Bangalore...The City With A Million Experinces

August 31, 2008

I went to church today.  It was a Christian church in the city of Bangalore.  David Selveraj was a student there when he was a young man.  It was really interesting because it was an English service.  I even took communion.  I thought that it was really weird because there really wasn’t a lot of talking about God.  The preacher talked about responsibility and what each person is responsible for.  After church was over we set out to explore the city.  We had brunch at a restaurant call Airline.  It was an outdoor place and let me tell you, if you would have seen the kitchen there is no way that it would be allowed to operate in the USA.  It was basically open to the air and all it consisted of was a small makeshift hut.  David introduced us to different types of Indian food and most was pretty good.  I was a little nervous when they placed cups of water on the table for us to drink.  Luckily one of the members of our group had a water filter with him and he let me use it to get rid of any parasites in it.  It seemed to work okay.  It is a few hours later and I have not felt sick yet.  During our tour of the city we really got to experience some crazy driving.  Crazy is actually a pretty loose term for the kind of traffic we were in.  It was absolutely nuts and at one point we had to cross the street to get to where the cars were going to pick us up.  I’m glad that I went to church in the morning because it reminded me how to pray for my life.  It was pretty funny though because all 17 of us were trying to get across without getting hit by a car, bus, scooter or rickshaw.  What a gong show!!! It seems like city life here is pretty crazy all the time.  What else can you expect from a city with about 7.2 million residents?  

It rained a lot today.  I didn't realize that we were going to be living here at the end of monsoon season.  It rained so hard today that huge streams were flowing through the campus.  David told us that there would be two more weeks of rain and then it would stop.  The storms make the power go out all the time, but we use very little anyway so I guess that its not so bad.  The only part that kind of sucks is that when the power goes out the fans stop working and it can get pretty hot.  Its a really unpredictable thing here, but everything about India is unpredictable.  We were told that the only thing predictable about India is the unpredictable.  Very suitable.