Today was my first day off in shillong. So I had 2 goals. 1. to find a sim card for my phone without having to give out detailed information and copies of my passport (as legally required) and 2. to find a cyber cafe'. I headed down the hill where I'm staying and stopped by 2 or 3 vodophone places and all of them required lots of paper work. Then I ended up finding the king of all cyber cafes. It had new computers, windows xp, ear phones web cams, fast surfing and tabed browsing and it had yahoo messenger.

So the first thing did was respond to most of my emaiils, then I watched the grape lady video, then sufjans "lakes of canada" video. I my first hour I got SOOO much done.... then april got on.

I had a hard time talking to 4 people on AIM at the same time, but I wa so happy to be talking to april for the first time in 2 weeks. Then I realized I had a web cam and she did too, so we ended up talking 2 or 3 hours on Yahoo messenger. It was overwhelming seeing her face.. live. and we were trying to write eachother but not much was said. We just stared at eachother for most of the time. It was so hard to type when here face was right there. She was 10 times as beautiful as I imagined, and it made me really miss home. Just to know that this freaking beautiful Goddess was waiting for me at home, I could have burrowed strait down thru the center of the earth to be with her.

our goodbye was abrupt and unwelcomed the store keeper said "I'm sorry but I have an emergency board meeting to attend. I need you ti sign out now." being cut off so suddenly put me into a terrible mood.

2 days before i got april sick (as in missing april) I got the news that Jordans Grandpa larry had died and the funeral would be on monday. Had I been in delhi when I heard the news I would have paid for the next flight back to the US to be home intime. But it would take me 3 days to get back to delhi from shillong then another 2 days to get back to fresno, which would have been too late. But I really wanted to go. Not just to support his family, but because I felt like his family. I never knew my grandpa on my dads side and I only see my other grandpa a few times a year, so larry was as close a grandpa as I'd ever had. I've known him my whole life I've spent countless hours at his hous watching TV land and eating his carmel candies he always had on his table. Listening to his slightly less than politically correct stories. He was the funniest guy with the oddest sense of humor. I feel bad that I didn't say much to him the last time I saw him.

I wish I could be there for jordan and the terrys and I feel like shit for not. I wish I could have been there to pay respect to a great man who laid his life down for his wife, and excepted jordan as his blood.

sorry Larry.

Shillong

The last 48 hours have been pretty intense. Saturday morning we packed up and left st. Stephens. Ot was tome to say goodbye to all the nuns and the caretaker who became kind of a grandma figure to us. She blessed me and told me to visit here next time I came to india then gave me a kiss on both cheeks. It was also time to say goodbye to bobby Anu and Aaradana. Everyone was kissing huging and crying. it reminded me of the last episode of "Bugjuice" in the least corny way.

Me Alisha and mayang stayed the night at abels, ate pork, then went to julies, ate fish, got up siunday morning met andy sudha and yuvraj at the train station and then borded our train that would be our home for the next 33 hours. it wa a really plesent trip. It was nothing but good food, good conversation, and good views of farm land for the whole trip. We where on our way to Gohati and from there we would hire a taxi to Shillong. 3 days before was arived in gohati, 3 bombs went of and killed 80 people. We got there late and we knew it would be safer t drive during the day thather than night because it was montain driving on naroow roads. But we didn't want to stay the night in hogati because of the terror threats. So we found the taxi lot where there where 8 passenger jeeps, and they where loading our stuff into this nice new car while mayang wa nagotiating the price, but he didn't want to pay more than Rs.1800 and they where asking Rs.2000 ($4 differance) so they directed us to this older looking, beat up jeep that was in our price rance. The wole time Andi was fighting to stay in a hotel and leave in the morning, but mayany piled us ito the car and we left.

It was really hard for me to relax when we were driving really fast in the dark tru windy steep roads with no divider lines in the road and I just exepted that I couldn't make myself any safer by worrying about every set of headlights coming in our direction, so I turned on my ipod and listened to isreal... ki.. kimo....sa ... the hawian guy that sings "somehwere over the rainbow". I decided to look up at the sky rather than the down at the raod. I looked up and for the first time in 3 months saw stars, bright and brilliant and numerous. I came to the realization that, the longer you live in a place man has made, the more you are forced to keep your head dwon. All you can see is shit and cement. And during the day you see gray from the smog mans cars, and at night you look up and see orange from mans lights and smog. But the farther you get from mans creation the more you look up at the blue sky and brilliant white clouds, and at night you look up and see stars, and there you can see the great size of our universe the beauty of nature and the face of God.

