In which I claw my way back out of total mental stasis

Alright.

Things have been a little slow since I've been home. I culture shocked pretty bad for about a week - every time I saw the colour white I was stopped in my tracks. Any street without pedestrians made me feel like I was living in a post-apocalyptic zombie world. For the first few days, I smelled everything - the Toronto airport, Canadian trees, my house, our car, you. Then, after it faded, I was desperate for days at a time to smell anything at all. I slept poorly, waking up in inky silence. One night, in a groggy half-delirium, I woke up thinking I should be able to hear my heartbeat, but there was just silence. I took my pulse at the wrist. Still there. Slid back into sleep, felt silly in the morning - silly, but also empty.

It's been more than a month since I got back and I've spent it unemployed and claustrophobic. I've been to Montreal and Toronto twice each, looking for company and a new home respectively. I've been job-seeking, emailing, sorting photos. I've done a little reading, but less than 200 pages. Mostly, 've been haunting the house feeling increasingly unsettled and useless.

All of which has reminded me that idleness one of the quickest harbingers of poor mental health... at least for me.

A few big things have happened in the last few days. First, I got hired. It's nothing to be of - just a lousy retail gig, actually one I was offered once in high school - but there's a paycheck coming in my near future. There's no emoticon indicating "sigh of relief," is there? I guess that's because 15-year olds rarely contemplate paying law school tuition and Toronto rent without any savings. Kids these days.

I also had my first orientation day at Osgoode, which feels too much like home for me to accept the nickname 'Oz.' Its homeliness is good and bad. I felt sincerely welcomed and inspired by what I heard, but not challenged.* I know without equivocation that I will eat these words over the next few months, but that doesn't stop the feeling now.

I also found my notes for a writing project I had started dreaming about during the months before I left. I still like it, and it still scares me. So, great. Included: a note from a former co-worker in response. "I think you're on to something." You know, I might be.

Perhaps most importantly, while I was in Montreal last weekend I made a pact with a friend. We both tried to think of something that we knew in our minds that we could do if we worked at it, but which seemed completely unimagineable at the moment. We both needed a bit of a kick-start in our lives, and this seemed like the way to do it. She came up with doing a triathlon next summer. I came up with running a marathon.

This, in 2009, is going to be my marathon. I have well over a year to train for it - enough time to prepare if I work at it consistently, not enough time to drag my feet. I have new running shoes and I've started my jogging training plan. I run three times a week for the next 8 weeks when I adjust my schedule based on my fitness level. By that time, my free York U gym membership will have kicked in.

So far I'm excited and feeling good - about everything. In this spirit, I present a new post tag, inspired by my unspeakable love for Simon Pegg: "Run, fatgirl, run."

All this to say, I'm resurrecting this blog. All previous entries from my India trip are now going to be tagged with "India" and archived. I'm hoping to post substantively at least once or twice a week, depending on how school is going. At the moment, I'm bursting with things I want to talk about - mostly the things I always talk about: politics, pop, and progress.

Stay tuned.




*Budgetary challenge not included.

Conclusive India posting

It's my last day here, I'm checked out of my hotel, and apart from a few errands, I'm just biding my time until I leave for the airport (late this evening).

So, in the meantime a few Best Ofs:

Best attraction (architecture and culture):
- Taj Mahal (especially at sunrise)
(Honorable mention: the Golden Temple in Amritsar_

Best attraction (nature):
- the walk to Bhojbasa and Gomukh
( mention: the Pachmari hike)

Best interaction with the locals:
- Surya in Jaipur

Most appalling moment (nature):
- the army of leeches, Coorg
(Honorable mention: puppies harassing mother dog, also Coorg)

Most appalling moment (human):
- the men in the van, Mysore
(Honorable mention: the insolent rickshaw kid in Hampi)

Most unfortunate sickness:
- E: "My only symptom of _____ is ______."
(Honorable mention: me in the Thar desert, pursued by sheep)

Best liberty taken under the guise of being in India:
- Ali baba pants
(Honorable mention: chai chai chaiya chai)

