Looking quite regal.
The Venice of Japan.
This doesn’t even look real, does it?
Kev with our snacks and tea courtesy of the ladies at the next table 🙂
Kev got a hand-carved hanko stamp made. It was pretty cool.
Scary pic – but us Thanksgiving night at our local onsen.
Thanksgiving Dinner part one: Soba, tempura and sushi
Naoshima did not disappoint. We heard about “Art Island” from a friend in Tokyo, and man am I happy we did. Today, Kev and I wandered around the island relishing in the fall colors, soaking wet from the sweet-smelling rain and breathing in the beauty of the contemporary exhibits scattered around the island. Coming just yesterday from a month in the exhilarating, albeit frenetically paced Tokyo, Naoshima was truly a breath of fresh air and rejuvenated me in a way that I didn’t even know I needed. Maybe it was the fresh sea air, maybe it was the cleansing rain or maybe it was the beautiful exhibits, but whatever the case, it was everything we could have hoped for.
Stormy clouds on ferry to Naoshima
Horrifying spider (which are literally EVERYWHERE in the woods in Japan)
Beer at gravesite.
Pumpkin sculpture by Kusama Yoyoi, which has become the symbol of the island. 
Hello friends, family, and everybody else.
I just wanted to take a quick second to update this blog and mention some of the things that have been going on.
First of all, as of today, we’re still in Tokyo, Japan. Specifically Koto-ku, which means, I think, the Koto ward of Tokyo.
Anyway, we’ve done quite a bit recently:
Anyway, we’ve been both busy and not busy. We’ve been in Tokyo now for just about a month, staying in the same place the entire time. It’s strange, it’s starting to feel less like traveling and more like living. We “go home” at night. We know how to walk to various places of import. We have a grocery store we go to, and we recognize/are recognized by the people that work there. We honestly don’t do that many exciting thngs, we just walk a lot, exploring new side streets, trying different buns with different types of fillings, always on the lookout for sushi at grocery stores that we think is half off. We are getting pretty good at recognizing “half off” as apposed to “20% off” – not as easy as you might think!
Tomorrow we are going to Maker Faire Tokyo, which I’m pretty excited about. I’m hoping to get some sweet stickers, and perhaps see some cool things that you can’t see at the Bay Area Maker Faire. Maker’s Faire. Whatev. This has been something I’ve been excited about for a while, so, awesome!
Anyway, the title of the blog post. Lindsay and I are planning out the next bits of our trip here and there is just so much stuff that we don’t know! It’s crazy! It’s easy enough to be jobless, traveling around to various awesome places, but when you are on a budget and trying to save money every step of the way, trying to optimize your spending, there is a lot to consider!
Currently, our plan is as follows:
The thing is, when you are trying to save money on everything, little things matter. Like, which city should we fly into France? How should we get from X city to Y city? Do we need to buy Z in advanced to make sure we are eligible for the X pass? Does the temperature in Y city during X dates mean we’ll be unable to do Z, and so perhaps we should instead fly into W?
Anyway, it’s a lot to consider. At the end of the day, we’re basically just sort of going with the flow and honestly not putting all that much thought into things, but that drives me crazy sometimes because I feel so unprepared! Oh well.
Anyway, happy weekend all!
Hello everybody! Kevin here! How are you!!!?
Anyway, look, let’s get down to brass tacks. As a friend/colleague used to say, here’s the deal:
Lindsay and I had the opportunity to go to Tokyo 5 years ago, when a friend awesomely gave us the opportunity to have an extended layover in Japan on our way from SE Asia to Chicago. But, we were homesick after having traveled for 6 (ish – Nick, we’re using the ceiling function) months on the road. On that almost-layover, we were planning on going to the Tsukiji fish market, for many reasons, but because mainly, I had always wanted to see that. But we didn’t, and went home instead. Since then, it has been an itch I couldn’t scratch, because my hands couldn’t reach, if you see what I mean (it’s like, figurative language or something?).
Switching gears 100%, my favorite movie is Lost in Translation. I don’t say this lightly. It really is. If you asked me to name a single piece of media that is most important to me, it’s probably that movie. And it’s been a part of the reason I’ve wanted to come to Japan, sort of like a pilgrimage. Anyway, a lot of that movie takes place in a hotel called the Park Hyatt.
