The Day I Had No Wifi

Hey guys! I'm doing well, but the internet was down at the hotel yesterday.
We got to sleep in for Saturday, yippee! Except I'm so used to getting up early that I only slept in a little bit. Still nice though.
Then we had coffee together in the hotel.
Here's one photo of the hotel lobby for ya, mom!

[Harley/professor, Morgan, Francis/guide, Shannon]

Just because you can't see the coffee doesn't mean it wasn't there.

Then we went to an Americana restaurant, which was pretty funny. It was called Sparky's and pretty much reminded me of a mediocre Applebee's. I got BBQ chicken and it would have been good but it was a bit cold so it was okay.

[Spark-o-ramas for ya there]

[the gang! moi, Megan, Aly, Kristen, Morgan, Shannon, Laura, Sarah. yep.]

Oh, and we at with an Indian named Freddy, who works at a Christian organization called Youth With A Mission (YWAM). They do awesome stuff for the poor kids here. They provide shelter-homes and schooling for a bunch of kids who would have been forced into gangs, prostitution, organ donation, etc. Scary stuff.

We got to go to the YWAM house (well, one of them) and meet some of the kids! Except Freddy wanted us to plan skits for them, one for the older kids and one for the younger. I got to be in the younger group. Our skit was the parable of the lost sheep... I was one of the 99 not-lost sheep. It was my big break.

We had Francis (tour guide) translate and the kids loved it! They did speak a good amount of English too. One 16-year-old girl gave me a tour of the place. All of the kids were super excited for us to be there. They all wanted to play with our cameras and get our attention and such. I would have gotten more pictures but every time I took my camera out the little boys wanted to take it and play around!

Here are some.

[Bryan discovers cricket for the first time]

[my glasses looked good on him. real good.]

[profile pic--totes!!! OMG]

The children were very happy. They said they were all friends in the house. They play cricket a lot and all are going to a nice private school.

Back at the hotel, dinner turned out to be quite the interesting time.

See, we usually eat dinner at the hotel, there is a huge buffet of Indian food there. The entertainment is... interesting. It is a very loud live band that consists of two guys with thick accents and not the best singing voices re-creating popular American songs (and one or two Tamil jams) on their keyboards. This means ANY popular song, from Pink Floyd to My Heart Will Go On and more! Also, on the first day Brian told the guy to call "Laura the Explorer" up to sing (jokingly) and now he knows her name and calls it all the time while we are in there. Even in the middle of songs!

Now, as if that isn't interesting enough, last night a short man was up there dancing to all of the live band's songs! (And exactly ZERO people usually dance at this place).

Bryan got up and partied with him.

[oh yes dance dance dance woo hoo yay]

THEN it got even better! An odd magic show was traveling from table to table for some reason. It was actually pretty good.

[bend, spoon, bend. Laura, entranced by the magic.]

Oh AND apparently the small man was a Tamil movie star or something, so we had to get another picture!

[Kayla, Laura, you-know-who, Megan, hotel singers!]

It was a winning night.