We Have Finally Arrived!:)

After 5 days in Hong Kong, we've finally touched down in Bangalore! Hong Kong was...interesting. A good experience, definitely, but not really a place I would want to go to again. The food was kind of difficult, it was good when we were at an authentic place but when it was American-ized Chinese food it was really...gross. We only really had authentic Chinese food one time, and it was the night before we left. We were on a private tour with a British guy who had lived in Hong Kong for a really long time, and he was basically a local, so we had an amazing tour with him. But whenever we tried to eat anywhere in Hong Kong, it was really hard because we had literally no freaking idea what we were doing and the waiters didn't have great English, if any. We went to this gigantic floating restaurant called Jumbo Floating Restaurant (or something self explanatory like that) and the decor was nice...but we all decided that the nice decor was just a decoy to take your mind off the bland food. After carefully sifting through everything on the menu (which was like 50 pages long), Amara and I settled on getting a chicken dish. However, we were then enlightened, and found out that the dish we had so carefully picked out thinking it was a safe bet was actually a whole bird just plopped onto the plate. Literally. A whole bird. Head and beak included. Needless to say, we changed our mind on what to get, but the food in general still wasn't that great. Also, it was so hot in Hong Kong that I actually thought I was going to have a heat stroke and die. If you stepped outside of the hotel, within two minutes you would be dripping with sweat all over your body. When we went to see the Big Buddha, it was around 3000 feet above sea level, which is somewhere near the elevation of Bangalore, and it was still smokin' hot up there too. My dad had been constantly reassuring us that, no, we would not die in Bangalore, because it wouldn't be that hot since it's higher up. So, at the Big Buddha which is at a higher elevation, we were still drowning in our own sweat, so I did the logical thing and freaked out. When we got off the plane in Bangalore, I was bracing myself for the wave of unbearable heat to come crashing down on me and cause me to start dripping sweat at 3 in the morning, but miraculously enough, that didn't happen!!! We got our baggage, breezed through customs and immigration without any problems whatsoever, and then met our driver outside the airport, and arrived at our temporary serviced apartment. Aaaaaand that brings us to right now! Today we were house hunting all day, which was a super fail, we found nothing that met our needs, and now my mother is moping about because of that. But I have faith...we'll find a place to live for the next 11 months eventually! Okay, so now I'll go ahead and spit out the answers to questions you're probably all wondering about...I was wondering about them myself before we got here!
How's traffic? Today it wasn't that bad, it wasn't really a parking lot like you'd expect, but it was definitely not like Washington traffic. Washington's traffic is organized, Bangalore's traffic is....not organized, to say the least. There are cars, trucks, rickshaws, TONS of motorcycles, people, kids, dogs, goats, cows....it's crazy. Cars and motorcycles cut in from random places, people just run into moving traffic to cross the streets, and animals obviously couldn't care less about traffic so they cut in whenever they want.
How's the food? SPICY. Good, but spicy. That is all. Ohhhhmygod though, the gulab jamans are SO good. I could live off of those.
How's the weather? Actually, it's really nice. It was hotter in most of the un-airconditioned apartments we looked at today than it was outside. The weather is definitely manageable, I'm pleasantly surprised at how nice it is.
Are there elephants everywhere? Sorry guys, only in movies.
More later, thanks for reading!

Tomorrow is the Day!

The title is self explanatory but yes! The time has come for us to temporarily end our life in America and start a new chapter of it in India! But of course the suspense of our new life is still not quite here yet, because we added a 5 day stop over in Hong Kong on the way to India. If we hadn't done that, the flight would have been 26 hours, so we decided to make it a little more bearable by shortening it to 13 hours to Hong Kong, then around 6 hours to India. This last week has been especially stressful...it seems like it's lasted for 10 years. I've been trying to cram in my last sleepovers with friends whenever I could and trying to make sure I see everyone that I wanted to see before leaving. I didn't quite get everyone but close enough I guess. The movers came on Tuesday to pack our freight stuff, and it's kind of depressing to me that all the stuff we felt like we needed for a year could fit into 588 pounds of freight and 2 duffel bags a piece. Guess that just goes to show you that we have too much crap in our houses anyways! The biggest downside is that moves get everyone really stressed and on edge, and let's face it, nobody is a nice person when they're stressed, which has kind of been painfully obvious for the past week.When we moved from Kansas to Washington a few years ago, we always said that would be our last move until I went to college. We never thought anything like this would ever happen, and, though it will be a great experience for us, it does mean another move there and back. At least it's temporary!
Going to Hong Kong is also adding stress because the airlines have stupid rules like 11 pounds per carry on! We usually carry on a small Rick Steve's suitcase, but that suitcase alone weighs 7 and a half pounds, so that didn't happen this time. We had to shove everything for our 5 day trip into a tiny duffel bag so as to meet the airline's carry on rules. I also have to carry on my viola, which is light on its own, but when it gets into the case, it weighs 13.4 pounds. I have to carry that on too...so if they weigh it I guess we're screwed. Bottom line is, read the rules of the airline before you book the tickets. You might just have second thoughts on what airline to fly.