So, here is what we did:
Can you believe it? We did both things!
The Tsukiji market was pretty awesome. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the largest wholesale fish market in the world. It’s huge. One of the big parts of the market is a tuna auction that happens most mornings. The auction is one of the things we really wanted to see, but it starts at 5am. Only 120 people per day are allowed to watch this auction, and to get a spot you need to arrive as early as possible to get a place. We heard that 4:30AM was a good time, but being the paranoid person I am, we decided to get there at 4AM. This was bad enough, but to make matters worse we are a fair distance (3ish mile) from the market, and no public transportation would take us there at 4AM. So we were left with either 1. pay to sleep somewhere near the fish auction (expensive), or 2. pay a taxi ($40+) to get us there, or 3. walk there. We opted for option 3 on account of our budget, which meant we had to be out of the door at 3AM. So it was an early morning.
It turns out that we were almost LATE at 4AM, as there were only a few spots left. After all 120 spots are taken, the entry door shuts and nobody else can get in. So, at 4AM we got there, then sat on the floor of this room for an hour and 45 minutes.
But, it was awesome!
After the auction, we walked around the market and found ourselves a great place to get a 6AM sushi breakfast! It was a bit pricey (~$25 for both of us), but probably some of the freshest fish you can get, short of eating the fish raw on the boat.
(doesn’t look much like breakfast)
The wholesale fish market itself was amazing. It was far and above better then any fish market I’ve ever seen. Sadly, we don’t have many digital photos of the place (I took a whole roll of film though!), but here are a few random photos:
Overall, one of my favorite things we’ve done in Tokyo.
And then, there was Park Hyatt. We felt quite underdressed and generally like garbage walking into the hotel, which was incredibly fancy and awesome. Walking into the hotel made you sort of wish you were rich, and living a different sort of life. It was pretty amazing.
Anyway, we walked in like we owned the place, despite our feelings, and went straight to the elevator which took us up to the 42nd floor. Here, you step out in a huge huge room, complete with plants and dark atmospheric lighting and fancy people drinking expensive things. But we weren’t at our destination yet. We had to make it to the 52nd floor, which required finding a different lift. We ended up having to ask a hotel person how to get to the top floor, and I slipped in a tacky (feeling) question about when they started charging cover. We walked through the library, found the second lift, and ended up at the New York Bar on the 52nd floor of Park Hyatt.
It was smaller then I expected based on the movie, but I sort of liked that. It made it more believable that the two characters would be able to communicate with each other sitting at different tables without it being super weird/ackward.
Anyway, photos don’t really do the place justice, but here are a few bad ones anyway:
LIT == Lost in Translation
I had a Suntory beer, although a wiskey would have been more appropriate, they didn’t have a Suntory whiskey that I could find, and also it would have cost too much anyway :).
Here is where “Bob” sat
If anybody is curious, the drinks were 1100 Yen for the beer, 1900 Yen for the mixed drink, plus 13% tax (?) and 13% service charge, so the total was around 3600 Yen or 36 dollars for the two drinks. They gave us freeze dried peas and sesame crackers and peanuts in a dish. The service was awesome, if you are into that sort of thing. If we had stayed after 8pm (7pm on Sunday) we would have each been charged 2200 Yen for cover. If you ever visit Tokyo, and enjoy the movie or super fancy/classy/beautiful bars or awesome/amazing views, I’d say this was a great experience.
A great few experiences.
So, wow. We’re in Tokyo. How lucky can we be?
We knew as soon as we got our airplane food, we knew we were going to be in love. I mean, look at this cute little bento!
Kevin holding his first Japanese yen
Too bad for him, bills are NOT common here, so he needed to get himself the world’s cutest change purse to keep himself organized 🙂
On a budget, we’ve been frequenting the grocery store regularly…these were SAMPLES…I mean, right?! TOKYO.
We did the whole Halloween thing! Turns out, Halloween hasn’t really been celebrated except during the last 10 years or so…This is our (soon to be!) new Japanese teacher 🙂
P.S. Lamest costume ever award goes to BOTH of us – 2 hours before the party I purchased saran wrap and balloons to be (as seen below) the world’s most awkward Jelly Belly, and Kevin literally put on my pants and called that his costume. Yup. My husband fits in my pants. No I’m not happy about it.
