call me if you ever need a soccer coach, travel agent, or a good book

I'm now the assistant coach for the girl's middle school soccer team. I made sure the person in charge of putting me in this position knew that I know next to nothing about soccer. But she didn't seem to mind. And for 500 bucks and a trip to Sri Lanka, I'd do just about anything, plus it's a really fun group of girls.
Soccer practice ended with a scrimmage and then a shootout that finally ended in a draw so, I got home late. After handing me 50 rupees to pay the rickshaw driver Brad told me he had bad news: our flight to Goa this Saturday has been canceled. I was pretty upset about this because I've had the trip planned for over a month and was feeling ready to just go on it. The people on the phone from the airline were, not surprisingly, extremely unhelpful but they were able to convey the information that there were only 9 seats on the next day's flight. We also knew of at least 7 other people on our same flight, so we pretended we were on the Amazing Race and got really stressed out. I think if I actually did get on that show, I'd probably be one of the villains. The real stress was that we didn't want to wait another day to leave, what's worse than waiting around to go on vacation? So, we looked around and got an outgoing flight on the same day from a different airline.
Our new itinerary isn't great, we have an almost four hour layover in Bangalore instead of the direct flight that we were going to be on. But I figure while we have 4 hours we might as well step out and see the city.
So, we are going to Goa and we hope to be there around 5 pm on Saturday. I'm not packing much for the beach, which is good because my book is going to take up a good chunk of my suitcase. Right now I'm reading A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, a book I would never attempt to read if I didn't care a lot about learning more about India. You might think that learning about India wouldn't be hard to do since I'm living here! But it seems like the only thing I ever learn is that I don't know anything.
A Suitable Boy is the third Indian book I've read in my knowledge quest. The first was Beneath a Marble Sky by John Shors (an Iowan!) which was recommended to me by my brother's first grade teacher, via my mom. It gave a really nice, but mostly fictional history of the Taj Mahal, which I can't wait to see! Anyway, I think this is turning into a book blog, so my recommendation is that you go immediately to your library and read it.
The second book I read was White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Still fiction, this was, as far as I can tell, a more realistic depiction of life in India and by that I mean that it managed to be both depressing and uplifting. So, check this one out too.
I absolutely do not recommend reading A Suitable Boy. I just wikipediaed it and found out it's one of the longest English-language novels ever written. Yeesh. Maybe I'll bring a backup for the beach.
Anyway, congratulations to you if you got through one of the longest blog posts ever written. I'll write again once we get back from Goa!