Well we survived and to tell the truth I really enjoyed it: I agree with all the people that say that train travel in India is the only way to do it. Forced to read, eat and have pleasant conversation with your fellow passengers... heaven.
We arrived at the station with 20 minutes or so to go, and the station was a mad house, post was going on the first few carriages, or bogeys as someone has since told me :-), then the waiting list sleeper class (cattle class) where they all line up in the hope of some room on the bogeys: there seemed like hundreds of them, and about half way down we entered the 3AC which means that in each section of the bogey has 3 beds on each side of the dividing wall. The middle bed is normally placed up against the wall until you want to sleep, so all three people sit on the bottom bed / seat until lights out. It was quite exiting as the train pulled out of the station in Chennai as we did not quite enjoy the city and were glad to be "bugging out". This was both our first long train journey, I was quite apprehensive before, while Eleanor was always looking forward to it, but as I sat there at the beginning I got a little strange feeling in my belly like you get as a kid waiting for a Xmas present, we were off into the unknown again...
We were very lucky on the journey as we were next to an extremely lovely Indian family on holiday from the US to visit relatives, and we had some lovely chats with them that ranged further than "you coming from?" and "What job you do?", which is all we have had for a few days. The husband asked if he could quote our blog in a magazine he produces, promoting Indian culture, which we of course we agreed to. So now folks we are truly international lol. They even gave us a stone carving of an elephant, which touched us deeply, so if you are reading this, thank you again :-)
The family got off in the afternoon the next day and we had some new guests just before 10pm, so we had lots of leg room and I enjoyed finishing off a fantasy book I was reading called Eragon. The next few people were not quite as friendly and almost went straight to sleep, but I did manage to have a quick conversation with a salesman from Titan (big watch-makers in India) who told me that he was about to do a Q3 meeting in Kolkata and that in order to project the sales targets, they have to look in the calendar for all the religious marriage days, as there are are only so many in a month, adding all these together gives them their target for the quarter as in India the average citizen can only afford a 1000 bucks watch for his wedding day... fantastic.
All in all I had a lovely time on the train, I am not sure if that had more to do with the fact that it allowed a small time away from the hectic life of true India or that I am bone idle and enjoy being forced to lie down and read for a day... mmm one to ponder on.
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