Smelly Train Ride

September 7th
Day 5

Yesterday we left Mysore (where Ameli lives), and we took an overnight train to Hydrabad. The best part about the trip was that I saw my first monkey! He was chilling on top of the train station.


The train was fine, apart from the fact that our seats were right next door to two toilets. It was okay when the windows were open and the train was moving, but once the windows were closed for the night, the smell saturated everything. In the beginning of the train ride, there were many people who tried to sell us things or ask for money. The train was sectioned off into small sitting/laying areas with 8 beds in each section. One side of the section was split off into two triple bunk beds, and the other side of the section was a bunk bed. We locked our things below the bottom bed, apart from a few items-- like my shoes. I was a little paranoid about our stuff throughout the night, since none of us had the beds closest to our stuff, and many people walk through the sections at night. Between the smell, the people and the lack of bedding (all I had was a small towel and scarf for a pillow and a long wrap around skirt for a blanket on a dirty fold down middle bunk), it was quite hard to fall asleep, and I wasn't really sure if I wanted to.

We finally made it to the hotel which is relatively close to our second project, we were going to stay at the land where the project is, but it wasn't really an option since the monsoon season is making the area quite difficult to come to and build accomodations on at this time.

The train ride took about 14 hours or so. I felt so dirty by the time we got to our hotel, I washed up and also decided to wash my clothes from the trip. It took about 3 hours to do so! Because each time I tried to wash them, the smell from the train was still on them and the water would turn black immediately. Now they are just soaking, hopefully the smell will be gone by the end of the day.

For dinner we ordered food for four people and the hotel workers brought up 2 small black bags full of little plastic baggies of food tied off with string. There were dozen of little plastic bags! Tali's are very popular here and they consist of a large portion of rice and then 5 or 6 different little sauces to go with the rice. We had ordered food for 4, so they brought us each individual packaged sauces in separate baggies. I couldn't stop laughing.

After ripping open the baggies and trying to eat, it seems that the smell from the train is still haunting me. Most everything tasted like the train ride. :(

I haven't been a picky eater for years!

I couldn't quite explain to the others why I was having difficulty eating, hopefully this smell will stop haunting me soon..

Lol. Oh india.

Here's a picture of our view outside our hotel, and the little baggies.

There were still way too many baggies to even try to finish half of the food they gave us. We decided to give the rest away. We thought it would be easy to find some beggars, but when you look for them, they suddenly disappear! Rico and I had the task of finding some people in need. But it was more complicated then it seemed, because we didn't want to offend anyone by asking if they needed food, if they didn't. But we finally found a women and two children sitting on the side of the road. No one in this town speaks english, so we hand signed to her that it was food. She looked a little confused, and her eldest daughter gave a nod. We gave them a bag and continued on our way to find another family/person in need. Rico and I, again had much difficulty so we decided to give the second bag to the family we had already found. On our way back we noticed the family was all happily eating, and feeding the small 2 year old the rice. I handed them the second bag, and we went on our way.

We were supposed to go to our new project today. But a creek has overflowed blocking the route so cars cant get in, or people! Unless people want to wade across, which at other times people have had to do. But it isn't recommended since the current is so strong, people can't go alone, they have to link arms and and then wade across.

Vicarabad is the town im in now, and there is no english. The hotel guys love to come in without knocking. When the door is locked, they will still knock about every 5 minutes asking if we want coffee or anything. And everytime we try to tell them, 'no', or that we don't want anything, and we are just trying to sleep, they dont understand. But, thankfully this afternoon, Ameli's friend (Shyam) who is also involved with this second project came, and he speaks both Telagu (the local language) and English! So it's been wonderful to have a translator!

Other than that, we've been looking at contour maps of the land for our second project all afternoon. Rico has been explaining the details of reading maps easily and quickly, and main points to draw from them.
Fun fun, we are all still pretty tired from the train ride.
Super excited to sleep tonight.