Home sweet home. This photo is a block from my hotel at 6:30am (before it gets BUSY!) I'mlocated in the burbs ofCalicut called Medical College Junction. There isa traffic circle at an intersection of three roads, so lots of buses and other traffic. The medical college and ajacent dental college are more than a little rough around the edges, and constantly busy. Whe one of our classmates became sick the first week she was taken to emergency where they wisked her right by the 30+ in line and gave her the only unoccupied bed and some unknown medicine. Next to her a young boy was alone, crying and bleeding from a cut on his face and in the third bed, a courpse. Our friend return home to Wales the next day.
It's $4 to get a cab to town, $1.40 for an auto rickshaw and .10 for the bus....so guess which I take? The buses are always packed, women sit or stand in the front as they drive like hell thru super narrow streets horns almost costantly blairing. If you really need some excitement, try crossing the street, you just kinda go for it with vehicals coming in every direction. As you go into the city (aprox. 8 miles) there is a bridge under construction so the road narrows to about 1 1/2 lanes, motorcycles are on the sidewalk
Getting to this blog has been a chore as I'm now in school and I'm finding it a challenge to keep up, so no weekend fun for me until Christmas break and then we plan on getting on a bus and going.

As I prepared to board for the flight to Calicut airport I said goodbye to Linda on the wifi enabled phone I got for the trip. I have since found that India's wifi is different so we haven't talked for 3 days. I'll be trying a sim card swap today as I ran out of wifi option(bunmmer), I'm determined to make this work and I'd like that to happen before Monday when I start FT school.
I'd said that I knew that anything I did wouldn't prepare me for all I was about to encounter....and I was right. It started on the ground in Dubai when it was announced that they would be spraying the cabin and 2 flight attendants walked through w/a spray can in each hand spraying I don't what. When I landed in Kozhikode (Calicut airport) a driver was supposed to have been arranged but after 2hrs. of being stared at and playing with groups of children in the heat of the night it was time for a taxi, we negotiated a price of Rs300 ($6) for about a 40min. thrill ride. The trip was not for the faint of heart as the lane was about 1 1/4 lanes wide with people walking on both sides and motorcycles, scooters, taxis, motorized rickshaws, cars and huge trucks and buses coming for both sides horns a blaz'in in the dark of the night. Honking means I'm coming thru NOW and is used in a top down food chain with the packed, speeding, huge, cazeally named buses being the dominant species ( I'm compilling a list of names). The smell of the jungle around me is totally unfamiliar but I like it, especially on walks away from the busy areas early before the sun comes up and it gets really hot. There are banana, papaya coconut, clove and rubber growing everywhere along with many thing I haven't identified. I've seen a couple lizards, bats and lots of strange birds but I'm in the burbs. My fellow student Emma from New Zealand spent time in the foothills of the Ghats (Mountains) and said there were monkeys watching her swim by a waterfall!! Hope to get upthere. The people of Calicut are very friendly but some seem quite puzzled by me, once I get a mile from the hotel whole families come out to see me walk by and wave, this town of 500,000 is not a tourist destination. Many have no electricity (which goes out so often no one seems to notice anyway) and they have wells next to there homes usually with a homemade bucket on a rope to let down for water. At about 8:00am the school/work rush starts and by 8:30 there are so may vehicles and school children around here its amazing, and super fun to watch. The children are all dressed in the uniform of their school or grade, everyone of them neat as a pin with every hair in place, the girls mostly in braids some in pig tails (if the women wear their hair down that shows their trying to catch a man). The hotel staff have been quite sweet but I find the random English words peppered within the Malayalam they speak has fooled more than once. For instance: they answer the phone "HELLO" and if you ask any one if they speak English they say "YES", trying to be helpful of course but "yes" might be the only English word they know! One of the most curious things I've observed is that 99% of the street & store signage and billboards are in English. There is close to a 100% literacy rate in Kerala reading English and Malayalam but the English they speak is evolving w/o native English speakers and is mixed w/Malayalam, so communication is a fun challenge! Then again my classmates are from New Zealand, U.K., S. Africa and the Maldives so our "Engish", written and spoken, has also made it interesting to work with each other. As I explore my immediate surroundings the guys who sell fruit, tea, food and household goods from carts, stalls and even bikes (tea & lotto!) are getting to know me and want me to hang with them. It's supernice at night when it cools off and and the carts open, lots of guys are out eating, drinking tea and chill'in.

