Ever spent 40 hours in a train?

10:06h - The adventure begins

Trainspotting in India

Last Monday our program director introduced us to the schedule of our 15 day off-campus study tour. During the introduction, we realized with some astonishment that we would travel for 40 hours non-stop in a train. We would start on Friday at 11:20 in the morning and only arrive on Sunday at 3:20h at night. As you can imagine, this was quite impressive for us as most of the participants, me included – never even used a train so far in their life.
This Friday, while moving to the train station, we exchange the classrooms and the campus training sessions with the exciting adventure of a field trip.
I am quite impressed of the many different trains which I see while waiting for our train to come and to check in. The area is crowded and dirty but any way we try to control our selves in different ways.

After the first excitement of the adventure we just started, everybody starts doing different things: Chatting with a friend, walking through the train forth and back, dancing, watching movies, sleeping etc. For me being a railway-newcomer, it is very strange to do and observe all these things in a train.

Checking out India's landscape

I am frequently going to windows and try to look outside to learn more about the Indian landscape and natural resources. It is very fertile land suited for agriculture, full of rivers available for irrigation. It is also common to pass over bridge and also some times through caves.
After so many hours, everybody is quite tired. Finally, it is announced that the next station will be our final destination. We arrive in the middle of the night and everybody needs to sleep, but we are forced to leave the train and start the next step of our learning experiences.

Ready to check out

Finally there - but very tired...