Day one in India, over.
Travel time to get here was about 36 hours in total with flight, layovers, and standing in lines factored in.
I’m still jet-lagged, but here is what I can tell you from my short time in country:
First, in India, size does matter. I mean that in terms of car size, mind you. Our tour bus pulled out of the hotel, directly into a traffic stream, and no one in the on coming traffic stream seemed to care. Cars kept flowing around the bus until its surface area blocked the entire street. Even then, they didn’t honk about it, which is odd, because every driver—including ours—honked at everything else on the road that you could possibly imagine. Cars, bikers, tuck-tucks bicyclers, pedestrians, dogs, cows, primates… There is a lot of honking, and a lot of things to honk at.
Second, every friday, a new movie comes out in Chennai, which is where I’m currently at. They call Mumbai Bollywood because it used to be Bombay and makes oodles of movies, like Hollywood. This region I’m in is close to Telugu, thus its film industry is dubbed Tollywood. Fun. There are 4 “woods” in India I’m told.
Three, the folks here are either really nice or used to getting their picture taken because they wave and smile at me while I do it. Even when they see you on the bus, they wave and smile at you. Even with all the confusion of tourists and cars and primates, they don’t yell at one another or argue or get mad, they simply abide, dude. I’m going to go with really nice. The most I got for taking pics was a cold stone face—which I’ve included herein
Here are some shots of the experience thus far.
