Japan: Sendai - August 27 /
Sendai - August 27 2010 -Eric: So long story short, we're in Dubai after 23 days of being in India. This update covers our time at the end of June when we arrived in Japan and spent a week with the Starkey family. Enjoy the update and all five videos. The last video is especially cool as it shows a lot of cool things about homes in Japan. If you want to read about the last two days of getting out of India, keep reading! If you want to wait for the movie version, just skip down to the videos and pictures of Sendai!
Ok, so we're in Dubai, even though we had intended to be in India until mid-September. Basically, we have been sick almost the entire time we were in India and we couldn't find food that wasn't making it worse so the best thing was to get o...ut to somewhere with clean food to recover. The closest logical place for that is the UAE, and especially Dubai so while throwing up one night I decided we needed to make that happen. We were a few hundred kilometers away from an international airport at this point, and the normal mode of transportation into the city of Mumbai from our location was train. Keep in mind, I'm fairly sick still as being malnutritioned and throwing up tends to do that to you but we make our way to an internet cafe and manage to buy a train ticket for the following night that should get us into Mumbai with 8 or 9 hours before the flight to Dubai leaves, which we have also booked. The train is an overnight journey of about 8 hours, but we have booked a "sleeper" car so it's a reasonable situation.
A note about trains in India: They are ALWAYS late by an hour or two. We took A LOT of trains in India, and never once had one even close to on time. But it's never been critical.
We headed back to our hotel and slept a really long time, waking up the next day to sit around and play cards until our 10pm-ish train. At around 9pm we headed over to the train station fulling expecting a few hours wait until our train arrived, but otherwise ready to go. This train station is pretty small, so they don't have a big electronic board indicating which platform you have to stand on for your train, so Kyde goes to the overly crowded ticket information window to ask. She turns around a few minutes later with a look of horror on her face....apparently the train is delayed NINE hours. So lets put this into a math problem for you, one of those math problems with trains. It's 10pm. Our 8 hour train journey is NINE hours late. Our airplane leaves at 2:45pm and it takes at a minimum 1 hour to get from the train station to the airport. So if the train leaves EXACTLY in nine hours as the delay says (a laughable thought at the very least) that means we will leave at 7am and arrive at Mumbai train station at 3pm, 15 minutes after our plane leaves. Obviously, this is not going to work. We know for a fact there are not any other openings on trains as we have seen that they are all booked via the internet, so aside from bribing a train operator to kick someone else off the train (not an impossible scenario, but something outside of our general set of morals) we're not going to be on a train to Mumbai and we're going to miss our non-refundable flight to Dubai. Lovely. Did I mention I was sick?
So we go back to our hotel and ask the people whom run it if there are any other ways to Mumbai at such an hour. They point down the road at some buses parked along the street and tell us to go ask around and see if any of them go to Mumbai. So we do, and after some confusion it works out! A bus is to leave at 10:30pm and should arrive at 8am in Mumbai! The best part is it's a "sleeper" bus as well, so we will have somewhere to lay down for the night and at least sleep a little bit. So we give them the $14 for the 10 hour two person journey and wait for the bus. At about 11pm the bus shows up and we climb on. It's much cleaner than expected, but the room we have for the both of us to "sleep" isn't....much. We manage to cram ourselves into this little cube and at about 11:15pm the bus is off. We are in the far back "bed" of the bus though, so it's SUPER SUPER bumpy pretty much the entire night as few of the roads in India are smooth, but it's no big deal as at least we're on our way.
We arrive in Mumbai at around 10am, instead of the hoped for 8am, but we still have quite a bit of time until our flight at 2:45pm so it's ok. We grab a taxi and head to the airport in AWFUL traffic. It takes about an hour and 15 minutes total, a lot of it spent sitting in dead stopped traffic on the highway where children are begging at the window of our taxi because we are white and "rich". Once at the airport things go pretty well, we check in and go to the terminal which to much joy has an overpriced Pizza Hut. At this point we are looking for a bookstore, because momentarily we will be flying to Dubai and currently have no idea where we will stay and have no guidebook or maps or anything for the city or the country it's in. The bookstore comes up with nothing useful so we board our plane and fly to Dubai.
Once we get to Dubai and get off the plane it's instantly recognizable that we are back in civilization, and it's a lovely thought. We head through immigration, customs and find an ATM with no problems. We head into the airport hoping for a bookstore so we can buy a guidebook that we're sure they will have but unfortunately we can't find a bookstore, and the only map we have found of the city is in Arabic. We ask some random people how to get into the city center and they advise to just take the metro, which until this point we had no idea even existed. So we walk to the metro and look at the names of the stations...one is called "Dubai Mall" and we assume they will have a bookstore which we assume will have a guidebook so we buy a metro ticket and are on our way across town. When we get to the stop for the mall and walk outside the first thing we see is the Burj Khalifa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa), which is by far the tallest building in the world. We're basically standing next to it and have to walk along the base of it to get to the mall. It's unreal, just a very overwhelming sight. Quite a shift from India, that's for sure.
Once inside the mall we found massive (4 story tall) fish tanks, waterfalls and a massive bookstore. We got a hold of a guidebook for the region and headed to the food court. The food court is PACKED because it's just now 7pm and during Ramadan this is the first time during the day that people can eat in public, so we have a lot of trouble finding a seat. We end up sitting next to a lady whom is on her laptop. While I go to TACO BELL to get some food for us Kyde talks to this lady a bit, it turns out she's from Turkey and has done a lot of traveling, but is now living in Dubai. She has some advise for us and ends up helping us find a hotel online with her laptop. We get it booked online and head off across town on the metro for the hotel. Once we get off the metro we wander around a bit and get lost, talk to some locals and they end up giving us a ride to the general area our hotel is in and after a few more minutes we find the hotel itself. Our booking didn't process yet, so we have to wait a bit for that to get cleared up but eventually we made our way up to our room, which is normal and modern in every way you'd expect from such a nice city as Dubai. Hot water, clean sheets, internet...the works. By the time we get showered and in bed it has been about 28 hours since we found out our train to Mumbai was delayed 9 hours, and we're totally wiped out. And that is what we did yesterday.
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