I boarded the plane in LV after a very sad and disappointing attempt to reconnect with my dear brother, Mark.
The Jetblue fight was a redeye so I don't recall much about the JFK. I was just working to switch my sleep pattern 15 hrs. ahead. I rechecked my luggage with Emirates Air and sleepily talked to Linda, after 4 hrs. of straining to stay awake it was time to go.
The airline was off the hook! Snacks, fancy meals, 12in. screen on every seat and the best part of the 12hr. trip was it was uncrowded so those folks up front who paid 4K for a seat that lays down had nothing on me! I watched a TV show from the UK called "Secret Millionaire" where an unknown rich person goes back to his/her roots, lives frugally for 10 days and then has to choose a cause or individual to help. They had 3 episodes and they all made me cry both because of the folks they helped and to see the impact it made on the rich!
On the flight I befriended an elderly Bangladeshi man sitting in front of me as I notice he didn't understand the technology in front of him(music, Movies, TV, etc. Communication between us took awhile and he got a little mad at me once or twice, but we worked though it. He thought it was funny I was only going to be gone 5mos. as he had been away from home 2yrs. He laughed and pointed at me and said "short time!!" When we landed in Dubai the x-ray of his bag showed a pair of sisors for trimming his beard the had slipped thru JFK!! When security tried to get into his bag he started yelling at them so they grabbed his passport! When I got thru I told him he was my friend which was a little scary because by then everyone was yelling and they kept yelling at me "HE'S YOUR FRIEND?' in what I think was some disbelief since I couldn't even pronounce his name. They wanted me to explain that he HAD to stop yelling at them and I took him by the shoulder and told him they were police and shush. It worked and once he calmed down they let him go (with the siccors....nice).
Once inside the Dubai airport I felt as though I'd never left LasVegas! Add slot machines and take away squat toilets (about half of them) and it would be hard to tell the difference. People from everywhere, everything brand spanky new, even fake palm trees and 3 Starbucks. I'm only1/3 of the way adjusting my sleep and I'm tripping. The place is at least 3 miles long and I had 6 hours to explore. I ate a chopp salad at some fast food place because I had to try beef bacon (no pork in Dubai!) anyway it tasted the same. A couple stark differences though: McDonald's assures all meat is Halal and serves a McArabic, and the group of 75+ all in a nice shade of green from Togo going on their Haj. All of the luggage was on the women's heads so when a women lost her sandal she just kept going. When they stopped I tapped her on the shoulder and put it on her foot for her, everyone thanked the stranger in the cowboy hat profusely!

The past couple weeks have been amazing! Barak Obama is our President! Linda and I went to the Westin Hotel in Seattle on election night and got to meet several of my heroes incl. Rick Steves and Booth Gardner. We also got to see both our Senators and our Governor ramble.
Linda threw me a great party which I was both late and unprepared for. ( I had planned on a presentation about Kerala, India) Sorry friends.....
This week we traveled to Vegas, my home town. I love this place for reasons only a local can, and Linda loves cause it's fun if you know the ropes. We sat through a timeshare presentation to get super discount tickets to KA at the MGM, got free tickets on-line at clubvibe to a super fun burlesque show, got half price tickets to Crazy Horse from Tix4Less(google it!) and finally paid full fare to Last Comic Standing, add in lots of dancing at all the good spots and bed time becomes 4am if your disaplined.
We also went on a hike in Red Rock Canyon (where I use to ditch High School and where my ashes will be scattered).
Besides saying a sad and hard "see ya later" to my wonderful wife the highlight of the trip was a picnic with the Marchbanks family. Ralph and Jan (Mom and Dad) have retired to Colorado but were down to visit the kids. I just recently found them on-line after 15 years of searching and it was cheaper to fly to India from LV and Linda had never met them so we had to come. Their son Alan lives in Phoenix so he wasn't there but Kim, Paula and my best friend Rick were (stories about Rick and I are the stuff of legends and it's amazing we're alive). I haven't seen Kim in 30 years and she so full of life and with the same sense of humor that visiting with her was surreal(the big sister I always wanted). Paula was as warm and grounded as ever, you can tell how much she loves her family(I'm proud of you little sis). I can't even describe what it was like to be with Ralph and Jan........not only did they literally save my life by taking me in at 16 years old, the impact they've made on my life shaped who I am.
Now on to try to visit with my brother Mark then at 10:50pm, a flight!

No turning back now....

I've already paid for my TESOL training, 1 months accomadations and a 6 month IndiaVISA. Today however was signifigant, I bought a non-refundable oneway ticket from Las Vegas, Nevada, USA to Kozhikode, Kerala, India! I'm now broke. Linda and I embaced as the reality of being apart for 5 months set in. With 10 days to go I still have so much to do......