Good morning from Bangalore, India on MONTH 11 OF MY WORLD RACE!!! I am sitting here at the YWAM base, on my thin mattress pad, in a room I am sharing with the women on my team and the all-women’s team we’re working with this month, Team W.O.W. At this point, sharing normal-size bedroom with eleven other humans doesn’t phase me at all…I’m used to living on top of others by now. I can’t believe I’m in my last month of the Race. We have exactly 20 days here at the WYAM base and then our two teams head back to New Delhi for Final Debrief with the entire squad. Before I continue on with what’s currently happening for us this month, let me catch you up on the four days of travel we had from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to Bangalore, India. The entire squad met at the airport on August 31st and, as always, we were too early to check in to our flight. Emily and Alana watched a movie on the airport floor and Ashley was trying to sleep but being awakened by the Indian couple sitting behind her at “Costa Coffee”…the World Race makes you feel like a homeless person sometimes. 🙂 The five of us from Team Frontline (without Paul and Alana) and our new friend on the bottom right bunk who’s a university student from Bangalore! This was the amount of space the six of us had for two days. It was a great time of bonding and team intimacy! Haile and I enjoying our delicious train dinner in our fold down beds. This was hour 30…we were still energetic at this point.
Thankfully there was an AC restaurant right outside the airport (PRAISE YOU JESUS) and we were able to catch up with what every one had been up to in the past weeks we’d been apart. A while later we checked in and boarded our short flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where we had a four hour layover before flying to New Delhi. In case you were wondering, Ethiopia has a lovely airport and it was an easy place to kill the time. The flight to New Delhi was longer (about 7 hours) but I sat next to my flying buddies, Sarah Anderson and Angela Bringham, and we took some melatonin and were out for the entire plane ride. I remember the three of us sat together on the plane to Kenya and the flight attendants were so concerned about us sleeping for the entire flight they asked some of our squad mates if we were physically OK or needed medical attention. What can I say? We’re just good travelers. 🙂 Once we were awakened during the bumpy landing, the 61 of us were all esctatic to finally be in India!
We had prayed so hard to get to this country and it was such a special moment realizing that we had actually made it into the country! Well, this is where it gets interesting. So, we got through customs and Christina, the team W.O.W. leader approaches me saying that our two teams hadn’t gotten any word from our contacts about our train tickets to Bangalore. For a little while we were thinking we’d have to take a bus ride to the south and none of us were happy about that. Another beloved team also going to Bangalore decided to take the train with us, so they were waiting to figure out the plan so they could book their tickets with ours. Finally, after a few hours setting up a literal camp site next to “Costa Coffee” in the airport, we got word that our contacts had booked us train tickets for 9PM the next evening. We had 36 hours to kill until needing to be at the train station and all of us were so tired of airports and traveling…what were we going to do??
A few of us checked at the hotel and hostel kiosk at the airport information center and found a place for 15 USD a night, including breakfast and dinner. So we set off to the “Krishna Hostel” (typical name for an Indian hostel) stuffing ourselves into six tiny taxis with all our backpacks and duffels, dodging autorickshaws, cars and huge cargo trucks. You take serious health risks whenever you get in a vehicle in India, and I always thank Jesus when we come out alive…Indians are some of the most aggressive and crazy drivers I’ve ever seen. Our driver got very lost and none of us in the car knew where the hostel was (obviously) so we had to stop and ask about ten different people where the place was. We pulled into this very sketchy construction site with an apartment-looking building behind it and I thought, “Oh dear, this is where the driver’s taking us to kill us.” Well, fortunately that didn’t happen, and we came to find out that the rundown apartment with absolutely no sign outside of it was, in all actuality, “Krishna Hostel”.
We checked in and there were no beds left in the women’s room so Addie and I were stuck sleeping with the guys and a strange dude who was backpacking through India by himself. Typical travel day situation I’ve decided. A group of us wanted to go to McDonalds because, let’s face it, there were none in Africa and we were dying for some AC and fries. We took a few autorickshaws for 50 ruppees (which is a little over a US dollar) to the Citywalk and found out people were evacuating because there was a bomb threat on the entire building. At this point I was both laughing and upset, because all I wanted was to sit in a cold restaurant enjoying some American food and we couldn’t get inside because the Indian equivelant of the SWAT team was inside the building searching for bombs. Great. So there we were, standing outside in the hot Delhi heat, dripping wet with sweat, giggling at the situation.