Stupidest idea:
- the treehouse in Chinnar
(Honorable mention: not wearing my money belt on the plane)

Coolest place we stayed:
- the lodge over the Nepali border with the big clay oven, the first night of our Darjeeling trek

Finest moment in communication across a language barrier:
- The rickshaw driver trying to teach me to skip stones in MAdikeri
(Honorable mention: the richskaw driver in Dehra Dun who, delighted with my broken hindi, took me to meet his wife)

Biggest regret:
- not making it to Varanasi

Most persistent catch phrase:
- "Only one way to find out..."
(Honorable mention: "Eh, what are you gonna do.")

Funniest sexual harassment moment:
- to E. in Jodhpur: "Hello, hey! You! You look like Madonna! Too beautiful!"

Most memorable moment of fear:
- having to provide the name of a husband or father on my police report, first day in Delhi

Most memorable moment of joy:
- watching the stars coming out over the That
(Honorable mention: walking in the mist, first morning in McLeod Ganj)

Best food:
- Gautam's birthday party
(Honorable mention: Hotel Pearl Palace, Jaipur)

Soundtrack to our trip:
- the "RACE" soundtrack

Western cultural artifact I will now always associate with this trip:
- anything by Michael Ondaatje (Anil's Ghost, Running in the Family, or Divisadero)

Most memorable thing said by a travelling-Westerner friend:
- "In 50 years, there will be no more places like this, and it's our luck that we can travel it now. I meet the local people here and say, 'It's the luck of birth.' And they say, 'No, it isn't.'" (man from UK, Pachmari)
(Honorable mention: "No one really cares about McGill." (CDN drug lawyer, Udaipur))

And now you know all my good stories.

Well, not all of them.

See you all soon.

This Post: Now with even less content than the last post!

It's too hot in Delhi to do anything but sit perfectly still finding things hilarious, which is what makes today the perfect day to discover Slowpoke Comics by Jen Sorensen (now permalinked in my sidebar, along with a few other ways to spend more time with your computer than you do with your friends).

It's day three of five for me in this stifling city, and I'm bored out of my mind. I've done some shopping, but as I mentioned, all those narrow, windless stalls aren't very inviting in this heat. Neither is the cramped and sun-blasted bazaar. I have planned a nice final day, though, which I'm saving for Monday - get checked out of my hotel in the morning, whatever last-minute buying I need to do in Pahar Ganj, then I'll spend the hot part of the afternoon in the National Museum of Modern Art, which I'm assuming is air-conditioned (this is, in fact, crucial to the plan), and then I'll drift up Janpath and eat dinner at Spice Route, which apparently is one of the finest restaurants in Asia (at which a full meal works out to about $20 CDN). After that, grab my bag and head for the airport. Beautiful.

So who wants to have a beer in a few days?

Jesus H. Christ....

Did you all know you can download whole lectures, whole lecture serieses, and occasionally recordings of whole courses from universities like UC Berkeley on iTunes? Most of which are free?

Can you imagine how much free information there is here? I feel like I'm having a heart attack, or discovering the internet again for the first time. This is a really, truly, for-real, god-given miracle. I really might buy an apple laptop now, purely out of gratitude. Steve Jobs needs my money.

Looks like we know what I'll be doing for the rest of the summer!

Of course I didn't just come here to share my excitement about aspects of iTunes that most of you probably discovered 5 years ago. Mostly I came to share my excitement that I bought myself two more days in Dharamsala by swapping my train ticket to Delhi for a much less comfortable overnight bus ticket, meaning I'm still in sunny, temperate Himachal Pradesh and not in sticky, sticky Chandigarh. Meaning it's a good day.

But meaning also that I'm coming to the end of my relaxing shopping from Tibetans rather than Kashmiris (sigh... it's been so nice...) and that I'm already choosing where to eat my last Dharmsala lunch. This town's been good to me.

Alright, so I have nothing to say, and I really did just want to share my excitement about free iTunes lectures. Sue me.

