until we were miles away the reason for the plane being there, the reason for the delays and the reason for India was writing about America in the papers was all for the same reason… Hillary Clinton was visiting Chennai to do some survey work on poverty of some sort. Yah I forgot to take a pic. Oops.

I also forgot to include this crazy event. So while waiting for the planning, I'm blogging and charging my computer. So I got the plug adapter on plugged into the wall. An hour later, its time to go. I go to pull plug out via the cord. ARC FLASHHHHH!!! No joke. For those non Electrical Engineers reading this. An Arc Flash is when the current jumps from its source to a new destination. When you see a little shock when u touch a door knob after walking on carpet is a tiny arc. This was big. Like fire ball size of a cantaloupe big. It burnt my eyes. I saw orange and brown spots for a good 20 minutes after. The adapter melted and shot clear across the room. This made a big noise and now focused all the attention on me instead of most of the attention. The joys of electricity.

Bring plane ride. Blogged. But this one guy next to me wanted to talk, so I humored him and listened to him. He talked about the poverty system in India and why there are social classes. In a nut shell he told me that it dates to hundreds of years earlier when there were times of kings. The kings would intentially keep his people uneducated and doing certain tasks. Some people would work the fields some would be security for the surrounding walls. The one unifying part was a religion. It gave the people something to believe in and something to understand. Back then people did not know to ask the important philosophical questions: why am I here? What is my purpose? Is there something better than this? The people would wake every morning, pray, then go to work. This gave the people a routine and no reason to change because they did not know better. That was the task given to them. After generations of this, certain tasks required more skill than others. Some became more desirable. But there was no way to move to another task. You were born into it and your children would take over once you died…

Crazy.

We got to the airport in Delhi and I was craving some Indian food. We ate a little resaraunt in the airport and the food was awful. And the chai was from a tea bag. A rule of thumb, the more you pay for chai in India, the worse it tastes.

We grab a taxi and take almost an hour ride out to meet Preeti, our host for the next few days. Preeti is the mother of one of my dad’s colleagues at work, Duke. Although I have never met either of them, they graciously offered me their home. I was a little nervous, but really excited to see what the next week would hold for us.