Made it Tamil Nadu, India!!

Slight Disclaimer: I didn't have access to the Internet, so I am going to update one day of the trip at a time! Hope you enjoy!

Recap from Friday, January 21, 2011

We FINALLY made it to Tamil Nadu, India at around 2:30 this morning!! The 6-hour flight wasn’t too bad seeing as I slept most of the way. It is funny how as soon as you don’t have a bed to sleep in at night, you learn to sleep any and everywhere you can. (floors and random chairs around the airports are a few of these lovely places that I took a cat nap) I never use to be a big “sleeper on planes,” but I have since become one. You kind of have to if you want to function in the next city we go to.

They gave us a little trouble about the amount of shoes we were taking in through customs (they thought we were there to make a quick buck by reselling the shoes) Once they understood what we were doing, they let us right though. Overall, it was about an hour and a half before we get through immigration and located all 25 bags for our group. 

All of our bags

We found Vijay and Herbert, our representatives from House of Peace (the orphanage that we have partnered with for this trip). These two were here to take us to our hotel in Tamil Nadu and then to the train station in the morning. Oh ha… the bus we rode in… well, it wasn’t quite big enough for all of us so we just piled on top of each other and the massive bags of shoes we brought with us. If we weren’t close before, we definitely were now.

20 minutes later we arrived at our hotel, but it was a little strange. I guess I had forgotten by now it was almost 5:00 AM, but the employees of the hotel were asleep on the floor of the lobby with all the lights off and doors locked. Come to find, sad but true, it is very common around here to sleep on the ground. In fact, I couldn’t count the number of people that slept on the ground around the city from the Airport to our Hotel there were so many. Made me sad, but happy that I was here to help the next generation of the Indian people.

So its almost 6:00 AM by the time we get settled into our rooms. It really is quite nicer than I had anticipated. I imagined we would be in a little shack on the side of the road, not true! Okay, it wasn’t the Ritz Carlton and there was dirt pretty much everywhere and the bed was… lets just say less than comfortable, but it was a nice welcome to India!!

Our Room

Our internal clocks are so out of whack so of course it is hard to sleep. We managed to squeeze in about 2 ½ hours of sleep. That’s all we had time for since we had to be up and at it at breakfast at 9:00 AM, ready to catch a train to Salem. It was nice to sleep in a bed for a few hours though… I was starting to forget what that felt like. Bring it on India! So looking forward to getting to Salem and see the children that I came here to love!

Charge Thru Challenge,

Emily