our first night...

It is early in the morning of our first day in India. The wakeup call was for 7 AM, but I suspect many of us were up early with jet lag. I thought it would be nice to update the blog before we started out today.

We arrived in at the airport about 1.5 hours late, having circled in the air over Delhi for a while. As we stepped off the plane, the heat came: it was almost 11 PM and it was 93 degrees. The smell of smoke was all around us. It's a very special smell, from so many families using cow dung to heat their stoves. I think the scent is going to travel with us! The airport was interesting, a blend of modern and "different." Some of the walkways were made of marble, and thank goodness, the airconditioning worked. And even better, it didn't take very long to go through immigration, get our bags, and walk through customs. We met our tour guide in the airport lobby, where we found him among probably hundreds of drivers waiting for their passengers. All the drivers were holding signs and yelling, and they formed a kind of long welcoming funnel of people as we walked out of customs. When we walked outside to our bus, we had on one side a small fortified mini-bunker with an armed soldier (we could see the machine gun!). And on the other side of us, on a grassy median, not 30 feet away, were some cows. The cows were standing around, some were down on the grass. Just cows. Right there at the airport. It was an amazing sight to start out with!

On our drive into Delhi, we were on India's major highway and along the sides of the road, in among the trees, people were standing and walking. Some people seemed to have made little tents, and others were lying down right alongside the road. We also saw a number of watermelon sellers, with giant pile of watermelons on wood carts. The carts must stay alongside the highway throughout the melon season. It was all quite interesting to see. We didn't get to see much of the city of Delhi on our way to the hotel, but it appears that we are in a very nice hotel in the middle of a neighborhood that seems very busy and packed with people, shops, and "stuff." I think Americans are used to having our visual field much less packed with objects, people, colors, and "stuff." It's hard even to know where to look, or how to see what is out there. It's very overwhelming and powerful and amazing!

Most of the students got at least a little bit of sleep on the plane, but a couple of them didn't sleep at all. They were really tired last night! I'm hoping that everyone slept last night (although I only managed about 4 hours). Hopefully we will all get a chance to nap on the bus today. We had originally planned to have our first 3 days in Delhi, then move out into Rajasthan, but the Indian airline changed our flight schedule for our internal flight to Veranasi, so we are spending our last couple days in Delhi on the return, and going straight out on to Shekhawati. It will be at least half a day's time on the bus (on top of a 28 hour trip to get here!). But at least the bus is modern, comfortable, and most important: air conditioned!

OK, off to breakfast and the start of our first full day in India!

Martha and Andrea