sunday

After leaving the home on Saturday we hopped on the bus to head back to the hotel. Instead of going to the hotel, though, we decided to try to find a grocery store. We had found one the day before but have heard there is a bigger one with more options, so we went on a search. After quite a lengthy walk, we did not find it. We did, however, stumble upon McDonald's (which we knew about from our last trip here). It had rained a bit this afternoon so the streets had lots of black mud which, in turn, meant our legs (in long shorts/capris...rare for Indian women to wear) had much of the same black mud. As I was ordering at McDonald's, two younger Indian ladies dressed in full on saris and head coverings, looked at our exposed, dirty legs and gave us a disdained glare; that's putting it nicely. Apparently you need to be dressed up to enjoy McDonald's in India and we didn't quite fit the bill. Regardless of our attire and cleanliness (or lack thereof), we enjoyed our McFlurries. Because our personal schedules are so whacked, we're still tired and are sick of Indian food already and we were both content to have this snack size dessert at 2 in the afternoon be our lunch and dinner for the day. We spent the afternoon contemplating how to stay awake long enough to get into a normal sleeping pattern. We contemplated it enough to put us to sleep by 5 and we were both up and ready for Sunday by the wee hours after midnight.

Sunday was a regular day at the home. There were fewer volunteers in the am for breakfast and send-off etc...but away we went. The streets were quieter and, therefore, the bus trip was much shorter. At the home there were some new-to-me volunteers who had been volunteering for months (just not the one day before). Teresa and I had talked about taking Sunday off to go to a local Protestant church we've heard about but decided we should honour our commitment, at least this early in the game. We soon realized that Sunday's are a much lighter day: when we got to Kalighat, laundry was already done because the Brotgers/Sisters wanted to get ready for mass. By 10:00 it was mass and I was told to go to the break room (as I did not go to mass) instead of interacting with the ladies because "they're all praying". I couldn't tell the difference between this apparent new-found praying life today and yesterday when they seemed to be behaving identically, but I did not say anything to the Sister and I headed upstairs for an early break. Other than taking laundry down from the roof, we had the hour off. Even at 11, when it was time to help feed the patrons, there was all of a sudden an abundance of sisters: we were fully staffed. We will likely take next Sunday off.

We spent the afternoon in our hotel, again trying to keep ourselves awake to get onto some sort of schedule. We each took a short nap and then treated ourselves to Dominoes pizza: a 7 minute walk away. With our lack of energy and this stifling (actually, stifling) humidity it seemed like we were going to be in a marathon. We had already decided earlier in the week that we would let ourselves have American food once per week. Not gonna lie, even though it had only been three days in India, we were pretty pumped.

We ordered a small pizza with garlic sticks. Although hoping for a meat lovers (in case you didn't get the memo: you can not get beef or pork, of any form, in India), we settled for vegetarian: onions, tomatoes, green peppers. We happily enjoyed it as we watched the activity on the street; I never tire of this. After nearly falling asleep while looking out the second floor Domino's window, (it's about 4:30 in the afternoon) we decided it would be wise to head to the hotel. We managed to stay up until 6/7ish and I slept until 3am. Although a better schedule, still nothing close to ideal.