P.P.S. Turns out Kevin isn’t in any of the photos before my camera died – but I can assure you, he was there, drinking and eating as much of the “all you can eat/drink party” part as humanely possible and having a merry time talking with his Japanese brethren…
Kevin has found his new life’s passion: Pokemon! Gotta catch ’em all (or so he tells me :))
We’ve done a LOT of walking. The metro/subway lines are pretty darn expensive (about $3-7 one way), so between the two of us, that adds up. So walking it is! 
But, while walking – we often happen across places like this:
Or see super futuristic water taxi things, like this!
Or cute mini bonsais of every shape and size, like this!
Ridiculously cute ads like these are everywhere.
We visited the Sensoji Temple, which was pretty awesome…
And got our fortune!
WHICH WAS BAD! Hilariously bad. Try to read it, if you can. Turns out (to sum it up) Our wishes will not come true, our marriage is not good, and we should NOT be traveling…WELP! Sorry fortune gods!
We’ve learned to love maccha tea (or at least I have – Kev’s been a die hard maccha fan forever or so he tells me)
We managed to get tickets to the Studio Ghibly museum (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and loads of other Miyazaki films) using an all Japanese prompted touch screen to print tickets. After 15+ minutes, here is Kevin: VICTORIOUS.
We tried some traditional Japanese sweets (ice cold noodles to be dipped in sugary sweet sauce), If texture issues present yourself while eating, this is probably not for you.
And went to our first Japanese tea house!
And met new friends (picture shown: on the way to the Ninja Temple – Ninjadera Temple)
Thousands of Japanese paper cranes for eternal good luck inside temple cave
We visited some traditional Japanese Gardens (Kiyosumi Gardens)
We’ve tried lots of new food and drink and brushed up on our Japanese (aka: learned a few mini phrases to make us not seem like total jerks :))
Went to a (few now!) conveyor belt sushi place!
Walked around the crazy Shibuya streets
Used a bidet (too much info?) and learned that they even come equip with music as you pee! What will they think of next?!
At night, many neighborhood restaurants are illuminated like this…On a cool night, the warm glow and ramen scents swirling the air, it feels just like a movie. I feel pretty confident life doesn’t get much better. 
We’ve started to really have a taste of fall (and oh, how we’ve missed it!)
Shinjuku Gyoen (another Japanese garden)
We picniked here for a few hours and Kev read while I did some Sashiko (Japanese embroidery) that I learned from a meet up group I attended earlier in the week – it was a pretty awesome day.
There have been awesome (and very, very funny) street performers all over the place – below you’ll see a group of about 15 Rock n’ Rollers in their fancy leather jackets (complete with slicked back hair and combs in their back pockets) who frequent the park and dance literally ALL DAY to old school Rock and Roll. Pretty entertaining to say the least.
Trinket heaven.
I got flair.
And there are VERY weird shops all over the place – like this “make your own doll” shop (see those eyes?!) where grown men in business suits and cute lovey couples alike shop “Build a Bear” style, but for dolls…
Kevin plays videogames in Akihabara
More weirdness on the streets
We even went to the Cup Noodles museum (which turned out to be awesome!) and even got to make our own Cup Noodles! (Kyle, get ready! Christmas is coming!) 
Last week, I met up with these fine folks to go run around the Palace. After our run, we went to an onsen/sento (public bath house, complete with saunas, hot tubs and the works) and then went out to dinner. A perfect night.
Kevin imagines he’s making a Suntory commercial for Lost in Translation
And yesterday, we went mushroom hunting (although we only found poisonous mushrooms). It was beyond great to get out of the city, but we couldn’t help but wish we were back in Portland with Alicia and Justin having our (what has come to be) annual fall mushroom hunting experience. 
On our hike we saw rice being dried, which I had never seen in the “wild” before, and thought was pretty cool 🙂
I’m sure there are things I’ve missed, but that’s a pretty solid take on the last week. One down, 3 more to go, Tokyo – we’re ready for you!
South Korea (surprisingly) rocked our worlds.
What started out as a 2 week trip to visit our pal, Phill, turned in to a serious desire to stay a month! Or 2! Or 3! I’m not sure if it was the clean, COOL air minutes after landing, or the orderliness of the subway, or the fact that I could run (or actually go anywhere and feel totally safe) or the fact that we were with our friend, or had a mini pig in our hostel, or what – but either way, Korea turned out to be everything we could have hoped or more. Without question we will be going back to explore the rest of the country sooner rather than later.