In which I beg

By the way,

Law student-to-be requires summer job through end of August. PT/FT, anywhere in GTA. Extensive experience in writing, communications, administration, social justice, sales, customer service, event co-ordination, ice fishing, and Sanskrit. Will work for minimum wage OBO.

You may recognize my name because of my more successful brother, Mark...

Have pity, world. If anyone's looking for some summer help, or knows anyone else who is, please drop me a line. Surely someone out there has a restaurant...

Greetings from sunny Darjeeling!

Just kidding, it's actually a dank fog-pit with no running water.

Alright, just kidding again, it's not that bad.* But we are surrounded my cloud, which makes it a little hard to tell you what Darjeeling looks like since we haven't actually, really, totally seen it. From the 20-feet at a time that I can see, it looks pretty nice. One half European ski village, one half Nepalese market place.

Again I seem to have ended up with more stuff on my mind that I have time or space to sort it out in. Also I spent like a half hour emailing Cindy, another 20 minutes on facebook, and this internet ain't free. So, quickly:

There is a burgeoning separatist movement in the greater Darjeeling area, wanting to become a separate state (possibly a separate nation... I'm just learning about this now) from West Bengal. I won't even pretend to know the history behind it, but I will say this: there's a pretty clear ethnic difference in the population of this area vs. the rest of West Bengal. Darjeeling feels totally different than the rest of India, which probably comes from its huge Tibetan and Nepalese (Nepali? God, that's embarassing...) population. Names here sound like "Kalimpong." Names in the south of the state sound like "Howrah" and "Malda." This morning, during our breakfast in a hotel restaurant, the owner of the establishment got everyone's attention and told us - loudly - about the blasphemes of a Calcuttan minister who'd just published an article in a major newspaper (government officials in this country seem to have unlimited access to publication in the major media outlegs) about how the Darjeeling separatists are wreaking havoc on the region, with strikes and violence everywhere, and warning tourists not to go there. He asked us to tell other tourists we meet what we've seen here - that there is no violence, that there are small strikes but nothing that stops the tourist trade. Completely surreal. We leave tomorrow morning for our 5-day trek along the Singalila Ridge, but we're supposed to have one more day in Darjeeling afterwards, for recovery. I'm hoping to use that day to figure out what the hell is going on here. Suspect it will take longer than that.

So tomorrow is day 1 of the trek. Day 1 involves 14km of hiking with a total ascent of about 1k. The next day is... well, one day at a time. How about that?

Bengali food is freaking amazing. A-mazing. Too bad our only stops in West Bengal were Calcutta (oops, Kolkata) and here. Tibetan food, apparently, is also incredible. Which brings me to my next point:

Dharamsala arrival countdown: 19 days!

Which brings me to my final point:

It's May! Wish me a Happy Actually Finding Out About Law School Month (Well, At Least York, But Really Who Cares About McGill Anyway, If They're Going To Be Jerks Like That)!

Gonna have to find a snappy acronym for that. Who's for tea?



* It really is dank, though. That part's true. Oh, and about the lack of running water.

Why so quiet?

Those questions weren't rhetorical!

We're in Hyderabad at the moment, killing time on the intraweb until we catch our plane to Calcutta. I'm appalled that we're flying; add this to the number of trains and buses we've taken over the last three months - nevermind the flight to Delhi in the first place - and we've racked up so many enviro bad-karma points that we'll never recover. There's nothing like knowing that you've caused irreparable damage to the place you came to see and appreciate to make you feel like... well, like a spoiled jerk.

And I forgot to remark on Earth Day, which was April 22. We were trekking through the Western Ghats in Karnataka. Thinking back, we got lucky and managed to go the whole day using barely any electricity (no more than two hours of a single light bulb, in the homestay we stayed at that night), if you cheat and don't count the energy that went into making our food. Or the 6 plastic bottles we only reused twice each before throwing them away. Like I said, we'll never be able to atone for the damage done in this trip.

And yet, it's still probably less than the damage we would have done in Canada. Of course that's not what I meant to Earth-Day-post about.

