Take a breath and take the plunge my dear

I made it to India in one piece. The flights were pretty good - I mean as well as 3 flights in a 24 hour window can be. In case you were wondering, any class other than coach is indeed the way to fly to Asia. I'm reading the current Oprah book, not because it's an Oprah book, but because Jayne raves about it so much that I thought I'd check it out. It's called A New Earth, and I'm sure Amazon describes it better than I will. I was reading this part about how people get upset about their possessions when they let the possessions define them, and once you let go of that, you stop freaking out about possessions. So, I thought, maybe I should go this WHOLE TWO MONTHS without my ipod, and experience what is going on around me more. For a good 20 minutes I thought about how that's what I really should do, and that I really could pull it off, and then I realized, um, and not have music when I workout? Ummmm, no.

There was kind of a scary moment after passport control in Germany. I was in line first, so I went through, and past that doors that are basically the point of no return. I waited for...a while, and Denise & co. did not come through. Then I got yelled at by some flight attendant who though I was trying to get back in. Finally, I figured I'd see them at the gate. I went on to go through security, and when I finally got to the gate, all three of them were sitting there, assuming I had ditched them for a swanky lounge. Apparently they were redirected and told they didn't have to go through passport control. Hmph.

Speaking of Denise & co, let's do a little roll call:

• Denise - on my team at work. She's very...outgoing and boisterous. And funny.
  
• Joe - Denise's 9 year old son. He brought travel Blokus (score) and pretty much wants to go swimming all the time.
• Molly - Denise's niece, my age. She's going to take care of Joe while we're at work. She works for Andrew Zimmern, who eats weird stuff in other countries. She's very cool, and we actually have a lot in common.
  

The jet lag hasn't really been that bad, although I did wake up at 5am today. On Friday, we mostly slept and got a little acclimated. We ventured out to a mall near Denise's hotel, and crossed the street a few times. I'm really glad I'd done that in Asia before, cause I think it's pretty scary at first. First of all, there aren't really traffic signals of any kind here. Nor are there crosswalks. So, the cross traffic never ever stops. In order to cross the street, you just slowly start walking out into traffic and make your way across the lanes (if you want to call them lanes - cause they really aren't).

I have to say, I'm disappointed in myself over the packing job that I've done for this trip. I will never pack so far in advance again. I've forgotten: my work badge, my ipod, and the cable for moving pictures from my camera to my computer (so you'll have to wait for pictures). I blew out my converter straightening my hair - I guess you can't use it for over 10 minutes. So now I need to find a transformer. And, since I don't have my ipod, now I have no alarm clock. So I need to get one of those for when I don't just happen to wake up at 5am.

Ok, and I just have to say...I gave out a lot of those little cards, so I'm guessing there's a lot of new readers and a few existing lurkers. I promise I will love love love getting comments - remember, you're reading everything I'm doing, but I won't get to hear much from most of you. And that's hard. Thanks to the people who commented on the last one - love it. That is all.

posted by Diana @ 20:05