The pics below will be totally out of order, but will at least show you a small glimpse of what life was like…
1) We went to a Jjimjilbang (Korea spa)… 7 glorious floors stocked full of varying degreed water tubs, sweating rooms/sauna, open-air ginseng baths, a seawater bath, a salt room, an ice room, a huge outdoor swimming pool…all for $11. It was my first experience having to “drop trou” and get totally naked with a bunch of strangers, but truthfully, I found it pretty liberating and overall pretty damn natural (For the record, there was a man side and a lady side – apparently after talking to my dad, this wasn’t totally clear :)) We stayed for quite a few hours – and it was glorious. Before you enter the baths, you need to scrub until you’re raw, and I opted for a “full body scrub” which literally left me laying in a pile of brown/grey balls of skin after a 20 minute scrub down. It was unbelievably disgusting, but damn if I didn’t feel smooth as a baby’s butt when I was finished. Again, glorious.
There were also common areas (where clothing WAS mandatory) No photos allowed inside the gendered baths (again, naked people) but here as you can see, is pretty great. There were also other cool common areas like the Ice room, the charcoal room the jade room and a bunch of others that you could sit and hangout with your family or whomever else in…you can trust me when I say, worth every penny.
2) Kevin went to the LOL (League of Legends) Championship tourney which was hosted in the World Cup stadium and left him surrounded by hot chicks and nerdy nerds. I can’t speak much of it besides to say it honestly did look awesome (even though we’re supposed to be a DOTA-only family – blasphemous to even suggest otherwise! :))
The winning team (I love this picture).
3) We ate some pretty bomb street food. One of our favorites “egg bread” (Gyeran Bread) was right outside our hostel and was perfect for late night snacks…
Not street food – but a strange one just the same: Pig Trodders (feet) and Blood Sausage (and of course, Soju :))
4) We hiked Mount Bukhan (a bit of it anyway). We were even given these fancy-dancy badges for our hike! (Due to security reasons, we had to check in with our passports and could not take photos towards North Korea (which was on our left side the whole way up). About 6,000 steps later, we made it.
5) We saw some super cool graffiti
6) There were exercise machines everywhere to help you walk off your dinner
7) We discovered Makgeolli (fermented rice wine); how to mix soju and beer AND that we could do all of the above right outside of 7-11 (or any other convenience store). For travelers on a budget, this was a pretty rad way of people watching and partaking in a delicious beverage!
8) Highlight or not (depending on who you ask) there was MEAT. and LOTS of it. Seen below: Mountainous (Sandeomi) Bulgogi (when it arrived both of those giant stacks of meat were on top of each other – and it was ONLY for us) – not to mention the 12 banchans that went along with it…..
9) Scary picture of all of us – but! We went to the Norjangjin Fish Market
10) And visited a few themed cafes (Dog Cafe, Banana Cafe, Hello Kitty Cafe)
11) Grilled lots of fun things with friends (Phill and Jinnie were honestly the best tour guides ever)
12) Tried Bingsu – shaved milk dessert
13) THERE WAS A MINI PIG NAMED HAMLET AT OUR GUESTHOUSE
14) The streets were alive….with the sounds of viiideeoogammmessss
15) Besides the impressive subway, Seoul was a ridiculously walkable city. Cheonggyecheon was a 7 mile long paved trail that followed the river out to the river. It was full of artists and friends and lovers. 
16) Top highlight: Phill was there, being all cool and shit.
17) We went to the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) and had a chance to stand in North Korea for a few minutes. I didn’t realize what a big deal it really was until we where there – surrounded by guards who are literally “on alert” 24 hours a day guarding the border. You can see the guards looking across to N. Korea and a guard on the N. Korea side looking back with binoculars at the S. Korean side. Pretty crazy. After checking out the Korean War museum, we had an opportunity to see where high-level military discussions happened on both the N. Korea and S. Korea side. 
We had about 1 minute to take a photo towards the N. Korea side before our cameras had to be put away- here’s us with our badges.
Table where mmilitarytalks are held.
18) I could run along the beautifully paved Han River
19) Did I mention we had a PIG?!
