India

Hello from cool, pleasant London! I haven't updated the blog in a while, so I have a lot of gaps to fill in. First of all, though, for those of you who didn't know this, I was not planning to be in London this early on, and the rest of the group--Matt, Sanjana, and Dimitar--is still traveling in South India right now and will come to London next Tuesday. Between constantly being sick and dealing with the least developed country I've been in yet, I got so desperate to get to a developed country and get healthy that I changed my flights to come here early. I'll be here for two full days, today and tomorrow, and then fly home to San Francisco to complete my around-the-world trip on Wednesday.

My stay in India included a few days in Mumbai (Bombay), followed by a 32 hour train ride to the southern city of Coimbatore. Here are some of my memories:

--Watching a Bollywood movie in Bollywood. The movie sucked (Sanjana agrees, and as the only person who could understand what they were saying, here opinion carries a lot of weight), but we all had fun and I got a nice nap in the middle. My favorite part was the final chase scene, which involved a guy running along the top of a freight train carrying coal laced with explosives and guys shooting at him with fully automatic machine guns, culminating in a swordfight and him saving a girl who was strapped to the front of the locomotive.

--Getting recruited-twice-to be extras in Bollywood movies (since we're white, except for Sanj). Sanjana got super excited and wanted to go and demand to be an extra even though they wanted white people, but after some family friends told her that we would run a real risk of being arrested on suspicion of working without a work permit and be forced to bribe the cops to get out of jail, we decided against it.

--Matt or Sanjana asking Dimitar if he wanted to go watch a movie to kill some time before our train ride from Mumbai. His response: he immediately turned around, walked across the street, and projectile vomited onto a tree.

--A cool mosque and temple.

--A very crowded beach with very dirty water.

--Beggars.

--Terrible traffic in Mumbai.

--Being stuck on a train, in third class, for 32 hours. Dimitar entertained himself by getting as close as he could to falling off the train as possible.

--Meeting a very nice guy on my flight back to Mumbai who offered to take me to a nice hotel after I asked him for a reccomendation, and who told me on the ride there that Westerners get too worried about getting sick in India--that if they just drink bottled water, eat whatever they want, and don't take malaria pills they'll be alright. I beg to differ.

I'll post pictures soon, but today I'm off to explore London!