Monday, October 31, 2011

1 1/2 hours on a bus + 18 hours on a plane + 3 meals on a plane +another 1 hour bus ride + a 10 1/2 hour time difference = India Day 1

Friday, October 14th

The 9 of us met at church, said good bye to our families and jumped on a bus headed for Chicago. It was not easy for me to say good bye and I am not going to lie to you and tell you that I did not hysterically cry for a couple hours the night before declaring to Dan "I am going to die, I am going to die!" because that would be a lie. You see I completely hate to fly, I have medication for it and the thought of having to be on a plane for around 18 hours total made me want to throw up. I was not scared about going to a foreign country where I would stick out like a sore thumb, I was terrified of the flight. Our senior pastor's wife Tammy later told me she knew as long as she could get me on the plane she knew I would be fine, and she was right. But I got on the plane telling God every step of the way that He called me to do this so He better not let me die on that plane. So I got on the plane and before we even took off we were able to spread out due to it not being a full flight so already the favor of God was upon us. I don't know how but somehow the first 16 hour flight didn't seem to take that long. We then landed in Dehli which is an extremely nice airport. They even have a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf which I have not had since we lived in Las Vegas so I was super excited. We then boarded our plane for Kolkata on which none of us were seated together. Luckily I sat by a cute young girl and her mom. I passed out on that flight and slept almost the whole way. When we arrived in Kolkata we got off the plane right onto the tar mat which was no big deal to me. We got into the baggage claim area and all got our luggage right away, praise God. We went through customs without a hitch and met Ms. Monique and her husband Stew who we would be working with all week, she greater us with a warm hug and complimented us on how great we all looked. We all laughed but at the end of our time realized that that was probably the best we did look all week. We walk outside to get on their bus and we were smacked in the face literally with thousands and thousands of bugs. They were everywhere, in out hair, down our shirt, in our mouthed if we opened them, EVERYWHER! Ms. Monique said she had never seen that before, we must have been lucky. When then took the bus for about an hour to the place where we would be staying for the next week. We went to our rooms which were extremely nice. There were 3 of us to a room, the rooms were very clean, had a fan and air conditioning, and our own bathroom with hot water and nice "western" toilet.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

When are you going to blog about it?

So I have been back for a week now and I can not tell you how many times I have heard "I want to hear about your trip! Or when are you going to blog about it?" and I so want to share it, every moment with everyone. What I didn't expect when I got back was how long it would to me to recover and process everything. I have been so jet lagged I have felt like I was in a comma for the last week. So this is my promise, I will start blogging about my trip tomorrow. There will be a lot of posts because this trip was not something you can just write a blanket blog post about. Some of it might be hard to hear about as it was hard to see and experience but some of it will also be funny, because how can you not have hilarious moments when you travel with 9 awesome women? But I promise to share it all, the good, the bad, and the ugly.