Day 6 January 19


Today was another early morning as both mark and I are getting over jet lag. Falling asleep is fine, it's staying asleep past 5 that's been an issue. After breakfast we went over to the stadium and did som more work until about 2pm when we headed to lunch. Mark and I were talking to Martin about traffic again and decided to add one thing to our earlier analogy to the traffic here being like the start of a marathon just adding in cars, trucks, etc. One thing we needed to add was to now imagine everyone running in different directions. We went to smaller restaurant in a hotel that was down an alley. I have no idea HOW we made it down the alley with hitting anything. Lunch was very good however we had told Martin we wanted something light sicne we weren't all that hungry. Well, we ended getting, biriyani, again. WHICH is never a bad thing but there was just so much of it. And that to the shrimp and other things and it was a HUGE lunch. Again.

One thing about where we ate lnch was that on our back we went through a very poor area of town. The biggest difference we saw between that and other areas was it much smaller and much more crowded. Here's a basic rule I have, if there are stray chickens running around in the streets, you're either in a very rural area, a poor area, or a third world country.

After lunch we went to a relative of Martin's house. The place was beautiful and we watched part of the India-Bangladesh Cricket match with Martin's nephew George who was very helpful in us getting our visas and George's dad Simon. Also, there was Simon's dog Jude. A HUGE Great Dane that look like a gigantic dalmatian. And I mean gigantic. After some time at Simon's we went back to the hotel to relax for a few minutes and then went over to the courts and played with the team again.
The highlight of the day was beginning to learn some words in Hindi such as: Hello, Goodnight, and goodbye which were Hello, Goodnight, and Goodbye (no thank you to the British). Actually we did learn some other words such as nandri (nahndri) which means Thank You, Mudile (moo-di-lay) which means alligator (good for when we teach the players how to gator the ball), andrum which is a forearm pass and aprem which is setting or a fingering pass. I have no idea how these words are spelled but it's a rough translative spelling
 
After a long day we were both pretty beat, we got a very light snack and had a beer with Martin before calling it a night. We have a long day tomorrow.
 
Good night from Chennai, India