Some handy enviro links:

- your personal carbon footprint here, in relation to global averages and to the world's total resources. how many earths would we need if everyone lived like you do?
- everyday activist, one of the most useful sites on teh web; suggestions for small changes that everyone can make, more or less effortlessly, to improve the way they live. devoted especially to the generations who think they're too old to change now.
- philobiblion, for green politics (plus books and feminism. word.)
- some helpful information about the ideas behind fair trade, its effects on communities and the environment, and fair trade product certification

Alright, enough. I'm just going to feel guilty, and that's that.

Hyderabad is interesting. It's quickly surpassing Bangalore as the IT-tech and financial hub of India, which means a sort of westernization that, as it tends to do in this country, only makes the whole thing seem more fundamentally Indian than it otherwise would. Those unique types of Indian wealth and poverty, of modernization and tradition. This is a very, very interesting time to be in the East.

That said, I think we're all starting to think about home a little more than we have been. Between today and tomorrow, we're saying goodbye to the plains; the rest of our trip will be in the Himalayas, which is a little surreal. We've been on these plains for two months, which I guess isn't all that much time in absolute terms, but has been long enough that it started to feel like it wouldn't end, like this is just how our life is now: moving from place to place every few days, finding a new hotel and new places to eat, things to see. Occasionally joining another pair or group of travelers for a day here and there. But, it's not.

Next stop: Calcutta. We barely have 24 hours there before we get on a (painfully long) train to New Jalpaiguri, where we'll wait out the night and then take another, 6-hour train (of the old-fashioned steam variety this time) to Darjeeling proper. We've given ourselves one day there to put together our 5-day trek, and then we're off along Singalila Ridge. We have a total of about 8 days in Darjeeling, to give us some time to let our sore legs recover and to see the town a bit. After that, S. will be off into Nepal; E. and I are hanging back, E. because she's running out of time, and me because I have no visa to re-enter with. So together we'll be going by bus under the Nepalese border, across to pick up the mountains as they re-emerge on the other side of Nepal, back in Uttaranchal, above Delhi in the West. From there (well, from an 12-hour bus ride from there) we'll be doing a 3-day trek together to the source of the Ganges. This trek features glaciers, which is in and of itself exciting.

All of this may or may not be followed by a trip to Lahaul and Spiti valley, which is a poor substitute for where I'd really like to go: Leh, in the Ladakh region, which is still snowed in an inaccessible except by flight from Chandigarh. And I'm done with flying for this trip. Still, Lahal shares the high-altitude desert, the snow-capped vistas, the strange and barren moonscape. And I suppose that's the point.

Either way, it ends in McLeod Ganj.

I would expect that I'll have time to post from Darjeeling, but I'm not sure whether it will be before or after our trek, making it somewhere between a few days and a week and a half from now. So, be good. My dad tells me you have a (ha!) heatwave coming, up to 22C. I laugh with contempt at your 22C. Ha ha ha, that's my laughter. At you.

It's 41C here. That's without factoring in humidity. The breeze is like having a hair dryer blown in your face. Like outdoor shopping in an oven. Seriously, there is nothing in the Canadian vocabulary that can accurately capture exactly how hot it is here. Don't even get me started on the Madikeri trek. Gorgeous, yeah, but now my sweat valves only have two settings: resting, and pouring like a stuck faucet. Have you ever gone from bone-dry to dripping sweat in under 5 minutes? Because we have.

And yeah, one of these days I'll get a good post in that has some, you know, actual thought content in it, rather than just exposition. But, friends, that day is not today.

Behave yourselves. Everyday Activist can help you do that.


(Addendum: We Move to Canada has a post up about recent good stuff Canada has been doing on the green front.)

Karnataka and all the rest

Where was I?

