and now the end is near...

so this is my last real day in india... tomorrow i'll be up up early to get a bus back to trivandrum and get myself to the airport. i fly from trivandrum to mumbai. then i'll spend the night at some airport hotel. and bright at early wednesday morning i'll begin my trek back to the US. i'm excited.

i had an ayurvedic oil massage today. it was quite nice and now i smell good. kind of like coconut or some sort of dessert. i couldn't get the woman to tell me what the scent of the oil was. she just kept saying it was ayurvedic oil. i finally got her to say that it was a blend of some kind.

had a minor annoyance with a money exchange man today. at the place i had been doing my e-mail everyday (until today - he pissed me off and lost my business). i knew that they had a not so good rate, because last night susie realized that she had no money and needed to exchange a tiny bit of cash. so i knew i would be getting 42 rupees to the dollar instead of the going rate of 44. he asked me how much i wanted to change, i said 20 dollars (some random cash i had left over from when i originally bought yen in detroit on the way to japan). so he had his little calculator and showed me that it would be 840 rupees. fine. so i hand him my cash, which happened to be 2 fives and 10 ones. then he's plucking away at his calculator again and he tells me i can get 820 for it. so i was a confused, i said 42 rupees, right? and he says there's a different rate for 1 dollar bills. well- i told him that was crap and give me back the ones. so he did, but then some jabbering ensued with the other guy in the shop, and he changed his mind. so i snapped at him and said fine, stop trying to rip me off. so it's really time for me to go, since i'm now yelling at people.

i'm feeling a little nervous about my re-entry into society. first of all the kind of reverse culture shock. and in a social sense, i feel like i've been gone for so long that people are just used to me not being around! so next time i speak/write to you i'll be back on american soil!

:)