My best Japanese friend, Nobuko, is at it once again – traveling around the world and sending updates. I have decided – with her permission – to put her updates on my blog to help fellow travelers navigate and learn from her experience.

21 June 2012  

I am in Bhuj, Gjarat (India) since this morning. I am doing fine. I have some interesting stories to tell you. Hope you will be entertained.

On my first day, in a queue line at a train station in Mumbai, I happen to run into a Brazilian guy and his wife I had met in 2009 when we did a meditation course in Rio!!  How crazy and a good omen is this. Small world.

By the way, a big train station is a very good place to practice what I would like to call patience with assertive flavor (if you can name it better, please let me know). They are not mutually exclusive. It can be done.

I had to change queue lines three times due to me not having a form filled out or being in a wrong line (local vs long distance, etc), each costing me about 20 – 30 minutes to get to the window. All the while, others are breaking into the lines or squeezing themselves in at the window when someone else, like myself, is being assisted. I learned quickly that I had to glue myself to the person in front of me to prevent people from getting in between – I am sure men enjoy such close encounters on their back. Or in the front, for that matter.

Anyhow, without me being shuffled around from one line to another, I would not had bumped into the Brazilian couple, so I guess everything has a reason.  I have a cell phone now because a 24-year-old, very nice young Indian man I met on a train gave me a SIM card as a present. Here, one needs a local residence proof to buy a SIM card. So without him giving me a SIM card, I would not have been able to have local cell number. Lucky me. 91 is the country code.