Vijay's Village Trip Post 1

I've been working on this post for a long time so....BEWARE LONG POST

May 12th-15th our family got to have the experience of going to Vijay's village where he grew up. Most of our pictures were taken in the form of video so hopefully I can upload them all.

It is an 8 hour drive to the small village of Chinna Abbipuram in Andhra Pradesh. We left on Thursday night and drove half way and stayed in Tirupati. We pulled up to a really nice hotel and I was kind of excited that I had booked a great hotel without knowing what I was booking. As Alan went in to check us in they informed us that there are 2 hotels with the same name, and we were staying at the other one. :( We found our hotel (not quite as nice) around 10:00 p.m.
I have traveled with our kids around India enough to know that they won't eat the food so I of course packed bread, chips, mangos, cookies and a lot of drinks. I'm glad I did because we were so tired that we didn't want to go find food. We booked 3 rooms...1 for Vijay's family (yes, Lakshmi, Shravia and Shrinidi came in the car with us), and 2 for our family. Every time we book hotels here we have to get 2 rooms because we have too many kids.

Alan ventured out with Vijay to get food for his family and to see if there was anything our kids would eat. They ended up getting food at the train station that was across the street. By about 11:00 p.m. we were all finally showered, fed and in bed. We woke up the next morning and had some breakfast and decided that because we were in Tirupati, which has a famous temple with Balaji we would go and see that. When you make a promise to the God Balaji, if it comes true the people come to this temple and hike 10 kms to the Balaji god statue and shave their heads. Most of the people here were bald.

The line behind this guy is for a free meal once you have shaved your head.

As we pulled up to the area where the temple is our car started having some problems that we thought we had fixed. We decided to park the car and walk to the temple while we waited for the car to start again. 

Once the car started again we headed back to the hotel to get our things. On the way to the hotel the car again broke down.  We stopped at an internet cafe to print out some hotel reservation forms and to look up the Toyota Dealership in Tirupati. As we sat in the internet cafe we joked about how Al Quida ran their whole operations out a place like this. We had to take a few pictures for those of you who have never been in an internet cafe.

The guys who ran the internet cafe wanted to get a picture with us. I don't know why, they didn't have a camera.

We all piled into a rickshaw and went to the hotel while Vijay eased the car to the dealership. We rented another car to take us the rest of the way. Now we had 10 people in a 7 passenger car because when you rent a car here you have to rent the driver too. :)

We finally started off to the village at 6:00 Friday night.  By the time we arrived at 11:00 p.m. Vijay's mom, Panchalama had dinner waiting for us.

Panchalama and our family in front of her house.

We ate and went off to bed. The original plan that Vijay had told us was that we were going to sleep inside Vijay's mom's house on the floor, that's were they all sleep, and Vijay's family would sleep outside. When we got there the power to the house had been turned off and the fans weren't working. It was extremely hot and humid so they decided that they would sleep on the ground outside and our family could sleep on the cots outside with them.
We had packed a blowup mat because we are wimpy so Vijay and his family ended up sleeping on it. The people in the village had never seen such a thing as an air mattress and were very curious the next morning. As I said, we slept outside in the "front yard" on cots. I was one of the first people to wake up from our family the next morning, and as I opened my eyes, I saw four little brown faces staring down at me. I closed my eyes again and pretended to sleep a little longer. I heard some wrustiling around me and I took another peek around me. There were 3-4 more people watching us sleep and one lady was poking at the air mattress that Lakshmi was still sleeping on. I got out of bed and found my flip video. Here is the video of how we slept and I tried to slyly show some of the people as they watched Alan and my kids sleeping.

When we first decided to go and visit Vijay's village he told us there was only 1 problem with coming. There are no toilets in the village. Everyone just uses a field. Alan came up with a solution and told Vijay that we could just bring a bucket with us and turn it upside down and cut a hole in the bottom. Whoala, homemade toilet!! Vijay laughed and thought Alan was really funny. We joked about it for a few weeks before we went. Vijay thought we were being goofy, but we thought we had a good idea. I kept telling Vijay that everyone in the village is going to be jealous of my bucket. Once they see it, everyone is going to want one. He would joke back about how we needed to decorate it with devil faces so that the jealousy wouldn't break the bucket.
Well, that morning when I first woke up there was a lady there ready to help me. Apparently our problems were told to the village.

This lady in a weird way made me homesick for my granny. She was the only one in the village that really tried to laugh and joke with us. Luckily we didn't have need for "the bucket" while we were there.

Next post..more of Vijay's Village Trip