My first Week in India

All settled in... more or less.

I have been in India for a full week now. The vacationing and sight-seeing in Mumbai was exciting, fun, and hectic. Attempting to "settle" in Pune has been a bit disappointing. I will revisit this topic in a later post with a review of Murphy's law.

I awoke at 4:30am in Fayetteville, North Carolina on Thursday, August 2nd to begin my travel to Mumbai. I arrived 30+ hours later in the middle of Friday night. Whoever said, "it's not about the destination, it's the journey" had never spent the last two days of their life in and out of airports, planes, security, and customs. After collecting my 3 large checked bags and waiting an hour for them to find my surf SUP, I was able to hobble out of the airport, severely overloaded. I'll just throw that fiasco into my training routine. Oh, and by the way, "surf" is not in many Indian's vocabulary, making the explanation of what item of luggage I was waiting for extremely difficult. When I saw Corey (for the first time in over 2 months) he even looked surreal, I couldn't believe that I was actually in front of him! Being the terrible partner I am, I loaded him with luggage before acknowledging him with affection :-)

We spent the next 4 days in Mumbai. This city has a population of 16.4 million. There was no silence, there was no peace. I could never imagine living in a city such as this, although, it was fantastic to visit. We walked around the town to see the sites, shops, and the millions of people. We were intermittently instigated by small beggar children for granola bars, and bananas; which we never refused. Many locals disagree with giving the street folk any hand-outs at all, for the same reason we in the States refuse to throw change to people with their cardboard signs, they probably make more than a working person does. I did not see anyone who looked malnutritioned, nor did I see anyone that was very sick, which was good.