Oh yeah, I gave you a cheap, point-form update on what we've been up to. Well here's another:

- moved states; we're in Karnataka now (if you've looked at a map of India and noted that our travel route makes no sense and never has, you're right)
- Mysore! A palace! Sandalwood and crappy internet! A random guy who groped us! E.'s catlike reflexes in throwing a half-full water bottle at him and asking very loudly what is wrong with him!
- seriously though, Mysore was nice
- the Coorg region, coffee and cardamom plantations, and a two-day starter trek
- kinda nervous about the Himalayas; I'm coffee-shop-in-Montreal shaped, not necessarily 5-days-of-intense-mountain-climbing shaped
- keeping tabs on the Tibet situation, dying to get to McLeod Ganj already
- en route to Hampi, a huge ruined city

Yeah, there's really not much. Let's talk about what's going on on your end.

We Move to Canada is telling me some scary stuff today, among which is the fact that suicide rate in the Canadian military doubled between 2006 and 2007. What's going on out there, Canada? What are all these bills? And what the crap is this SPP?

Information, please! Especially about the SPP.

Seriously, I leave you guys alone for three simple months....

And again

We're fine, too much to say at the moment in my meager internet time. In Munnar, in the drop-dead gorgeous state of Kerala (non-exaggerating tagline: "God's Own Country"). We're headed to the Chinnar wildlife reserve upstate in an hour or so, where we'll be for a few days, then in Cochi. Hopefully I'll get some time for a decent post from Cochi. Just, again, letting you all know that everything's cool.

And, no word from schools yet. Why oh why must I wait to know what I'm doing in September?

Yup

We're alive, we're in Goa, everything's fine. I've been trying to get to the net for days now but internet cafes are few and far between here, and all the ones we had found (until now) had been closed for reasons that are mysterious and unknowable.

There's too much to really update on at the moment, so I won't. We're getting a train tonight to Varkala, Kerala, from which we'll be headed Kaniyakumari, the southernmost tip of India. After that we're working our way up through Kerala, cruising the backwaters, and then (after maybe 8-10 days) until Karnataka. For the next little while we're going to be super short on internet time, so this is a heads up to all family members that we'll email you as soon as we can, but that's not going to be very soon. S.'s cousin and his friend are with us as well, and having actual Indian people to help out with stuff is... helpful. It might easily be more than a week before we post/email again. That goes for E. and I both.

So, have a great week or two. Wish me a Happy Finding Out About Law Schools Month, it's April.

Be good.

Oh yeah, one more thing

Could this be any more patronizing? New in MSN Headlines this week: Old School Bullshit Plagues New Generation.

It basically talks about how teen girl online diarists are the hot new bloggers (untrue), and how women are, like, totally getting into tech finally so we can, you know, share our feelings and stuff. Totally makes up for the abysmal showing of women in tech jobs. Because we don't want the jobs or the pay or whatever, we just want to express our selves, you know, socially. According to our natures.

And, of course, the article ends with a girl realizing that, now that she's gone to university and made real friends, she can close up the blog, which was just a surrogate for other people.

Luckily it was on MSN, so no one read it.

Well, look who's back on the intraweb

Mood is a fickle thing, and it looks like I'm going to be blogging Udaipur after all.

You may actually recognize Udaipur; it's the city where the Bond movie "Octopussy" was filmed (as about a million signs and restaurants remind us daily). It's got the white palace floating on the lake, etc. Beautiful, but we're definitely getting a little too used to Rajasthan and the northern architecture; we've been here for three days, and only spent one morning doing anything especially proper-touristy (the City Palace). The rest we've just been enjoying the town, which is a little pricy but very laid-back and comfortable for us Western types because it's absolutely overrun by tourists. That's unfortunate - a town this nice should belong to its people - but it is nice to be able to sit on the rooftop in a tank top for a change.

Mostly, what we did here was Holi. I'm going to write a bit more about it in Mumbai (tomorrow) or Aurangabad (the following day), because some very interesting things happened that have got me thinking, and I know I'll need more than a half hour or so to get it out properly. But, in the meantime, a bit about Holi. (Skip the part of that wikipedia article on the health hazards. We did.)

