"This is India!" (Usha's house, Chennai, state of Tamil Nadu, India)

After 35 hours of traveling, starting in Atlanta, then New York, Brussels and finally Chennai, we made it here. Flying Jet Airways here, we were relieved to find that the recent pilot strikes had been called off. The flight attendants, dressed in beautiful yellow uniforms served us remarkably good airplane food over the two days we spent in the air, while we read, slept and watched movies. 'All's Well End's Well' was a particularly ridiculous, yet remarkably enetertaining bit of Chinese cinematography. We highly reccommend seeing it. We should probably mention that Kelsey was looking particularly suspicious and was stopped for 'random' security checks in New York and Brussels along with a mandatory swine flu check in India.
Upon landing in Chennai, we stood in line for our swine flu check, aggressive Indian ladies sticking a thermometer that looked like a gun to your forhead and yelling out your temperature. Thankfully we were not sent to mandatory quarantine. Phew. After easily locating our bags in the bustling, yet impressive and clean airport we pushed our broken cart outside into the swarms of people waiting outside in the hot, night air. We were concerned about finding Usha's husband, a man we had never met before in a sea of men, until we realized that basically everyone was staring at us anyways, being the only two white girls, pushing our overflowing, broken suitcase trolley into everyone. Luckily as we struggled our trolley out of the entrance way, the aggressive 'taxi' men becan to swar$, surrounding us with screams of 'Taxi!'
Then a tall, regal looking man, approached us and said 'Kelsey?' We nodded. Yaay! He beat back the "taxi" men now struggling to push our broken trolley away. See Kelsey, I knew there was a reason I picked the only broken one! Our tall, impressive, new friend asked us about Ms. Shanta, and we figured if he knew Kelsey and Shanta, he was a reasonable person to get in a car with. We switched to a functional cart, (not only tall, but smart!) And pushed into the street. People were standing, sitting, lying everywhere around the airport and the streets were full of honking cars.

Our host called over a driver, who from there took the difficult responsibility of cart pushing, which turned out to also be a hazardous one, as while trying to navigate our way to the parking lot he was literally hit by a van that refused to wait at all for us to get out of the way. This was followed by a series of fist waving, shouting, and pounding on the window of the car. After a few more close calls with cars and us being directly honked at several times for taking up most of the road, we finally got to our car. By that we mean a small Indian taxi which somehow could fit the heaviest bag out of our 4, but neither of mine (Kelsey's). (Says Paige, "Nice kelsey, nice..") So with 2 bags hanging out the front left window, the driver honking away in the front, Mr. Parthasarathy, our backpacks and us 2 in the backseat, we drove at 12.30am to our first Indian home!

Kelsey says that the streets reminded her of Mombassa. We rolled down the windows and watched the night, city scenes as we weaved between cars, and rikshaws, honking all the while. There were makeshift homes constructed beneath the highways with strings of laundry connecting them. It was dark and late and few people were out but the closed shops and buildings still seemed bursting with life, with the ornate decorations, and colorful billboars everywhere. We passed trees wrapped with lights and palm trees lined the street. Near the house, packs of dogs wandered the street howling, and barking at our car.
After struggling our bags to the second floor apartment we tucked in and went to sleep in our awesome room with ac. :)


Peace

We are about to head out on our first exploring Chennai adventure!