Our first day in India

After quite a long night’s sleep, Rachel and I woke up early.  We were excited to have the whole day ahead of us to get our first real taste of India.  After getting dressed and exchanging American dollars for rupees (which seem like monopoly money, especially since the dollar is so strong comparatively), we set off to explore Manipal.  We walked around and saw lots of people walking about, all of whom started at us.  We’ve decided to just be entertained by everyone staring at us since it is apparently a pretty popular thing to do.  But the town is really interesting.  There are restaurants, clothing stores, and little convenient stores on the side of the road. It’s so interesting and eye opening to walk around and see everything.  Another thing that seems odd to us, dogs and cows roam the streets, yards, everywhere.  The first few times walking past the cows felt a bit odd but we’re starting to get

 used to it now. 

After walking around a bit (and getting quite lost) we took a taxi to the local Catholic Church, Christ Church.  It is a beautiful open-air church with a statue of Jesus and a small grotto dedicated to the Blessed Virgin in the front.  Inside, the walls were lined with the Stations of the Cross, the pews were rustic and wooden, and the altar was made of beautiful marble.  The Mass was basically the same, however I understood a bit less than usual even though it was in English.  There were even nuns who attended, apparently from a nearby convent, whom I am particularly interested in meeting.  After mass, Rachel and I introduced ourselves to the priest who was very friendly in welcoming us to Manipal and told us there is a Sunday evening mass for the university students.  Hopefully that will be a good way for us to meet some students our age.  We flagged down a taxi and headed back to the hotel for our first Indian breakfast.  We were pleasantly surprised when we saw some foods we recognized like fruit, cereal, and eggs.  There were also some Indian breakfast foods we tried that were quite tasty as well, however I could not even attempt to spell them. 

When evening rolled around, we were excited to venture out into the city again to find a restaurant for dinner.  After getting some recommendations from the front desk, we walked around for a bit before arriving at Guzzler’s Inn at about 5 o’clock.  We found out

that Indians do not eat dinner quite as early as Americans (or at least Wofford students) as the restaurant was not even open that early.  Oops! So we walked around for a bit and settled on getting some ice cream as an appetizer.  We went into some clothing stores and were entertained by the recurring Bob Marley theme.  Eventually 6 30 rolled around and we decided it was a respectable time to go eat dinner.  We were still the first ones there, but we were so hungry at that point we did not care! Once inside the restaurant, we hardly knew what to do with the menu.  We didn’t know what anything was! So after ordering our waiter’s suggestion, butter chicken and chicken tiki masala, we were excited to have our first real Indian meal.  Although I am going to have to get used to spicy food, the food was delicious! After we walked back to our room, we realized how tired we were already.  We stayed up as late as we possibly could, and crashed at the deceptively late hour of 9 o’clock.  It was a great first day, and we could hardly wait for our first day of work the next day at Manipal Press.