It starts with a huge serious of bonfires in the streets just after sundown on the night before. Stacks of wood, tented together, reach 12 or 14-feet high in small squares (about the size of 3 driveways), and 6-7 feet in the smaller streets. Firecrackers and cherry bombs are thrown into the blaze or launched into the sky. The noise, in a town the size of Udaipur, was tremendous - as was the fireworks display. (Fireworks are legal here and easy to buy year-round because they're used in weddings and on other auspicious days.) Then, a good chunk of the population starts drinking; for most of the residents of a town like Udaipur, Holi is the only day of the entire year that they won't have to work. The enthusiasm is contagious, and there's no argument about it - they deserve it.

Revelry in the streets is over before midnight, but starts again early the next morning. By 9am, the streets are full of people moving in big groups, swarming through each other. Everyone you pass, you say "Happy Holi" to each other and throw a handful of coloured powder (or water) over each other - sometimes you put it directly on each other's faces. Sometimes hugging follows. The result is an incredibly congenial, hilarious atmosphere in which you can't stop laughing and end up with colour in your mouth as well as everywhere else. People are almost unrecognizeable - after about 20 minutes I could only pick out the other people in our party by height and stature, as even our clothes were so covered in bright colours running together that you couldn't tell what they originally looked like. My skin is still stained in a lot of places (all visible, unfortunately), and my clothes are absolutely ruined.

All of which is fine, because it was so much fun. S. and I went out with a couple we met from Toronto named Aaron and Marion, who are maybe 10-12 years older than us but very fun. (Bonus: he's a criminal lawyer who loves his job, and loved law school, and wasn't a jerk in the least. There's hope!) We'll post photos once we get them from Aaron, who was the only one brave enough to bring a camera into that mess.

There were some tourists who were not loving it - which was maybe the most hilarious part of all. Every once in a while you'd see some sour-looking European in khakis and a white golf shirt lurking around with an expensive camera giving death stares to anyone who approaches them with powder. Imagine coming down from your hotel into that chaos - just a huge mob of people greeting, throwing colours and paint everywhere, hugging, laughing - and expecting to be left to yourself on the sidelines. It doesn't work like that. Like I said, there is no solitude in India - and definitely not on Holi. Did I mention there were people walking around with drums, stopping when they met other drummers to play together, and people came running from the sidestreets to dance in big groups wherever they were?

All of which has reminded me that joy can get you through a lot. Again, I'll save some of the details for a longer, later post, but the last few days have been extremely instructive.

Gordon, a British man we met in Pachmari who has been coming to India for 15 years, said over and over again that India is the great teacher about humanity, and that whenever you start to get it wrong, India will correct you. That's certainly what's happened here. Just when I've had all I can take of touts and aggressive salespeople and everyone trying to squeeze every penny they can from you, staring at you, talking about you, and giving you wrong information, you meet a young shop worker who stops you with a glance and all but closes up his shop to sit and talk with you - and then refuses to sell you anything. That's what happened the day before yesterday, to E. and I., when we were out in the market. A man named Surya (appropriately, he's named after the sun) started the conversation the way most touts do - "From which country?" - but ended up being so sweet and so interesting that we spent a few hours with him drinking chai and talking Big Ideas. He grew up in an ashram in Kerala, but when he was in his teens his guru told him he needed to see the world before he would understand anything. So she gave him Rs. 2000 (about $50) and sent him on his way. Ever since then (about 10-15 years ago) he's been moving from place to place every few years, working two jobs for 11 months of the year and then using his 12th to travel around India. He had a really interesting perspective on the world. Although astrology is Not My Thing, he was talking to both E. and I about our signs and whether we match with them (it seems like everyone here takes astrology very seriously), and suddenly got very intense about needing to read my palm. He told me a pretty good story. A lot of it was familiar. With these things, it's not so much about the accuracy or inaccuracy of what people can tell about you; it's about paying attention to how you react to the news. Your own response can be highly, highly instructive. Mine was.

(Actually, this is the second time a relative stranger has singled me out to read my fortune for free. The first time was years ago, and it was helpful too.)