After a little while the authorities informed us we could go into a certain area of the mall because that section had been cleared as secure. If you’re thinking this is an old rusty mall, think again. This was one of the biggest malls I’ve ever seen, including the malls I’ve been to in America and Europe. Everything inside it was top-of-the-line and Western. I was very impressed and I thought of the Cherry Creek Mall in Denver, Colorado, only three times as big and on steroids. We had a great afternoon at the mall and made it back to the hostel in one piece after our autorickshaw driver had us driving around Delhi, listening to Justin Beiber’s “Baby” song over and over followed by the oh-so-infamous “Apple Bottom Jeans” rap that was popular in the States a few years ago. The songs foreigners find enjoyable has never ceased to amaze me.
Jake, one of my squad mates, informed me that our room was the only one in the hostel that didn’t have working AC and that our room temperature was that of the Sun. I sincerely thought about sharing a tiny bed with my squad mate, Emily Toles, who had offered it to me after hearing about our unfortunate bedroom situation. I decided to stick it out in the room I was put in and not abandon Addie in the guy’s smelly/hot room so I prayed that God would fix the Air Conditioner ASAP. Come midnight, there was a loud commotion and we heard Jake yell from the top of his bunk bed. Turns out, all the ice in the AC machine on the wall next to Jake’s bed had fallen out of the machine and onto Jake’s mattress.
It was sad for him but hopeful for the rest of us because maybe since the ice fell out of the AC coolant thing, the temperature would go down. I’m pretty sure I fell asleep after waiting and waiting for the temperature to drop but the next morning I woke up feeling rested and less sweaty. We went back to Citywalk mall that day just because it was freezing cold in there and we didn’t want anything stressful before the two-day train ride down south. After a full day of relaxing and eating yummy American food (including Cinnabon…WHAT!?!?) we made the journey to the train station. I’m pretty sure my back pack has gotten even heavier than when I first packed it in October. How that has happened, I don’t know…but carrying that sucker through a crowded train station up and down staircases was not much fun.
The train pulled up and none of us were expecting much simply because we had heard horror stories of third class cabins having live animals and no AC in them. Once we got near the train doors, however, we were absolutely thrilled to find that the third class cabin we reserved had AIR CONDITIONING!!!! YAYAYAYAYY!!! God is good, all the time. All the time, God is good…that’s one of my favorite Asian church sayings. 🙂 I lugged my bags to the 5×10 foot boxes that I shared with five other people. You see, during the day time, the six people in the tiny cabin sit on the benches across from each other and at night, there are four more beds on top of the bench that fold down so all six of us have our own places to sleep. We had a nice Indian university student in a cabin with five of us from Team Frontline and he was so patient and gracious with us and our loud conversations and our many, many bags. I liked the train much more than the airplane becuase we had the ability to lay down flat during the night time and sleep and we could walk around from tiny cabin to tiny cabin and chat with the other World Race teams. Turns out, Indian train rides are pretty fun!!
After two days of making videos on my camera, watching episodes of the sitcom “Big Bang Theory” on Emily’s laptop and sleeping A LOT out of sheer boredom, we made it to Bangalore! Now we’re here, in this beautiful city with some very fun people from all over India. Tomorrow some of our new friends here at WYAM are going to take us women shopping for traditional Indian clothes (punjabee suits and sarees). We have been asked to buy a few outfits that won’t make us stand out as much as we already do and I’m excited to wear them simply becuase they are so gorgeous and fun! We still don’t know exactly what we’ll be doing these next few weeks, but I’ll fill you all in when I have a better idea. I love you, all! Thanks for all the travel day prayers. Please pray against me getting malaria and for good health, because I am COVERED in mosquito bites. 🙁 Over and out from the land of Gandhi and curry!
