Road to Recovery

For those of you who don't know (even though it's the only thing Aaron has thought about since May 2011--no exaggeration here), Aaron was hired to make an educational/promotional video by Central Michigan University's graduate school. The video, intended for students in India, details the process of researching, selecting and applying to a graduate school in the United States, as well as the documentation, planning and other issues involved. Since it's for Indian students, part of the video needed to be filmed there.

So began months of planning, researching, meeting, e-mailing, calling, purchasing, preparing, and training (he trained me! I'm trainable, like a puppy!) for an international video project. And now that the India portion is complete, Aaron can take tiny, tiny breaths of relief before diving into the rest of it.

We came home from India just over a week ago (January 23rd). We got home on a Monday night, after taking four planes and spending about 22 hours in the air. We crossed 11 time zones. We ate all manner of semi-identifiable airline food. We did not sleep. Whoever said the world is small has not flown from Hyderabad to Mumbai to Amsterdam to Detroit to St. Louis. The world is very, very large.

Although we're both still recovering, Aaron is decidedly the winner on that front, having only in the last two days developed some kind of head cold that keeps him sneezing, coughing, and congested. I'm having some...problems...with readjustment, especially in regards to the most basic of physiological needs--eating and sleeping. Thankfully, neither of us has malaria, dysentery, dengue fever or any of the other serious diseases we were warned about. Just a bone-deep fatigue from being on the other side of the world just long enough to taste it but not quite long enough to really enjoy it the way seasoned travelers would (due in large part to the fact that this was work, not a vacation or honeymoon).

Here are the answers to the most frequently asked questions about our trip:

Yes, the trip was enjoyable.
Yes, we would like to return to India someday.
Yes, we accomplished everything we needed to for the video project.
No, we did not visit the Taj Mahal. It would have been very far out of the way.
No, we did not drink tea, though it was offered to us daily. We're not really tea drinkers.
Yes, we did enjoy the food.
No, we did not visit the slums in Mumbai.
Yes, the culture was quite different from home, but maybe not in the ways you're thinking.
Yes, we took a lot of pictures. Over 2,000 between the two of us.
Yes, we're glad to be home (and you can thank Brenna Lemieux for picking us up at the airport).