Trains, Planes, Auto-rickshaws

Yesterday was very busy. We caught the train from Varkala to Cochin where we were picked up by an Iranian Baha’i from the area, Mr.Ghanbari. He took us to his house where we visited with his wife, who is from Sri Lanka and their four-year-old son, Vaheed, for the afternoon. We were joined later in the evening by Rakesh, another Baha’i from the area. We had a lovely meal together and discussed both our and their Baha’i communities and the export business in India as that is Mr. Ghanbari’s profession.

We stayed at a hotel near the airport and caught a morning flight back to Bangalore. School work was waiting for us. It has been a much deserved, week-long break from school, but today it was back to it again.

Late this afternoon we went to M.G. (Mahatma Gandhi) Road. It is a shopping area, where I wanted to finish buying a few gifts, and where Nadim was on the hunt for a new knapsack. We were successful on both fronts, but there was some heavy bargaining involved and we actually had to return to one shop because we found the same item a few shops down the line for so much cheaper. All this hassle seems to be second nature to Indian people, but to us we find arguing and haggling quite exhausting, particularly if you aren’t in the frame of mind for it and today I guess we weren’t.


The area also provides some fast food restaurants, upscale coffee shops, and the like. It was a bit of a treat to take advantage of some of these things as well.

Today marks six months of traveling! In some respects it seems like it can’t possibly be that long that we’ve been away, but we’ve seen so much that in other ways it seems impossible to have fit so much into that time frame.

CM