20) One day, Kevin and I got up and walked probably 15-18 km around the city (we had no idea where we were going short of we needed to get over a main bridge to check out a bridge river light show – which never happened) but we DID get to see this – pretty magical (although the pics don’t do it justice!)
21) Eating our way through the Tongin Market (with these cool little tokens!)
22) * Going to the AMAZING Gyeongbokgung Royal Palace and walking around the grounds (and awesome museum) and having our first glimpse of the fall colors
Other highlights not pictured (because I forgot my camera on multiple occassions 🙁 ):
* Having a dinner fit for a King (and Queen!) with Phill’s Dad
* Checking out the Flea Markets with Jinnie and Phill
* Dancing in Gangnam
* Eating squid in a PC Bang while Kevin played DOTA with his keyboard accidentally set in Korean
* Visitng the Ewha Women’s University
* Listening to K-pop in the grocery stores
* The girls kickin’ butt in pool in the wee hours of the night at the Blue Monkey
* And the list goes on….
Needless to say (again!) Korea, see you SOON.
At this point, sadly, I cannot remember what was posted or not, or what photos were shown, but the photos below are from our last few days in Delhi (well, Agra and area surrounding Delhi, anywyay :))
Visiting the Temple where Buddha gave his first speech on the 8-fold Path
Kevin standing under Buddha’s Bodhi Tree (implanted from Bodh Gaya)
Tired as a goat.
We made it to the Taj Mahal!
Bucket List – Check! Turns out, it was pretty cool – and for me anyway, lived up to my expectations…even if it was 6,000 degrees and took us 6+ hours to get home.
Representin’ St. Bede!
When we got home from the Taj, I have never felt so sick in my entire life. After throwing up on my hair, I had quite a (quite uncharacteristically, I hope!) dramatic moment and chopped off a hunk of my hair with Kev’s kid scissors he used to make Japanese Kanji flashcards. 
Here I am (feeling much better, 3 days later) with much shorter hair (and a see-through shirt , as it turns out!)
Not sure what else there is to report from our last few days in Delhi. That said, minutes before leaving for the airport, I watched a woman get hit by a car turning her thigh into glue on the pavement. While many watched her scream, no one came to help her. After quite a bit of effort, I was finally able to secure a Tuk Tuk driver to take the woman to the airport (after the first 4 refused to put her in their vehicles.) I felt pretty shaken by the entire experience, but it was a reminder once again of the difficult lives that many Indians face on a daily basis. I know it is not from an unkind spirit that so many stopped to watched or refused to help this woman – I know that to be completely opposite from my experience during the last 1.5 months…I do think, however, that individual lives are truly so difficult on a day to day basis, it must be extremely hard to imagine taking on someone else’s pain or difficulty, when so many are struggling just to get by themselves. It was something that I had felt on numerous occasions while in India, but was never made more clear until our last night there.
At this point, it’s hard to remember just how we were feeling when we left, but I do remember the genuine sense of relief I felt when we finally entered the airport. India had, without question, rocked me to my core, and made me feel stronger and weaker as a person that I can ever remember feeling (especially in such a short period of time!). From the highs to the lows, the beauty and the filth, I could not be happier that we chose to travel here – I know I am better for it – and will be looking forward to the day when we have an opportunity to dig a little deeper into the scratch we left there.
(note: I’ll add pictures in a bit!)
Lindsay and I went to Delhi, though it is NEARLY a distant memory at this point. I’m typing up this account of the experience to be sure we don’t forget about this bit of our trip.
Arriving in Delhi was great after a somewhat long journey from Varanasi. Like every other trip we took, the train ride was longer then you would think, and our train was delayed in Varanasi which was not a particularly nice train station. I think we sat around for 3 or 4 hours on the piss smelling ground, not really sure when the train was coming.
Anyway, getting to Delhi was great though. While hot, Delhi is a pretty modern city, some areas could easily be straight out of the United States. A great example is the Delhi metro, which is clean, air conditioned, and generally in working, non-broken condition. The Delhi metro was actually significantly nicer then the Bay Area’s metro. And more useful as it went all over the city.
