Well the plane trips to India were not as exciting as I thought they might be. On my flight to Frankfurt, Germany I was stuck in the very middle of the plane. No view, no leg room, and the person in front of me liked to recline their seat back.
Since it was a 7 hour flight I figured I had alot of time to kill, so I brought the laptop down from the overhead and started to watch some Family Guy. This was entertaining for about 3 minutes as I couldn’t open my screen to a nice viewing angle and my laptop was uncomfortably too close to my body. I ended up watching 2 episoded before it was too unbearable.
After Family Guy I decided I would listen to music, on my portable Creative Zen Media Center, and do some Sudoku puzzles. This is when I realized the gentleman to my left was working on Sudoku as well. The peculiar thing about him though is that he was working on the same puzzle for around 3 hours. I figured this must be one hell of a puzzle on the hard level or something, but during dinner I found out it was an “easy” rated puzzle. So that was humorous and I started working on my puzzles furiously to make him feel even worse about his slowness.
The second flight was much more entertaining to say the least. I feel asleep on the plane before it even took off and didn’t wake back up until 4 1/2 hours into the flight. That makes a 9-10 hour flight much easier. I again was stuck in the very middle, so no leg room. The plane was freezing, not even the full body blanket they provided could stop the shivering. The first movie was some English film that was unbearable, so I read alot of my book.
The second film, however, was much more entertaining. It was this Indian pop-star that had this love song and sang it to a woman at his concert. They fell in love, blah blah blah. It was horrible, except that the whole movie was them professing their love for each other. “I love you, can’t live without you. You are my everything, I can’t live without you. My world is nothing without you.” No imagine a two hour movie with that stuff as most of the script. Humorous, but still horrible.
Once we landed in Bangalore, India, I found myself in a culture shock. Construction everywhere, no signs or ropes telling you to stay away. Broken glass on the floor. Random trash and scrap metal everywhere. Once outside there were hundreds of people around the exit so it was like trying to weave through the papparazzi. Random dogs everywhere and guards carrying M-16’s over their shoulders.
The 3 hour bus trip to Mysore, India from Bangalore was scary to say the least. The charter bus would go down one way streets the wrong way while honking at cars to move. We were approached by cars driving on the wrong side of the highway. Random road blocks that had to be weaved through (I will give the bus driver credit on getting through those). It was a set of the barricades, like so:
-
-
-
With all 3 of these being no longer than 20 feet apart. He had to do this several times. The trucks on the road have no running lights so you don’t know they are they until you get up to them. Mopeds all over the highway, sometimes carrying 3 passengers. Ox-driven carts on the highway. Trucks that pass you have children hidden in the back. It was much different than anything I’ve ever seen. Random speed bumps, huge speed bumps, sprinkled throughout the highway for no apparent reason. There were random piles of dirt and gravel in a whole lane, so the driver would have to swerve last second to miss them as there was no street lighting. There were people walking in lanes on the highway and noone drives in a single lane, they drive the “best line” for the road, most of the time it is in the very middle of the highway. When you come up on someone doing the same, which is almost everytime, the custom thing to do is to honk your horn and flash your lights. This is the norm, each vehicle says “Sound horn” on the back of it.
Once we got to the campus, everything was much different.