White people are such a novelty in India. Today, a random person came up to Francis and shook his hand. The other day he gave out an autograph to a kid after we spoke at a youth conference. We are all pretty easy to spot, because there are no other tourists in the places we have visited ie. everyone else is Indian.
The overnight train was quite an experience. I can't even describe the chaos of the train station and the sight of people crammed onto trains. (Like I mentioned before, the entire population of Australia is the same as the population of Mumbai, just one city in India) The most traumatic thing was seeing a stray dog leap onto the train tracks as a train steamed through the station. We could hear the train coming closer and closer and still the dog refused to budge, seeming preoccupied with something he'd found buried in the dirt on the tracks. Passengers on the platform tried to shoo the dog away but it wouldn't move. I swear the train missed the dog by a whisker, because it finally decided to take a casual step away from the train only a second before it would have been hit. I think I screamed.
We passed time on our 15 hour train ride by playing cards, drinking chai tea and adopting a little Indian boy that we named Steve. He was still his pyjamas and didn't speak a word of English, but he talked to us as if we understood him. Francis bought about 15 chais from the coffee cart that came up and down the train every five minutes, calling "Chai... coffee... coffee... chai". They were 5 rupees each, which amounts to about 10c.
Steve copied everything Francis did, and would stop the chai coffee man as he came down the aisle and ask Francis, "Chai?" And when Francis would shake his head and say "no no no no" and Steve would do the same to the coffee man, as if he was speaking on behalf of Francis. Steve would also take Francis's money and pay the coffee man every time they bought a chai. After 15 hours when we arrived at our destination, the boy said something to his father who translated it for us as being, "He wishes that you are on the train tomorrow when we take the train again to the airport." He is just one of the many children we have fallen in love with over here.
We passed time on our 15 hour train ride by playing cards, drinking chai tea and adopting a little Indian boy that we named Steve. He was still his pyjamas and didn't speak a word of English, but he talked to us as if we understood him. Francis bought about 15 chais from the coffee cart that came up and down the train every five minutes, calling "Chai... coffee... coffee... chai". They were 5 rupees each, which amounts to about 10c.
Steve copied everything Francis did, and would stop the chai coffee man as he came down the aisle and ask Francis, "Chai?" And when Francis would shake his head and say "no no no no" and Steve would do the same to the coffee man, as if he was speaking on behalf of Francis. Steve would also take Francis's money and pay the coffee man every time they bought a chai. After 15 hours when we arrived at our destination, the boy said something to his father who translated it for us as being, "He wishes that you are on the train tomorrow when we take the train again to the airport." He is just one of the many children we have fallen in love with over here.
There are some seriously beautiful people in this country. And we are seeing the most amazing things.
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