Lindsay and I ended up staying accidentilyin a touristy area of Delhi near the “Main Bazar”, the hotel being called “Hotel All Iz Well.” This ended up being one of the nicer hotels we stayed at in India and also one of the more expensive places at ~20 bucks a night. It had air conditioning, CLEAN sheets (from what we could tell), a HOT shower (well, some of the time), and even a TV that had a few stations showing Western movies. We were staying in Delhi for a full week and we had prepared ourselves for dirty, hot, humid, loud, and overall not relaxing time and figured if we were going to be there for a week we might really appreciate having a nice place to come home to. And we did! Very very much!
Delhi itself we did a lot of random things, but to be honest not much to write home (or blog) about. The number of tourists things we did in Delhi itself were somewhere around 0. We didn’t go to see the Red Fort, we didn’t go to any museums, we didn’t see any temples or other places of worship (well, once, on accident we ran into a huge mosque), etc. Honestly at this point we felt a bit templed out, so to speak.
Instead, we spent our time in Delhi doing random things. We tried different foods. We went to a sports complex (which ended up being too expensive anyway) and tried to find a place to go swimming. We bought some clothing to bring with us to our next (colder) destinations. We spent some time sending a package back home… Interesting thing about that: we took a bunch of bags of presents/etc to a “package wallah”, basically a person who packages up stuff, and the dude SEWED all of the random stuff into a lumpy package with canvas. No box I guess, just canvas. It was like he made a lumpy custom canvas skin for our stuff. Took maybe 15 minutes and cost something like 4 bucks. Not bad. Shipping packages from India to the USA (Via “SAL” if you google this) was quite expensive. I think we paid ~USD$81 for a 11.5kg package.
And let us not forget our day trip to Agra (i.e. the Taj Mahal)! Agra could easily be a separate post but I’m worried I’ll loose steam and it’ll never happen, so here we are! We took an EARLY 6 AM train from New Delhi to Agra. Agra is a decent enough city I’m sure, but it mainly felt to me like a city with the Taj Mahal and a few other touristy places in it. We got off the train, took a tuktuk/autorickshaw to the Taj Mahal area, and walked in. We walked around, looking to buy tickets, but couldn’t figure out where to buy them. We thought we had to wait in a line that said “Tickets ->” to buy tickets, but it turns out we waited in the line and just got sent in to see the Taj. We still though we had to walk further to buy tickets, so we went to the entrance of the Taj expecting to be told/asked to buy a ticket or directed to the ticket purchasing counter or something, only to be pushed through the Taj (which is quite small) and then spit back out. This isn’t very clear i realize, what I’m saying, but basically we (honestly) accidentally saw the Taj without paying what would have been around USD $30. Which was crazy. The Taj itself was pretty cool. I keep typing other stuff and deleting it, but honestly that’s about all I can say for myself personally, “pretty cool.” It was cool. I’m glad we saw it so we can say we saw it. I wouldn’t travel to India to see the Taj, I’ll say that. And I might not even visit the Taj if I had a short period of time in India, just because for me I think there are cooler and more interesting things (Varanasi being a great example). I sort of feel like the Taj is travelers poison, you feel like you have to see it because it’s so famous, and it IS really cool, and you feel like if you don’t see it you’re going to regret being in India and not seeing it. Which is how I felt, and I’m glad we saw it, but those motivations sort of stuck in the back of my head.
The trip back from the Taj was hell. It was shit, so to speak. We were on a PACKED train, could barely move, people were screaming, Lindsay was sick, people jumping through windows of the moving train trying to get off on their stop, throwing packages through the windows, etc. Insanity. Hot, dirty, etc. Plus, when we finally got back to Delhi, it was super super crowded and somebody stole my wallet from my FRONT pocket. Pickpockted, you might say. Luckily the only thing of value that was stolen was the wallet itself, which I think was ~$20 bucks. I liked that wallet though :/. Other then that I had maybe 3 bucks worth of cash in the wallet, and nothing else (Larger bunches of money and credit cards, passports, etc, etc, I keep in a moneybelt either around my waste or locked up somewhere).
We also went to a western style mall one day (Select CITYWALK) which was great. I had a vegetable burger at McDonalds, and we tried various Indian deserts (I’m a big fan of gulab jamun btw, which I never was in the states… not sure if it’s better here, or different, or my tastes are just different with all of the Indian food), that sort of thing.
