It wasn't my alarm - it was my mom.
She didn't wake me up, for I was coming back from my yoga class, but I was confused.
She usually calls me around 4 or 5PM (Indian time).
I picked up the phone;
"Hey, good morning. How are you?"
"Hey mom! ummm I'm fine. Actually I'm great!"
"K.. that's good. Have a good day today. I love you and miss you."
"Love you too. I gotta go get ready. I'll talk to you later."
Not knowing why my mom called - she didn't tell me about "it" because she didn't want me to worry.
I wasn't expecting anything when I came to school.
"HEY GUYS! Did you hear about the bombings in Mumbai?"
Wait. No. I did NOT know about that. Well, obviously my mom did.
By then there were already 80 dead and 250 injured people. (at the moment I think it's 125 dead and 350 injured.)
Apparently the bombings were to attack westerners in general (or to be more specific, Americans and English).
It was terrifying for a friend of mine (he's Mexican), because his parents were staying at the Taj, a five star hotel that was one of the main targets.
However, they were out for lunch/dinner when the bombs went off.
There were other parents who were planning on visiting Mumbai this weekend - how scary is this?!?!
Well when I checked my email, there were emails from people asking me if I was safe.. and "sound."
I'm not sure if I explained a little about the geography of India, but Visakhapatnam is in Andhra Pradesh, and it's quite far away from Mumbai.
Vizag is a relatively small city - and as our resident director put it, "We're probably one of the big things that happened here in a long time (we meaning SYA.)"
But no one knows, so he told us to stay away from five star hotels like the Park and the Taj (not the same Taj, it's official name now is the Gateway Hotel) and recommended us to stay home. If we were to go out, we should be with at lease one member of our host families.
So we are not to be seen. (Maybe that's a little too extreme, but it's for our safety.- actually I joked about this with a friend of mine who looks North Indian; since I'm Korean and she looks Indian we can just go where ever we want! haha.)
Therefore, our trips to Araku Valley and Hyderabad have been cancelled.
Araku Valley... well I've been there twice and I would love to go back but it's fine...
But Hyderabad!!!!! It was one of the places that I was so excited to visit!!!!
Readers, (if there are any at the moment) please don't worry about us, for we're in a safe city.
Our resident director is very experienced (he was in Jerusalem for a while and bombs went off half a mile away from his school twice.)
And we're safe and alive - as you can see me writing a blog post.
Namaste!
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