At some point in college, I made a top five list of countries I wanted to visit. Ridiculous, I realize, but, as someone who wants to go everywhere all the time, I had to order my thoughts and plans somehow. The list was as follows, in no particular order: Turkey Morocco Cuba India Denmark As …
Street Suitors
Okay guys, time for our first ever officially interactive post! Get excited. I'm quite familiar - as are those of you who followed my blog in the first half of 2009 - with the Indian/Southeast Asian man's way of treating women, particularly foreign ones, on the street. I imagine it's also similar to that in …
Found the Dalai Lama
Just a quick update to say that while I will probably not meet the Dalai Lama while I am here (he's a busy man), I saw him today! He returned from a speaking trip in the US today, and we happened to be lunching with some friends at the cafe in his residence's complex, and …
Travel Plans
We have ultimately decided to stay in McLeod Ganj/Dharamsala for another week or two instead of trying to cram the entire country of Tanzania into 10 days, so this leaves me plenty of time to catch you all up on, well, all the places I haven't written about in the last several months. In order …
Indian Elections
In case you haven't been aware, the last few months in India have been leading up to the huge National Elections, which started April 30th and will somehow continue for the next few weeks. (I don't quite understand.) Anyway, I just stumbled upon this interesting article by an Indian, a Mumbai resident, commenting on the …
Dharamsala: Search for the Dalai Lama
First, some logistics: you may have notices that at the top of the sidebar on the right, there's a new widget that says "My RSS." If you click on the little logo, you can go to a site that lets you subscribe to my blog, so it will send you my updates. At least, that's …
Haridwar/Rishikesh: Buddy Om
Everyone remembers 'Buddy Jesus' from Kevin Smith's brilliant religious satire film, Dogma, right? Who could forget that hilarious parody of the commercialization of religion and spirituality? Ladies and gentlemen, I have found its match in Hinduism/eastern spirituality. As soon as we arrived, Buddy Jesus sprang to mind. Willa describes it as Disneyland spiritualism. Welcome to …
The Inevitable
I figured it would happen sometime, given how much I travel, and I've been lucky thus far. I just crossed my fingers and hoped to avoid it as long as possible, and that it wouldn't be too bad or inconvenient. At long last, it happened. Last night on the train from Delhi to Pathankot, I …
Rajasthani Heat
They warned me. Every single Indian I met warned me. They said, why are you going to Rajasthan in summer [it's summer here]? They said it was insanely hot and no one in their right mind would go there this time of year. I figured it couldn't get any worse than anything else I'd experienced thus …
Indian Observations
I realized yesterday that not only have I been in India for 7 weeks, but this is - and will be, when I leave after two and a half months - the longest I've been in any one country outside the US, except for my year in France. I guess India wins some sort of …