Honestly, this gives a pretty good idea of what we did for a week. Go to different parts of the city, different types of markets, etc, try different foods, eat a small bowl of rice pudding (kheer) from street vendors, get a chai and sit and read for an hour (I finished something like 7 Dresden Files books in a month).
At this point in our trip, especially the last few days in Delhi, Lindsay and I were honestly just getting pretty pumped to get on an airplane and fly to a new country. Our plan, because I’m not sure we have really posted it here yet, was/is to fly to Korea to see Phill and enjoy Korea for two weeks and move on from there. So, with a new (and happily colder!) country on the horizon near the end it mainly felt like we were passing time until our departure. Lindsay was quite sick one day and for this reason we spent nearly an entire day (except fro the occasional trip out to eat something or buy a “snack”) watching western movies on tv, which was awesome. We also watched Bang Bang! which was a pretty OKishsortofmaybenotreally Bollywood movie.
Eventually our time came, and we flew out of Delhi to Korea.
Varanasi, also known as Benares, is somewhat of a dream. We were told to brace ourselves as we entered one of the most colorful and intense experiences in India – and we were told right. Varanasi is unapologetically chaotic and crazy at every turn, but among the endless cow and dog feces, strings and strings of vendors selling prayer beads and incense holders, holy men walking with their Shiva staffs and long beards, poor children begging for extra rupees or trying to adorn you with sandalwood for “free”, I think we can safely say this is truly the Indian experience we had been waiting for.
Varanasi is one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities, and is one where pilgrims swarm to the Holy Ganges to wash away their sin or cremate their loved ones. It’s an especially sought-after place to die, as dying here is thought to allow for the liberation from the cycle of birth and death according to Hindu culture.
Yesterday, Kev and I watched body after body being brought through the windy streets ((called galis) which are far too narrow for traffic, but just wide enough for hundreds of cows, scooters, and every other imaginable thing) on bamboo stretchers hour after hour on their way to Manikarnika, the city’s largest burning ghat. At the ghat, we watched for hours as more than 7 bodies were dunked into the Ganges for their final cleansing, and then lit on fire surrounded by their loved ones while listening to the relentless DONG of Shiva’s temple next door. It was magical, and surreal and overall, quite an amazing experience. Watching such an intimate experience – right out in the open – has had somewhat of a strange effect on me. It is overwhelmingly powerful to witness such a thing, and was something I feel especially honored to have seen.
Yesterday morning, we got up at 4 am for a sunrise river ride on the Ganges. There we watched again as hundreds of people bathed themselves in the sludge that is the Ganges, swiping away the tangible grime on the water’s top layer to get to the green-brown water underneath. Others meditated, or chanted spiritual songs along the banks. Cremation continues 24 hours a day, on average burning 200 individuals per day. We learned that unless you are a pregnant woman, child, holy man or a pet, you are cremated, otherwise, you are brought to the center of the river, tied to a rock, and sunk. A few photos down, you will see a water buffalo having seen the same fate.
I’m not sure i have the words to describe what an insane, again – chaotic – experience Varanasi is, but damn, if it’s not something worth seeing.
There are endless other things to remember, but I’ll bullet a few for our memory later on:
After leaving the Ashram, Lindsay and I went back up to Cochi (aka Kochi aka Cochin). We really wanted to get to Darjeeling, but Darjeeling is way in the North of India and it was going to take 50-60 hours (straight) via train to get there, so we opted for a flight.
Cochi itself is actually a pretty nice city. We ended up spending two nights there, and in that time we went to a fancy mall (Lulu) where I bought a shirt at Wildcraft (India’s version of REI?), we went to the nicest super market yet and tried some different foods (mainly deserts), we watch some traditional fishing (giant nets one a crane type device that four people lift out of the water), we had some great food, and we generally just hung out and walked around. It was nice to go to a slightly slower paced place. We walked around the night market also, which again was slower paced and felt friendly. Our first Indian park/night market/thing as well. Nothing too crazy, all of these things I’m mainly mentioning for my own memory.
