Entry 4, Day 3

In the morning, we went to eat breakfast at Darshan's place at 8:00 "Indian Time", which meant it started when it started. We went upstairs and people were sitting around in one room. We took our shoes off and entered. Inside, a guy was chanting/singing and had a bunch of bowls around him and one large container. We were asked to come up at one point and get red paint rubbed on our foreheads. See side for pictures.
Later in the ceremony they started burning cow dung for purification. I found that interesting and humorous at the same time.
We came downstairs for breakfast after that.
Later we were invited to go outside to a playground. We saw a spinny thing that had been banned from most playgrounds. I span it myself because I'm a wimp, but I got less scared of the high speeds later.
We also played a game called cricket, which is like baseball except you throw the ball a different way and you run back and forth from only two bases. Dad says he didn't know what the score was, but he was pretty sure he lost. It was a lot of fun.
After that event, we went back to the hotel- a JW Mariott, the most high-end Mariott hotel- and rested.
That night, we went to a venue called Shree Ji Lawns and watched some really cool dancing to the good, bad, and decent Indian pop. It was mostly about the dancing. There was also plenty of force-feeding.
             
                          "I'm not tired."                          

Day the Second

We went down to breakfast that morning as usual.

Next, we had an adventure of finding a shop called Raymond's.

For the first car ride to Raymond's, we took a hotel car. Our theorized destination was Nucleus Mall, but Dad was not communicating well with the cab driver. He thinks that the cab driver was trying to tell him that the shop wasn't there anymore, but as I said, they weren't communicating well. 

The driver was having trouble finding the place so Dad offered his phone for navigational purposes, but he refused. The driver called people for directions instead. 

We got to Nucleus mall and Raymond's wasn't on the directory map in the mall. Some people behind the counter told us there were shops on the sixth floor. We went up and didn't find Raymond's.

We stood on the stairs for a while and waited for an Uber to come. The driver was having trouble finding us and we were almost ready to give up and haul an auto, but Dad's phones showed he was coming toward us. We drove toward another mall.

Raymond's was nowhere to be found at that mall either so Dad called Darshan and we took an auto to his house. 

The auto driver would also not accept the phone and he asked random people on the street for directions.

We got there and one of Darshan's friends took us to an existing Raymond's rather than a hypothetical Raymond's and the real shop was rather tiny.

The suit salesman was a real showman and had a fine taste in suits.

Side note: We were getting material for a suit that was to be tailored because it costed about $10,000 dollars to get a suit tailored in the United States while in India, it costs the price of a regular suit would in the U.S.

We finally were done with the abundance of Raymond's and went to the first wedding event at Darshan's house where I got my first Henna, which would turn orange and then red the next day and talked with a nice lady and got a picture with me and her daughter. Here are some pictures from that night:

 

First Day

"Why'd you have to wake me up so early?" I said when he pushed me. "Ephram, it's not early", Dad said. I looked at the clock and it said 12:??.

We went down to the spice kitchen downstairs and had some pretty good food. Darshan met us there later and we got in his car.

We went to a mall to shop for suits, but it didn't have any traditional suits. 

Finally, we found a place called Jaihind and got some good traditional Indian suits there. I got two. See images at the left of the screen.

We also stopped to get coconut water for me. They actually cut up the top of the coconut and stick a straw in it. It was really good. It didn't have very much juice in it, though.

We went to a restaurant that I forget the name of and I got fried idli, which is thing made of rice and a lassi, which is a really yummy drink. 

After we had all finished, Darshan left.

We walked out and got into an auto, which is a car without doors. The driver was fine and the auto was fine. The bad part is that India doesn't have lanes. you just shove your way through, basically. Pune is the seventh most populous city in India. That's not a good combination. When I got out, my back was sweating. That's partly the heat, partly the stress. 

We stayed at the hotel for the rest of the day.

Getting to Our Destination

On the fourth of February, Dad and I set out on a flight to London. The flight was okay as flights go, but what's really important is the destination. Every destination has to start with a journey. It's a rather boring journey, though. I will say, however, that international flights are much nicer than regular flights.

We got to London around 6:00. We got some European adaptors that are much different than American adaptors. See images at the left of the screen.

We also went to an airport restaurant called Giraffe. I had some pretty decent pancakes. It was not as good as the title implied, but still good. 

I also got orange juice that was extremely pulpy and was a little bit too sour. The orange juice had a plastic green giraffe. Now I have a souvenir from the airport in London. It's very special to me. 

On the flight to Munbai, my tablet would not function so I mostly fiddle around with the in-flight  entertainment system. I watched the first episode of a show I'd wanted to watch called 'Fargo', so that was good. 

We landed in the Munbai airport and it was amazing! There were stone sculptures behind the glass and also a thingy made out of bottle caps. It was more like a museum than an airport.

We had already registered for our Visas, but we still hadn't gotten our actual Visa. We went over to counter 6 and dad had to get his fingers scanned. Unfortunately, dad had recently cut one of his fingers with scissors so the guy behind the counters had spend several minutes trying to figure out how to scan only three fingers.

Darshan, the one who's getting married, hired a driver to drive us from Munbai to Pune. I got some sleep on the car ride, which was good. I was very cold so I had my arms and legs scrunched up under my shirt. We got back around 5:00