Packed...and waiting

Buddhism--which was founded in India more than 2,000 years ago--turns on the central tenet that human beings should let go of their physical and emotional connections to the world. In this way, they can obtain enlightenment and inner peace.

If the bags that Jenna and I have packed for our trip to the Subcontinent are any indication, we are nowhere close to enlightenment.

Two large hiking backpacks filled to the point of tipping over, a roller suitcase, and two more smaller backpacks. And we still feel like we are leaving stuff behind.

Here is an abbreviated list of the things we are taking: two weeks's worth of clothes, three weeks' worth of underwear, comfortable shoes, flip-flops, Crocs (to traverse streets washed out by monsoon rains), eight sticks of deoderant, three tubes of toothpaste, four toothbrushes, three cans of shaving cream, ten Gillette razors, Ibuprofen, inhalers, Dayquil, Immodium, EmergenC and and a half-dozen other types of over-the-counter medicine the sum total of which would make up a pharmacy shelf; a laundry bag, a water purifier, two travel guides each as thick as the Mahabharata, electrical adapters, two rolls of toilet paper, insect repellent, four blank journals, a laptop, a camera with an extra long-range lens, five paperback books, two old copies of The New Yorker and a deck of cards. Not to mention the most important thing of all: our passports with visas.

Our lives for the next 10 months or so are contained in these five bags. Much of it will be disposed of along the way. Empty deoderant sticks discarded in the trash. Books that have been read given to used bookstores somewhere along the Ganges. What we come back with will be much, much more.

Bangalore Boogie

We have officially accepted a volunteer position as teachers at an English Langauge Institute in Bangalore, which is in the southern state of Karnataka, landlocked between the Western and Eastern Ghats (which are mountain ranges running up the coasts of India's penninsula). The city is considered the "Silicon Valley of India", the country's high-tech capital, home to Internet giants Wipro and Infosys, and one of the fastest growing cities in the entire country. With all that said, it is also thought of as one of the most Westernized Indian cities as well. It will be quite a change from Calcutta, which we will live in for the first month that we are there.

Welcome!

Welcome to our blog. Thanks again for following us. This is our first post:

We are learning before we go that nothing in India is easy. Jenna and I spent much of Monday picking through the minutiae of Indian visas. There seems to be a different visa for every special group of people: tourists, students, workers, businessmen, missionaries, journalists, medical patients, former Indian nationals, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans. You name it. (If you ever plan on going to India, for any reason--even just to visit briefly--you must have a visa. Here's the India Consulate website page listing all the types of visas you can possibly get. A veritable Baskin Robbins of bureaucratic meticulousness: https://indiavisa.travisaoutsourcing.com/guidelines.)

Complicating matters is the fact that Jenna was born in India and once held Indian citizenship. This disqualifies her for some reason (though I bet it has something to do with the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks) from getting a tourist visa--the easiest form of visa to get. So we have considered entry visas, student visas, employment visas, and even this thing called a Person of Indian Origin Card. All of this is to say that, by Monday evening, we were nearly at our wit's end.

However, we have gotten reassurances from the organization that is training us in Kolkata (the American TESOL Institute) that they will be sending us documentation by tomorrow that will prove we are students. Therefore, we can apply for a student visa. It should hopefully be in the mail by tomorrow night.