When I sat down on the plane to come to India, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I was excited to get there, but knew it was going to be a long, intense adventure. When we landed in Qatar, we made our way through the airport relatively quickly, knowing we had another long flight ahead of us. We then flew to Bangalore, India, where we had a 6-hour layover before arriving in our new home for the next few weeks, Hubli. The other US students and I began to introduce ourselves when we were in Bangalore and had a lot of time to roam around the airport and get a lay of the land. I realized that we had a good group of people and was excited to see what would come. When we landed in Hubli, I was ready for a break from all the flying and after not sleeping on any of the 3 flights here, I was extremely overtired. But when we got on the bus to head to KLE, I immediately was no longer tired at all. All of us were crowding the windows of the bus, in awe of what was going on outside. We were cheering, pointing things out left and right, and waving to the locals, as they waved back confused. They gave us a traditional Indian welcome upon entering KLE, I knew I made the right decision to come.

A couple of us stumbled upon a traditional Indian culture festival and although we were completely uninvited, we ended up being put in the front row and were treated like kings. There must have been 5,000 plus people there, all staring at us and taking pictures of the back of our heads. Despite us being hesitant, they brought us up on stage and introduced us as the crowd cheered and then they caught us off guard even more by turning on an American song and making us dance… on stage. I’m sure it was an embarrassing site to see, but we were having fun and for some reason the people at the festival cheered instead of making fun of us. We left in dramatic fashion, as we were already late for our orientation. As we were leaving, people began to swarm us, asking for selfie after selfie. It probably took us 10 to 15 minutes to leave, before we litterly had to run away. I certainly will never forget that day and at this point I was very excited to see what the next 3 weeks would hold.