Wandering Browns

Once we knew we had a little time before Korea, we decided to come back to the U.S. for Mother’s Day and to obtain an International Driver’s License. Austin’s last day was Tuesday and we had tickets for Saturday. Austin tried 3 times to change our tickets to Wednesday, but we were only able to get a flight to Mumbai on Wednesday, followed by a flight to Chicago on Thursday. That means we had about 30 hours in Mumbai to kill. The process for flying starting from India was a little different. Jamnagar airport has one normal flight per day from Jamnagar to Mumbai. First, we needed to show our itineraries and tickets to a lady outside the airport before we were allowed in. Then, we put our big baggage pieces through a big scanner. Then we checked in. We needed to have tags placed on all of our carry-ons. Then we waited for security to open up. The toilets at the airport were almost all holes in the ground. That was fun and exotic. When security opened up, there were separate lines for me...

While here in India, I write my blog and read books in my free time. There is not good enough internet to watch any shows and the TV would wake up Landon. So, I have been reading a lot. I am trying to read books that take place in the country that I am living in. I have read two books so far, and both were very good non-fiction books that did not seem like non-fiction. I borrow them from my library in Elk Grove and read them on my computer. I recently read the book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. This caught me right away because I saw the slums in Mumbai. This is non-fiction, but reads just like a novel as it follows many characters that lived in Annawadi, a slum by the Mumbai airport. Many workers flooded the city looking for work when they started working on the new Mumbai International terminal (the one I was impressed with when we first got here). They didn’t have anywhere to live, so they started squatting on the airport land. It...