Our morning was a very relaxing one. As you can imagine, every village that we go to is much more enjoyable than the cities we stay in. Today, we spent the afternoon walking through the local village. All the kids were super excited to see us, wanting to shake our hands, practice their English, and having us take their picture. It is priceless to have so many kids so excited to see you. While these people don't have much, they appreciate what they do have; very different mentality from most.
Along our walk, we visited the local elementary school. All the kids were coming up and shaking our hands and saying, "hello!" They then got together for their morning prayer, followed by their, English, ABC's and then counted to 100. It unbelievable to see how English is being taught in different places around the world at such a young age. If you plopped me in the middle of a small village in Mexico, I don't think I would be able to survive a week on strict Spainish.
Before we got back to the palace, we stopped off to see the making of Bidis, which is Indian hand rolled ciragettes with a local leaf called tendu patta. There wasn't much different about them from a normal hand rolled cigarette, except that they tasted, like most things in India, spicy and left a good after taste on my lips.
I am writing this on the bus ride to the train station. We are about to take an overnight train to Varanasi, which is about to be, hopefully, an amazing experience. Outside of Varanasi, in Allahabad, there is a Hindu religious festival going on that happens once every 12 years and it draws in around 40 million people from around the world. One of the other guys in our group and I talked Yash into arranging a bus to take some of us to Allahabad on Friday from Varanasi. Seriously, what are the odds that I would be in Varanasi during the right time to experience this? All the bad luck that I have experienced in my life is coming back to me in the form of good luck while I have been traveling; how long can it continue?
Our visit to the train station was not like our last one; no one was coming up to us trying to get money or anything. However, there were people sleeping everywhere on the ground. This sleeper train is not at all what you would think of as a sleeper train. Each car had over 50 beds. On my side of the car there were six beds, three on of side and three on the other, then across the hall was two beds. Of course my bed was in the middle, so if I wanted to lay down flat, everyone walking down the hall ran into my feet, constantly waking me up. My bed was around two feet wide, so I had to ball up in that; not many things I have come across while traveling are tall people friendly. I imagine that south east Asia is going to be worse. The train ride was a bumpy and shaky ride, but I managed to get some good sleep, surprisingly.
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