Thursday October 16th Today was spent pretty much completely away from our families. Chris and I got up at 7 because we were to be dropped off by 8am at the stadium we met our families yesterday to go on a tour of a group of shore temples. Priya was very nice and made us a very authentic Indian breakfast. We had idaly, which is a porridge made of 2 types of rice, pongal (rice and lentels), sambar (lentel and teameron- tangy taste), tomato chaudney (thic...

Wednesday October 15th This morning I woke up at 8:00 and got some breakfast. We were meeting in the Union for the hoem stay at 10:30 so I used the extra time to relax and get all of my stuff together. After meeting in the Union we all boarded a bus outside and departed for a stadium in the center of Chennai where we were to meet our families. The bus pulled up and all of the families were standing there waiting anxiously for us. We got off in pairs acc...

Tuesday October 14th Today we arrived in India! I got up around 7:30 to see us pull into port. As soon as I stepped outside you could smell the unique smells of India. To be honest, it smelled horrible. I watched the ship pull into its spot in the harbor, had breakfast and went to get ready for the day. The diplomatic briefing was at the normal time, 9am in the union. The two U.S. ambassadors that boarded the ship to talk to us were very helpful in givi...

We just left Chennai and have three days before we get to Malaysia. How do you describe India? Its really a place that you have to go to in order to really understand what people are telling you. I did a service project the first day at a Dalit school, which is a school for the lowest class, the untouchables as we call them. That was a lot of fun. The people were so thankful that we were treated as celebraties for the 3 hours of work we put in. The group of 18 sp...

Tuesday September 30th Last night we got to know one of our tour guides really well. His name is Toby and he is from Australia. He gave up working in defense in Australia and came to South Africa with his wife, who is South African, and now became a safari guide because he had such a passion for the animals and the bush. Well, he volunteered to lead us on a bush walk this morning at 6am and even came and woke us up. Only a handful of us actually got up ...