A wave of goodwill can carry you for a long time. I'm hoping mine carries me through Mumbai, but I'm dumping it there, because I have things to do and some serious business to write about. As always, the last few days weren't all rainbows, and I think there's some big shit brewing here. Holi, joy, and the British travel warning released last week about Goa - and, for good measure, how all these remote things on the other side of the world help shape how we perceive our communities at home.

Be good, all.

International Women's Day, my Dad's birthday, and Khajuraho

Kind of hard to bring those all together, so I won't.

Happy International Women's Day, in which, among other things, I pause and offer respect to the long line of smart, brave, and righteous babes, including our mothers and grandmothers, who've given us everything in the world. I'm grateful to inherit what they worked for, and to be part of the next generation (along with almost all of my friends) to use the F-word with pride. Check out what us smart young bitches is up to.

Happy birthday, Dad, and congrats on all the new directions the new year is bringing.

And I'm in Khajuraho, having a beer and a bhang lassi for all the girls back home, and for my Mom. You guys are amazing. Please be in Canada when I get home.

Mom, this is for you. Dolly never lies.

Real post in a few days.

The talking is free

... but the content you have to pay for.

Meaning, this is going to be another rambling post. (Official tag: 'blah blah blah.')

New photo albums of Rajasthan from both E. and I on facebook, so check it out if you can. I've tried to label things somewhat clearly.

So, Western news. Edwards really did the Clinton campaign in when he quit, eh? She probably would have taken the next few states if the leftist dem vote wasn't being split between him and Obama. I think it's a good thing overall - not just because I more or less, given the three major options, like Obama, but because I think he'll cut deeper into the GOP voteshare than Clinton would have, and that might be a big issue with McCain since no one seems to be noticing that he's every bit as batshit crazy as the rest of them. Evidence provided upon request. Or just click any one of those links over there ----->. There was a really interesting post up at Pandagon from a few days ago about an interview in which McCain pretends not to know whether condoms help reduce transmission of HIV. And that, friends, is really, really bad news.

There are these ads here, for I don't know what, but they're these huge billboards with a huge cartoon of the US, the geographical outline dressed in the stars and stripes, and it has a cartoon of HRC and two anonymous men in suits and the headline "Auntie Sam?". I cannot figure out what it's an ad for but I've seen it multiple times. There's something else on it about "the democratic choice" and then the logo of some product we don't recognize. Of course that's nicer than she's been addressed as by most of the US media in years.

But I was talking about gurudwaras. Or I was meaning to. And Amritsar.

Going to the gurudwaras was incredibly interesting, and being now on the Ganges, even more so. I'll be spending the rest of tonight doing some contextual reading about both Hinduism and Sikhism. I shortchanged Amritsar a lot, in my previous entry. It's just not quite enough to say that the Golden Temple was amazing, beautiful, etc. When we first saw it, it was already edging past dusk, but there were still prayers being sung. When you see it, it's floating in the middle of a square, still pool which is surrounded at some distance by a walkway of marble. You slowly make your way around the entire structure, and you stare. I would have sworn it was lighting itself. It was so phenomenally serene. I could have sat there for a long long time.

To enter, like all gurudwaras, you remove your shoes and cover your head. Before entering the complex you wash your hands and dip your feet in a shallow pool at the entrance. You walk down a few steps, which is meant to remind you of the humility needed to approach God. Then, in the Golden Temple, for about 20 minutes you're knocked on your ass by the beauty of it all. I'll share the details of how you proceed through a Sikh shrine once I've got my background information straight, so in the meantime you'll have to take my word for it - it's amazing.

Tonight we've taken a walk and seen the evening arati, though from more of a distance than we were hoping - we might try again tomorrow. We're getting up early to do a (beginner's) yoga class (embarassing) tomorrow. I'm looking forward to showing off my utter unflexibility and lack of co-ordination in the early hours. Then back to ogling the mountains. I said I was enjoying the Himalayas, right? We're doing a 7k hike tomorrow and then in the afternoon.... possibly reading.

