Homeless again :D

India
Originally uploaded by An Smith.

We arrived in Bangalore this morning at 4:30am!! Ya. Like AM. And our train doesn't leave until 10:30pm. Two over nights in a row and lots of time in between..ugh. Although, overnight trains are so fun and in India they are even more fun when you are the only tourist (you usually are) and everyone takes you under their wing to make sure you get off at the right place and are seeing the best places in India (so cute) and basically want to know your life story in a nutshell or take apart your headlamp with mild fascination.

Today we are being totally cheap and rather than get a sleaze bag hotel for the day we decided to freshen up in a scuzzy washroom at the station and store our bags in a locker. *And to note that when I say scuzzy I mean the ultimate in grossness. At home I wouldn't go inside this type of washroom for fear of immediate death or touching something that would cause your hand to fall off or at the very least turn strange colours.. of course when travelling it's a totally different story, and you feel as if you are immune to gross!! Well, probably cause we tend to be ON the gross side of the scale 98% of the time.*

Anyway, we brushed our teeth, splashed water in the right places, washed faces.. you know. That kind of stuff. Tried not to breath deep. Wandered around, pretended we were rickshaw Nazis, grumbled about how the city of Bangalore must not have realized we were arriving and therefore they forgot to roll out the red carpet and open stuff for us at the time we needed it. Very rude.

So here we are. We plan on spending $5 and going to the best 5 star hotel in the city and sleeping by the pool for the remainder of the afternoon. This fun has to wait while I finish backing up my Thailand pictures (taking forever - full time job, so time consuming - violins playing..) but at least this time I'm doing it to MY flickr account instead of some other persons whom I've never met. They must have been really pleased when they found all 200 of my pics in their account. Duh.

We spent the last 6 days in Mamallapurnam being lazy cows. A holiday within the trip perhaps :) We had a pool and a TV and we didn't move. We ate, we met amazing people and we suntanned. We didn't even really shop. No sightseeing. Unfortunately the orphanage thing got totally muckered up (but not for reasons previously discussed!!). I got sick, the driver was never free.. that kind of thing. Wasn't meant to happen I guess. The pool at our guest house was rank (lots of dead mozzies in the pool and dead crows hanging in the trees.. i suppose in an effort to scare away the crows? The town is nuts; it's like out of a Hitchcock movie and semi deserted because it is low season; throughout the day there are thirty crows flying over head squawking away.. very creepy. So we paid $2 to go to the nice clean dead-crow-free pool every day).

We met this amazing man by the name of Swamiji when we were there. He truly is a nomad in every sense of the word - he has travelled a lot of the world and does not have a home. He never has. He is probably in his forties (my best guess) and was born completely blind. He is a devout Buddhist and dedicates his life to helping people.

I can't imagine a harder place to grow up blind (with no family or education geared to your needs or social services to help you) - in a country with crazy roads, sketchy planks to get you over gutters (with icky stuff in them) from one broken sidewalk to the next, traffic that means you get out of the way fast or you get hit. He has the most adventurous spirit and is one of the most intelligent (self taught!!) people I've ever met. He can swim confidentely in a pool, has gone parachuting, tried jet skiing (mind you briefly), owns a digital camera (he loves to do the kind of shots where you all squeeze in while he holds the camera infront and tries to guess where we all are.. so cute) and even emails (he gets people help with that part.. we helped him type some stuff to friends and read him the replies). He actually won a photo contest once for the legally blind and he says that the spirit and soul of the people he meets is in the camera :) Refreshing to meet someone so determined to live his life as best as he can without letting a small thing like being blind get in his way.