Early Rising

This morning the gang arose at the crack of dawn; 5:15 to be exact. As we haggardly trudged to meet the bus that would take us to the wedding that we were invited to (hence the early start), we were surprised to see the FFC girls who were awake and doing chores with gusto. We later learned that it was like this every morning.

A short bus ride away we hopped out of the car and were led into a high school gym-like ‘hall’ where the wedding was being held. We were escorted to the front row, and as we were busy looking at the beautiful Indian decorations, a blaring band consisting of two drums and two horn things began playing at decibel levels that were disturbing at times that were not 6:00 in the morning. The fatigue that we all experienced helped drown out the noise.

After some waiting, the groom was led out of one section of the hall, and sat on the floor in front of many ceremonial items. Soon the bride came out, draped in flowers and bangles, looking utterly terrified. She sat beside the groom and maintained the frightened facial expression for the rest of the ceremony. As it turns out, the couple had only met a month before, for ten minutes, and hadn’t seen each other since. The ceremony came to an end and we were offered bottled drinks, and promptly left. We spend the remainder of the day spending time with the kids (the older girls mainly), and teaching them Koob (a Swedish game that we first played at Mr. Brickell’s cottage months ago) from a set that had been specifically made for us by a carpenter named Jerry just a few doors down from FFC.

In addition to this tiring morning, the men dressed up in traditional Indian clothing, like the ladies did last week. It consisted of Lungees (a skirt like sheet wrapped around the waist), a button down short sleeve shirt and a turban. The Lungees could be rolled up, resembling diapers, allowing for a greater cooling effect. The girls at the orphanage had never seen such muscular legs as those on Harry and Max, the two behemoths of the trip.

Because the last few bloggers have had terrible memories, we have to pick up the slack on this entry. Two days ago we made the LONG journey out to a meditation temple called Isha. Last years trip went twice because they had such a fun time, so naturally we were very excited. We pulled up, expecting the place to be empty as described by last year’s trip. This, however, was not the case. It turns out that we made the hour and a half journey (down an incredibly bumpy road) on the one holy night this temple actually celebrated. It was some sort of all night festival that was capped off at 5:30am by a visit from a famous Guru named Sadhguru. It was only around 7pm, but people continued to stream in, and we estimate that around 100 000 people would eventually show up. However, we did get a chance to go into some of the ground of the temple, where we walked down an enormous staircase to a pool with a beautiful mural on the roof.

Tomorrow may be our last blog entry until Friday…So until then please don’t worry about us…we will only be chilling with the elephants and possibly deadly sea creatures.



-Max and Harry