I know, blah blah blah. I know it's a vacation, but I haven't been idle in a while.

Hi, we're alive, and we're in Uttaranchal

Yes, that Uttaranchal.

There's a lot I skipped over before, about our time in Punjab. Like being shown how to behave properly in a gurudwara, for one. But again I'm short on time. I'll have it all down pat by the end of the trip and discuss it when I'm home.

We've just come from Dehra Dun, Uttaranchal, where we stayed with yet another generous member of S's family's community. Again it was lovely. Uttaranchal is quickly catching up to Rajasthan and Punjab as my favourite Indian states (sorry, Delhi). Of course, that's all the ones we've been to so far. But at some point between the tucked-between-mountains-on-three-sides Ayurvedic Medical school and the life-in-your-hands, lump-in-your-throat bus ride up the cliffs to the Mussoorie hill station (a small town at a great altitude where people come to escape the heat in the summer), it's becoming clearer and clearer that wherever I settle down will have to be in a valley. Or on a mountain. I haven't been around hills of this size since New Zealand.

We're in Rishikesh now, taking our first look at the Ganges - which somehow, for some reason, totally lives up to expectations. We might take it easy today, since we've had a busy few days leading up to now. Either today or tomorrow we'll go to watch evening puja on the river, take a walk around town, who knows. We'll be between here and Haridwar for the next two days, until we take an overnight train to Delhi on the 2nd-3rd to go pick up my passport (woot!). Then we're going poking into Uttar Pradesh. Figure while we're here we might as well go look at this.

Needless to say, I'm pretty excited for the next two weeks or so. Back to Delhi (which, oddly, I'm looking forward to - although most of the Indians we've spoken to about it refer to it as things like "awful," "nightmarish," and "hell"), then Agra (for the ghost city of Fatehpur Sikri as well as the Taj, which is getting and entire dawn-to-starlight day for itself), then Varanassi (of the famous ghats), then Khajuraho, then back across into southern Rajasthan for Udaipur and, hopefully, Pushkar.

In Patiala we were invited to a wedding on March 15 (I think I might have mistakenly told some people we were seeing one in February - we're not), so we'll be headed back up into Punjab for that in another two weeks. After the wedding we'll go down past Mumbai into Maharashtra, spend some time around Aurangabad (for the cave temples at Elora and Ajanta) and at the citadel in Daulatabad, and then down into Goa, Karnataka, and Kerala. The next few weeks are going to be just amazing.

Argh, internet time is up. I was going to link you photos to all of the above, but y'all know how to google image search. Go spend some time on wikipedia. We'll talk to you soon. Once again, wish you were here.

Ugh: A Post With No Content

Lazy. Had a big post in mind for today, breaking into the concern-as-colonialism problem, which I meant to start off with a long discussion about the concept of human rights - which I figured I'd eventually follow with one about the definition of colonialism and the paternalistic attitudes it's based on - and then, sometime after that, and probably in small bits spanning the rest of the trip, I was going to cough up some thoughts on how the two relate to each other.

But.

Came down here around 1pm all hot to get going, and we had a power failure (which apparently happens at the same time every day, although no one told us that). Now it's 4 hours later and I'm feeling tired and lazy. So maybe not today after all.

Tonight we're leaving Jodhpur, getting back on another overnight (we checked - tickets are correct) headed for Jaisalmer. We had an extremely relaxing time here, including lots of reading and eating, which was offset by one fairly physical day where we hiked up to the old fort above the city and saw that. The fort was really incredible, as E. mentioned below, and hopefully we'll post photos sometime soon. Those who have access can look at E's photos of Delhi on facebook in the meantime. I imagine we'll do another big round-up photo upload once we're done Rajasthan, which is really only another 5 days or so anyway.

Blargh, sorry, this post has no content. Just wanted to check in, say everything's cool, etc. Also, E. is going to be posting every once in a while, which I'm very happy about, and hopefully will be nice for those of you on her side who read this.

So, cheers. See you in Jaisalmer.