Day 8: ♫ Go Well and Safely♫

Today was full of goodbyes. We had our last breakfast all together and then moved into closing activities.

We began worth laughing yoga. It wasn’t something that I had heard of before but an external man led us through various laughing activities that didn’t have much to do with yoga. It was pretty funny though!

Then, we had a recap session where we finished our action plans from yesterday, were told all about he leaving procedures, filled out eval forms and wrote postcards to ourselves that they are going to mail to us in 6 months. They also put on a funny skit about how we can stay in touch and continue to support Sangam.

Right before lunch we had the official closing ceremony where we sang a couple songs and sent paper flowers floating across the pool.

People starting leaving during lunch but our car wasn’t coming until 5pm so we finished packing and went out for some last minute shopping. I never did find a pair of pants I liked but Marie-Eve bought a few gifts and we got some cookies for the trip.

When we got back we had a few minutes to dip our feet in the pool, pack last minute items, settle our bills and say goodbye to Kaitlin before we headed on our way.

If you are super observant you may have noticed that today’s blog post has the same title as my last post from Our Chalet in Switzerland. It seems to be a world centre tradition to sing “Go Well and Safely” as guests leave.

We had a 4 hour drive to Mumbai but we are getting used to the roads by now and it was fun to make the trip in daylight. They wouldn’t let us go through security or departure immigration until very shortly before the flight since we were flying standby so it was pretty stressful, but a staff member accompanied us through the whole process and we made the flight without a problem. They made us go through 2 security checkpoints though so we got pretty sick of pulling out our liquids, taking our shoes off and being frisked by the time we had to do it again in Newark. I watched two good movies on the plane (St. Andres and The Little Prince) and we were seated next to each other with an empty seat between us so we had few complaints except for the lack of food. We only got 2 meals — one 1 hour in and one 1 hour before we landed — so it was a long 16 hour flight.

We are now sitting in Newark, hoping to get into a flight to Montreal in a couple of hours to finish off our approximately 32 hour journey. Fingers crossed!!