Bienvenidos a Bangalore... Just Kidding. They didn't actually say that.

My arrival to India took a total of 23 and a half hours, including air time, layovers, immigration, waiting for my baggage (45 minutes), and customs (.36 seconds).  All in all, the journey was a good one.  I had an aisle seat for both flights, and during each flight I sat next to interesting women.  The first was on her way home to Algeria after spending the last year teaching Arabic at a college in Portland Oregon on a Fulbright Scholarship.  The second flight I sat next to a woman from Bangalore who had just spend the week in Paris for work.  She was nice and assured me that I would have an excellent trip.

My first day here was spent learning about the NGO I'm staying at, meeting the Selvaraj family, and forming the research project for my college Sudhir and I will be working on while I'm here.  I ended the day with dinner at the Selvaraj house with students and interns at Visthar from Iowa, New York, Finland, and Nigeria.  

Now I am sitting at the end of day two, which included a lot of walking and meeting people.  We walked around a middle-class, normal college hang out shopping area in Bangalore, attended a high school personality competition Siddarth (Sudhir's brother) was judging, sat and ate lunch/dinner (actually, I had a mango milk shake that was fantastico), went to a theater group meeting (more on this another time), and ended the day with dinner at a Chinese restaurant (which is different from one back home because it has Indian influences with the food... essentially it's less greasy) with a few of Sudhir's close high school friends. 

Organizers of the personality contest performing Soulja Boi while the judges decided on a winner for the competition.