When we were half way there we decided to stop and eat. We had a great meal and headed back to the car... but the driver wasn't in the car ....he was in the bar. He came out and said he only went in to buy some chew and so we got back in the car. As we were driving me and yuvraj starting thinking that maybe this guy did have somthing to drink. I didn't know what to do. We could't stop him.. we where in the middle of nowhere and there was no place to stop but on blind curves. I was praying that we would arive in shillong alive, or that we could stop somwhere safe long enough for this guy to sober up. 5 minutes later he polled over to a gas station and said that the brakes wern't working. So here we are in the middle of nowhere and our car is up on jacks as he was tring to repair the leaking brake fluid.

the stop took 2 hours and our driver seemed pretty level headed and we decided to drive the rest of the way without brakes. I was thinking "what are the 2 worst things to have when driving thru the mountains?" I think it's drunk drivers and no brakes.

we arrived safe and sound.

10/29/08

Yesterday was a bad day. I woke up in a bad mood, I was tired and stressed. The stress led to a cold and a break out. I set aside that day to sort out my airplane ticket issues.

This sounds like a meager task, but I had to go to the airport to do this, which meant taking the metro 40 stops, with 3 changes which adds up to be more than a 2 hour trip . It was basically like going from fresno to the beach, just to sort out my stupid tickets. Andi, my british friend went with me as she also had to re-schedule her tickets. We got on the metro, which was packed shoulder to shoulder with no place to sit and rode all the way to the last stop on the metro(s). So here I was with snot dripping out of my nose, coughing, drowsy on cold medicine standing in a shoulder to shoulder crowd for 2 hours. When we reached the end of the line I met 20 teenagers, and I could automatically tell they where from California. So then I had this erie feeling of being in Riverpark or something. So that plus being in a place far away from the city where there was land and no high rise buildings for the first time in 3 months gave me really erie feeling.

when we left the metro station we had to find an auto rickshaw (kinda like a go-cart if you have never seen one) to take us the rest of the way to the airport. When we got to the place where several autos where parked, and I saw all the auto drivers standing in a circle smoking, chewing and laughing together. I automatically knew all of then where in bed with one another and would charge us whatever they felt like without room for bargain... and they did.

We got to the airport and Andi went to the ticket counter first and her change literally took like 40 seconds. But of course, I was in a bad mood with bad health and in my pessimistic mindset, I just knew that I was going to have a repeat of my ticket trauma I had in Germany.... and I did. I was being switched back and fourth, this counter to that counter to this office to that office until they told me that they didn't have anyone there that could help me, and they didn't even have a United counter. They did give me a phone number, that led to an automated voice helpline that did not help.

We couldn't find any taxis that wernt overcharging for the trip back to the metro, and we ended up paying 4 times the amount we had paid the auto that brought us there. To worsen my mood, when we got to the metro station, I knew that if I got a Sikh security guard would think I'm a woman [My continually growing hair seemed like no problem until I finally got around to buying a razor. I despise my tiny patchy facial hair, but went without shaving because I had no time to shop for a razor. A week ago I finally bought one and started shaving. Soon after that ever we went thru security checks, which had a line for "ladies" and one for "Gents", if the guard was a sikh, he would look me up and down... look confused and gesture that maybe I should be in the ladies line. When I didn't comply, he would just shrug and give me a rather inappropriate pat down (which made me realize WHY there was a line). It turns out that my tiny patchy facial hair was the only thing securing my gender in india] So sure enough I got a sikh gard and he could tell that I was a "gent" but still laughet and said "boy or girl? or maybe a bit of both! ha your hair is to long my friend!" and I laughed and said "my hair is too long? You [being a sikh] never even cut your hair! you just have something to put it in [turban]!" he laughed I laughed but it still didn't help my mood. I decided to stop shaving until I leave delhi so I wouldn't have these awkward moments. (usually if they look at me and think I'm a woman I say "what? do you think I'm pretty?" in as low and full voice as I can muster.

So... yeah... had a bad day. But I ended up calling my grandma and she put some life back into me.