Upon leaving Hyderabad, the Amick's treated us to ticket's on what they call "sleeper trains." Matt, Rae, Allie, & I were stoked, and excited to get some sleep on the night train to the more coastal part of Andra Pradesh that our team was located in. We boarded the train around 10:45 p.m., anticipating our stop to be around 6:30 a.m.
Allie & Rae decided to go to bed early, while Matt & I stayed up for a bit watching his favorite show, Duck Dynasty. I'm pretty sure we kept half of the train up between Matt's laughing and my giggling. Hilarious show if you've never watched it before. As Matt says, its good, clean, christian humor!
Around 7 a.m., I was woken up by a very small Indian man yelling, "Get up, get up! Get up!!" I believe we finally fell asleep roughly around 4 or 5 am… so waking up to someone yelling at me, second off to a lack of sleep… I was NOT in a good mood. In fact, I believe I was extremely rude to the man, for I kept yelling back, "Who are you?! STOP touching my things!!" In my sleepy stupor, I imagined the man to be stealing our things, for I heard Allie further down on the train yell, "He stole my bag!!" Matt slowly began to wake up, just as pissed off as I was. We were all so deep asleep, unaware of the time, or even the place that we were in. It took me a while to pull my senses together when Rae walked up and said, "He says he's from ICM (Indian Christian Ministries), can we trust him?" Haha we thought about it for a second, and as I see him proceeding to grab my bags, I hear him yell, "The train's leaving!! S***!!"
Haha, whoops. We had missed our stop.
We finally began to realize that his story was plausible, began to grab our bags, and proceeded to the exit. We waited another 15 minutes before we could exit at the next stop, when we hopped out, & realized the many Indians starring at us. White people are extremely, extremely rare in India. Almost everywhere we had gone previously, we were constantly starred at. However, the stares of these people felt different. Some of them (we were told) had never seen white people before, and I truly believe that after that experience.
Our contact ran (literally) to go and get us a taxi, or as they call them here, auto's or tuk tuks. The next thing I heard I will never forget. "Was that a tractor playing Rihanna??" Haha we all busted out laughing. Our first experience in a more coastal area of Andra Pradesh (i.e. poor communities) was a tractor, decorated like it was an Indian god in multitudes of colors, flowers, etc. traveling down a dirt road, playing a Rihanna song.
Only in India.
