Day 3: Why not start the journey off with the one thing people and travel books tell you not to do!

At about 5:30pm...we finally wake up for good and are ready to start our day...yup, 12 hours later!!! I guess we really needed the sleep!! Not having heard from Vaishali, I give her a call to ask her what the plans are. She tells me that she figured we would be so tired that it was better to let us sleep and recuperate today and do the registration on Tuesday...such a sweetie!!! So Yan and I decide to take our showers and go walk around the area where we live! We walk up to the main road, exploring the shops and decide to stop at a street shop that sells milkshakes!! We order 2 mango milkshake and as we watch the guy making it, we realize that he is rinsing the blender with tap water....OH OH!! This might spell trouble!! We decide to have it anyways (being the adventurous people that we are!) but tell him to hold off on the ice!! We enjoy the milkshake while sitting outside and enjoying the sounds (which some people would perhaps call noise!) and the colourful scene being displayed before us: Indians of all ages walking down the streets buying fruits and veggies from the street vendors! A great start to our journey (especially since neither of us was sick from that shake!!). We decide to do as the locals and buy some bananas for the next morning since we weren’t sure where we would be eating. Taking a look at all the fruits they had, we decide to buy some apples as well! We ask the vendor for the price and he responds to us: 300 k-g...HUH?!? Yan and I are trying to figure out what k-g means and we figure it must be a lower type of currency so we decide to hold off and ask Vaishali tomorrow...but as we’re walking, we have a genius moment and finally realized that Kg was kilograms....Wow!!

In our defence, when an Indian mumbles a number and two letters to you and you’re in a new country trying to figure things out for the first time, k-g was NOT that obvious!

We really do have a university degree, I swear!! Laughing, we make our way back towards the hotel and feeling a bit hungry (and still on our adventure high) we head to a local coffee shop for soup. We buy a (very small) bowl of tomato soup hoping it will hold off hunger until the morning. We then head to the internet cafe to let everybody know we made it safely and then head back to the hotel for another night’s sleep so we’ll be ready to tackle our first “real” full day in India!!