Alf's blog.

I arrived on Thursday, June 7th and was the last person to arrive. I actually had a pleasant flight, yes, call me crazy. I was lucky to bump into another deaf woman on my flight, Michele Friedner, a PhD student at Berkeley. She's been doing research on deaf people in India and is actually going to be working with us during our field work with the other Indian GRO delegates. Small world!!

Friday, June 8th was our first day as team Monsoon Riders. We spent the morning having breakfast at a local restaurant with the coordinator for the Indian GRO program, Anantadev Das and the Mouli family. It was soooo nice to finally have my first Indian meal in India! For those who don't know, when it comes to Indian food, it can be dangerous for me. Not because of the fact that most Indian cuisines are spicy, but because I tend to eat more than I can handle. It's too good!! Masala this, masala that, dosas, and best of all, Indian coffee!!!! I think my team can vouch me on the coffee part, especially when Smitha's aunt makes it.

After breakfast, we spent the rest of the day doing a team building activity similar to the reality TV show "Amazing Race". We were paired up with a partner and told to visit 10 different places around Bangalore, find a few facts about each location, and take a Jump Picture at each location.
**Jump Picture = one or both teammates being photographed whie jumping in the air.**

Once we were discharged from the starting location, each team took off. By the time my partner, Bus and I arrived to the end of the street, we looked around to see where everyone else was at. True biz, without anyone really saying anything, the other two teams, Bus, and I telepathically decided to break the unspoken rule of not working with the other teams and embarked on the Amazing Race journey together. We looked at our locations, bought a map, and went to Lakeview, a small eatery , to map out our route. Some of us had eaten here before and highly recommended the vanilla icecream with fresh mango. After double checking on my teammate's stomach status after eating that, I got the okay and ordered it. It was really delicious, but still wondered how it would treat my stomach.

It took us quite a while to find the first place we picked which was the Vidhana Soudha, the central Government building where Smitha's mother used to work as a lawyer before moving to the states. We walked for what seemed like an hour to get there since the map we had only named the major streets, the locals we asked kept pointing us in different directions, and several auto drivers kept lying to us on how far it was in hopes to trick us into being overcharged. Autos are small taxis that look like 3-wheeled motorcycles with a covered back seat that can fit up to 3 people. Since we were foreigners, we often find it difficult to get a reasonable fare or a metered ride.

After leaving the Vidhana Soudha, many of us were exhausted and had achey stomachs includng myself. Dang that mango!!!! We wanted to speed up our route so we decided to pick up 2 autos and have them take us to each one of our destinations for 600 rupees. It worked out sooo well and we were relieved to get off our feet. However, on the last part of our route, the drivers decided to try to outsmart us into getting commission by telling us that we should visit a shopping center on the way back and when we declined, they tried to increase our fare by 400 rupees. We got a little annoyed as they wouldn't stay with our original offer so we just told them to drop us off at our ending location, the Forum, a really nice contemporary mall. Once we got there, we paid them the original 600 rupees and took off without looking back. Some of us kind of laughed feeling guilty as if we just "dined and dashed", but we were glad to stick with our plan and be cautious about getting ripped off.

During dinner at the Forum, we all talked about our lows and highs of the day. Some of us said that the lowest part of the day was getting stomach aches and not feeling well. Luckily, for most of us, we all felt better and back to our normal, crazy, fun, loving selves by the time we had dinner. Most of us commented that our high of the day was working together as a team of 6 even though we were "supposed" to work in pairs and taking Jump Pictures at the Glass House with some Indian kids. The kids were really cute when they wanted to take a Jump Picture with us, but 3 kids turned into 6 kids and from there the number of kids grew exponentially. We had to leave before we became stuck in a stampede of kids. Still cute though :)

Yesterday on Saturday, June 9th, we all got up at the crack of dawn and left the hotel to embark on a 5 hour van ride to see 3 temples (Halebid, Belur's Chennakeshava temple and Shravanabelagola),
Smitha's cousin, Anju and the Mouli family joined us. We had a pretty wild time on the bus to kill time, playing games and listening to Indian music.
At the temples, we couldn't wear shoes on the premises so we walked around on flaming hot stones as if we were being tossed around like hot potatoes. Inside and outside the temples, there were religious stories carved into stone that were beatuiful and detailed. I think we can all agree that we liked the Shravanabelagola temple with 1,000 steps because it was a good workout and the view was spectacular. Yes, that's what they say...1,000 steps from the bottom to the top of the temple, but we actually only counted 661 steps.

Right now, it's Sunday, June 10th and we're playing "Let's see how many people you can fit in a standard-sized jeep" with bags!! Yep, we managed to squeeze 10 of us with some bags in the jeep and we're en route to Mysore.

More later!!
Alf
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