1/29/11-1/30/11 Time travel

How appropriate to be watching Eat, Pray, Love while on the plane starting the journey that will quite literally take me around the world. The movie was awesome, mostly about how the main character leaves her marriage and is on a worldwide quest for inner peace and ultimately, love. As I’m sitting on my second plane from Qatar to Delhi, I sit next to this older Indian man. He takes my window seat, but I don’t mind. Then he proceeds to nosily look at the Op Smile business cards with pictures of children with clefts as I’m entering new contacts into my phone and actually picks them up one by one to inspect them. In another hour, my airplane seat mate invites me to his daugher’s wedding haha. I totally want to and would go but its in the Punjab region on Feb 20th and I’ll be somewhere in Thailand by that point; note to self to get invited to another Indian wedding – they seem so fun and colorful. When I land in Delhi, the local time is about 3:30am and all of my bags make it, I’m not sure why I was prepared for one of them to be missing but I was. A Marriott taxi picks me up and I get my first feel of India. It feels like a warm spring night and quite foggy out, apparently this is winter for the area. The hotel I arrive at which is provided by the generous Marriott family for Operation Smile International is quite lavish. I plan on sleeping for 1 hour, showering, and then checking out Delhi at 6:30am. Its rare to have a 7 hour layover and have the opportunity to explore so I was eager to try.