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Published: January 19th 2008
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Me and Alannah
On the beach at Chennai on our Retreat Well this is quite a busy month with midway through I have had my retreat and am presently on my intercity visit, seeing what the Chennai girls are up to aond how there work is going, and then they will be coming back to Bangalore with us.
The Retreat was really needed as a time to be refreshed and to be able to refocus upon our work we also had a set of talks from our super cool speaker Herbert who has been working with India Scripture Union for decades, his talks were about destiny focusing on different people in the Bible. The hotel where we stayed was amazing with no cockroaches, and it had a pool which we conquered at 7am so that we wouldn't be stared at, and the food was delicious although a buffet so we ended up eating loads, which we then went on to burning off in the pool. On our second day in the afternoon we went down to the beach for a few hours, it was packed because it was the third day of the Pongal festival, where all the families meet up and go out together and being in Chennai this meant
the beach, although our beach wasn't as crowded as some of the others. We couldn't swim in the sea we just had to paddle close to the shore as Chennai was one of the areas that was struck by the tsunami and as a result the sea bed is all uneven and now has some fast flowing under water currents. This dosen't really bother the Indians as most of them don't swim. We spent our time runing in and out of the sea trying not to get soaked by the waves which we eventually failed at arrriving back to the resort completly soaked, although the locals enjoyed watching us getting soaked and shrieking, we then moved on to singing all the songs we could think of that involved the sea, whilst standing in it.
after the retreat we headed back to Chennai and we are now staying in a hotel down the road from the girls here, it is a bit of a back to reality hotel, basic as it gets.
Back in Bangalore the work has been on the increase with closening deadlines and Majella our co-ordinatior will be going a way for a month so I
have been helping her out with the admin to get her away. We have also just found out that when we get back to Chennai it will be our last week in our flat as Oasis will be closing it up, so we will be staying with an Indian family for the rest of our stay in Bangalore which should be a whole new experience which we are all looking forward to although we will miss our lovely neighbours.
Daily supermarket shopping=
Bumping into some other westerners who obviously live in Bangalore and being stared at with open jaws,
and the typical marriage proposal. in the upstairs of Fab World our cheap and helpful supermarket in the gulab Jammon section a lady in her 30s-50's comes up to us and begins talking to us in Tamil, we tryto explain we don't speak Tamil, but that dosen't bother her, we then work out she is asking us where we are from and we explain we are from the UK and are working with a Christian NGO and living in Bangalore.
The woman then proceeds to ask will any of us marry her son. Obviously this is rather amusing so we
laugh a bit and then she asks again "you marry my son" she is deadly serious we answer "no" and then she is suddenly offended that we do not want to marry this random womans son, and she trys to get us to explain why we don't want to marry her son.
Train journey to Chennai
Majella tells us the day before we leave for our trip that our tickets are not atually confirmed, you only get the confirmatiuon the day you leave, but we don't need to worry it should, be fine. Our tickets are for 2nd class, there are many classes on Indian trains, 1st AC 2nd AC 3rd AC 2nd class and so on, our trian was a sleeper train so we had our tickets for 2nd sleeper class without the AC. Our little tazi picked us up from the flat 20 minutes early which never happens in India so we were slightly rushed, my suitcase is placed in the boot and Ali and Bini's rucksack and suitcase placed on the roof of the car, we drive off and observe that the driver has a cross hanging from the rear view mirror, and we get quite
excited that he's a Christian so start chattin gwith him, he then puts on his music, which is hillarious but very Indian me and Bini in the back start headbanging pretending we are cool, with the driver now thinking he is cool as he has 3 western girls in his car so has his window rolled down with his arm hanging out, whilst occasionally glancing up to the roof to check that the bags are still there and haven't actually fallen off. The song were listening to then mentions, I pray to God everyday and from our spying skills we get even more excited thinking it is a Christian song, however the next verse our hopes are shattered as it starts talking about Krishna, our headbanging stops mid air, disgust sprawls our faces and that is it.
We get to the station to find our train ius delayed by over 2 hours, so we find a bench to pass the time watching the rats runing across the platform and shooing off the flee ridden wild dogs. Whenouir train arrives we are waiting by our carriage to find all the doors are locked with only 5 minutes to get onto the
train we begin panicking a bit and banging on the doors for someone inside to come and open it, no one respoinds so we run down the platform to the next carriage which is also locked but someone heres my banging ad opens the door, we manage to get on just in time and then work our way down the carriage to our carriage and then find it is a huge carriage with millions of beds ours is no.49-51 and that was onlyu part way through the carriage they are all little bunks 3 tiers high we get to ours to find someone has taken the top bunk and it appears there is no no. 50 so we all sit down on bunk 49 which is just a plastic seat in the semi-darkness realising we are probably the only women in this carriage of about 70 men although there is an old lady with her husband. There is one major disadvangtage to having all these men, that most of them snore, and we are supposed to get enough sleep tonight as we won't have any time when we arrive for our retreat. However, we sit there for about 30mins taking
it in then the ticket conductor comes along checks our tickets, chucks a guy out of th lower bunk on the other side to us and then tells us we are leaning against our bed no.50 which we had though was the back rest to the seat, we then attempt to uprig it with some random chain making a right pigs ear out of it to be rescued by a man on the otherside, who puts it in place in about 5 seconds, we then get into our beds, me in the middle bed no.50 and try to sleep. However (again, sorry) the window by our heads is broken so we have freezing cold air rushing onto my head all night, which is good in away as I was to worried about our stuff going misssing to fall asleep.
To end the tail we arrive safetly a few hours late slightly intact, and desperate for our retreat.
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