2011 February 15 | A Day in Mollywood

Joining us today for Travel Bug Tuesday is blogger Kristin. She was nice enough to write up a story about her amazing experience in India. I know I have certainly been bitten by the travel bug after reading it! Please make our guest blogger feel welcome!

I want to tell you about the best trip I have been on to date! It is my trip to India from September 2005 to May 2006. I went to India to be a student missionary at an orphanage. I was told there would be around 50 students at the orphanage, and they would all speak English and I was just to help teach conversational English! I went with my freshman year roommate and you can imagine our surprise when we arrived at the orphanage and found over 500 kids there and probably less than 50 spoke English, and really, only about 15 could have a conversation with us!

India isn’t a place that welcomes you with beautiful sights, wonderful smells, or gorgeous sounds. Instead, you are welcomed with trash filled streets, the aroma of curry mixed with open sewage and the clashing sounds of music, street vendors selling their wares and horns honking! It wasn’t the pristine images that were in my travel book and it most certainly wasn’t what I was expecting to encounter! But, by the time I came home I was able to see the beauty amidst all the clutter.

My heart still longs to go back to India. I would do anything to snuggle up with my precious Poornima, or to run after little Lakshmi threatening to pinch her little butt cheeks that were hanging out from a much too short skirt that had lost its hem and 90% of its material years ago, probably somewhere along the line of the 4th or 5th owner of the skirt.

I had great plans of travelling to the northern part of India to see the Taj Mahal, but when my Indian mother found out she had broken a vertebrae in her back and had to have surgery, our plans changed as we rallied around her in the hospital. While I didn’t get to see the most well known tribute to love that we know as the Taj, I was able to see the ocean off of the very southern tip of India where we went first thing in the morning so that we could watch the sun rise. I travelled into the mountains of Kerala with my Indian sister where we stayed with a Muslim family for a week. I spent a few days in Madurai visiting another friend from America that was at an orphanage there, and I spent a few days in Chennai. But for the most part, I never left Tamil Nadu.

When I came back to America and people found out I hadn’t been to the Taj Mahal, and I hadn’t seen the Ganges River, they were shocked and questioned how I could go all the way to India and not see those sights?! My response to those people, “My Indian family was more important and this just gives me a reason to go back!”

Jorden and I plan to return to India someday. When? We don’t know, but we’ll get there! And I would highly recommend to any one of you, if you get the chance, GO!!! You won’t regret it! You’ll smell the worst smells, meet some of the nicest people, eat some amazing food, hear some strange sounds, feel like a millionaire, have extremely dirty feet, and come home feeling more blessed than you could have ever imagined!