Post Vacation Depression

I've got it.  Bad.  Even Geetha, the tea woman, has noticed.  Work  has become boring, Chennai is hot and I miss traveling.  You know it's bad when you wish you were currently on a non-AC sleeper class train instead of sitting at your desk in your AC office.  But the train is so fun.  I love downtime (reading books, napping, writing letters), eating street food, and talking to strangers and long train rides combine all of these!  Plus, there's looking through the open window or hanging out at the end of the car, wind blowing, watching the country go by.

I met some nice people on the train.  One Indian fellow, recently married, who was traveling with his new wife to a large temple a bit North of Chennai.  And the man and wife who occupied the bottom berths of our coop, who shared their oranges and sweets with us.  I met an Indian fellow, Shyam, who had spent a few years in Chicago pursuing a PhD in something Biotech.  His US visa wasn't accepted so he couldnt continue his studies and had to come back to India.  Now he owns a lucrative construction business in Bangalore.  He was on his way back from visiting a girl he met online whom he wanted to marry.  It was their first meeting and he also met the parents.  Everyone liked him, but he was denied because he wasn't a doctor.  He was devastated because he says he loves this girl, and he knows that she loves him, but her parents only want her to marry a doctor.  If this falls through, he says he will not marry and will only concentrate on making money and becoming rich.  I learned all this within 15 min of meeting him.

Having spent considerable time in the US, he was reluctant to eat or drink any of the food at the train station.  In fact, he didn't even want me to consume these things!  I told him it was safe to drink the water and showed him which foods were safe, too.  The food is a really fun part about train travel.  When the train would stop at a station, we would hop off and fill up water bottles and then go looking for food.  You never know what you're going to get.  If you're lucky, you'll find tasty fried snacks, channa masala, or one of my favorites, bread omelette, which is exactly as it sounds, an omelette with bread being the filling!  And ice cream is always a safe bet.  Sometimes there are not so many food choices, and you have to settle for bland egg biryani. Or sometimes the stop is too quick, the train starts moving and you have to jump back on before you find anything good.  One morning, our train went a record 7 hours without stopping and we couldnt have breakfast until 1pm.  That was a tough one.

Another perk of sleeper class travel is all the hawkers passing through the car selling everything; drinks, tomato soup, snacks, books, toys, popsicles, buttermilk (yeah, it grew on me).  I can still hear them, "chai, chai, caufee, chai."

And now I sit here in the relative comfort of my office, with all the people I see everyday, knowing that lunch time is coming in 10 min and that I'll be having rice and vegetables. BORING!!!

Feeling bad like this while I'm still in India makes me nervous for how I will feel when I go back home to the States.  Yikes!