The Weekend's Adventure

We have safely made it to our hotel in Trivandrum!  

The journey to the hotel was a long one...

It started with the 3.5 hour drive to Chicago, then waiting in the airport for 3 hours before boarding.  The first flight was non-stop to Abu Dhabi and took 13 hours.  This was my first international flight and it was actually pretty exciting.  I had to sit in the middle aisle seats with three other people, but it wasn't too awful.  They gave us a blanket, a pillow, eye covers, ear plugs, socks (kind of odd), a toothbrush, and toothpaste.  THEN, to top it off, we each had TV screens on the back of the seat in front of us that we controlled ourselves!!  There were copious amounts of movies, TV episodes, and games to keep entertained.  There was even a camera and map that we could watch that shows where the airplane is at.  Unfortunately, sitting for 13 hours is not ideal for decent sleep.  Add a crying baby and an old man snoring and we have hit the jackpot.  I maybe slept (if that's what you want to call it) for a total of 2 hours.  At least I got free food.  Definitely not the best food and not at the most ideal times (we had a 2am [central time] klondike bar snack, and a "dinner" at 5am), but it was better than nothing.  After 13 hours, we arrived to the Abu Dhabi international airport.  It was a lovely airport.  

This was the only picture I got from the Abu Dhabi airport.  I thought it was beautiful. 

Unfortunately we were not able to spend much time there.  We went from one flight straight to the gate for our next flight.  This was our last flight to Trivandrum and was only about 3.5 hours.  I sat next to a woman and her daughter who was probably only about 4 years old.  Her parents live in Trivandrum so she was telling me about the city and things to see.  Finally, at 4 am (local time) we landed in Trivandrum, grabbed our taxi and headed to our hotel… or what we thought was our hotel.  There happened to be two University of Iowa groups studying in Trivandrum and we took their taxis to their hotel.  So, we had to sort all of that mess out and finally got to our actual hotel around 7 am.  Just in time for breakfast.  After breakfast, we had to wait around a while longer to get into our rooms.  I’m assuming because people still needed to check out or they needed to be cleaned. 

This is a picture of my room.  It's really nice and has a/c and our room has a different type of city view....

These are the views from our window.  Our professor says that they are some pretty bad living conditions.

After freshening up at in the hotel, a couple of us went out to explore around the area.  We only walked around for approximately 45 minutes because there aren't too many shops open on Sundays and it began to get really hot.  At 1pm, everyone met up and went to get lunch.  It was delicious and the waiter was helping us by telling us how to eat everything (we must look like tourists ;)).  There was so much food!  They brought rice and kept coming back to give us more of each bowl.

Yes, I took a picture of my food. 

I would have posted this yesterday, but I was so tired from my flights that I ended up sleeping for about 14 hours!  More will be posted after todays adventures!