Anyway, then we had a flight. Our flight was a mix of good and not ideal. We had three separate flights actually, and then an 18 hour layover! The flights were 1 hour, 2 hours, and 1 hour. So, 4 hours in the air, saving us roughly 4 days on a train or in a train station. We flew with Air India, and were served food on each flight. Which was awesome actually. After our first two flights, we ended up in the rather nice (not as nice as major US airports, but still nice) Kalkata airport around 6pm. Sadly, the way the flights work you end up outside of the security checkpoints. And with an 18 hour layover, that sucks. They wouldn’t let us back into the main airport (even the main lobby, they have guards with guns at the doors to the airport and require you show them your boarding pass before you get in. Basically, it’s a bit difficult to explain, but spend the first 2 or 3 hours sitting in uncomfortable chairs in this strange limbo part of the airport that was cut off from the main entrance (where you’d check in, etc) as well as the security cleared/gate area.
I’m rambling a bit. Basically, we eventually talked our way into the main check in area of the airport, where we could at least get some dinner. Then we found some chairs, and we tried to go to sleep in the bright/surprising cold airport. My back hurt very bad, and I think I got the most sleep at around 5 hours. Lindsay had around 2 or 3 hours of sleep. A highlight of the night: it’s common here for men to hold hands, lock arms while walking, put their arms around each other, etc. Men in camo with AK47s are no exception, and it was interesting to wake up in the middle of the night because two army guys with loaded guns were walking by hand in hand.
In the morning, around 6am when I wasn’t able to sleep again, I went to check us in. Turns out, our flight was cancelled until the next day! Luckily (VERY, i would have cried I think) they put us on a different flight (Jet Air or something similar), actually a few hours earlier which worked out really really well.
Eventually, we arrived in the city of Bagdogra (which is really difficult for me to pronounce correctly, btw). Like all of our India travel experiences so far, Bagdogra SEEMS like it should be a quick 30 minute drive from Darjeeling (our actual destination), but it ended up being an hour long taxi ride (for 10 bucks, which is a lot for our current standards), followed by a 4 hour process of locating a shared jeep, then waiting in the shared jeep for an hour for enough other passengers to buy a seat so we could leave, followed by a 3 hour trip (76km!) up a mountain to Darjeeling! That included an unscheduled 20 minute stop for the driver to get lunch.
But here is the real point of this post: The drive up the mountain (hill?) was amazing. It’s honestly near impossible to describe, but basically narrow, terrifying roads, at a steep incline, for 2.5 hours, most of the way through mist/fog, making the whole experience quite magical. Any amount of beauty/magic/steep lush green/colorful houses on cliffs/something from a movie/etc that you can imagine is likely not enough to do the experience justice.
Also, it got cooler and cooler as we ascended. When we arrived in Darjeeling, which for our purposes is a series of winding, dirty, but nice streets running parallel, connected in various places by series of nearly hidden steps winding through various strange allies/houses. It’s a bit difficult to describe honestly, because whatever you might imagine is likely not quite right because I’ve never seen something like this before. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get decent enough internet to upload some photos, but we’ll see. The buildings/roads/etc are just so amazing. Everything is super tight together, and walkways/paths between “major” streets are stairs/dirt paths/etc that are sort of just jammed wherever they could fit.
Anyway, when we arrived we first went to a guest house whose name I don’t exactly remember (“Sai N…..something”). Like most guest houses/hotels we’ve been to, they are generally not super clean, but OK. But, when you walked into this little dark/damp/dank/dirty room, you had a window that you could open, and when you looked out you basically just saw the edge of a cliff with mist surrounding you. When the mist leaves, you can see mountains in the distance, and to either side/below (down the steep cliffs) you see colorful houses, moss, tea plantations, green. Something like in a movie, that seems to awesome to be real.
I have enjoyed imagining on foggy/cloudy days, when you can’t see below the edge of a cliff where I might be drinking tea with Lindsay, that we are on a floating island up in the sky. It’s very very easy to do.
(Lindsay and I agree that this is our dream house, the one with the dude doing something with the roof. We’d like the top two floors, and we’d like it in the same location except closer to home.)
And, there is Tasty Hasty! Tasty Hasty is, so far in India, my favorite place I’ve eaten, with my favorite foods. In particular, every time I go there I got either the North Indian Thali, or the “Special” Thali. A Thali, btw, is basically a small amount of a wide variety of different curries/sauces/”curd” (yogurt)/etc, and includes rice and chapati (chapati being more common than naan, so far, in our experience). Anyway, it’s amazing, and it costs 1.50, and is enough for Lindsay and I to share. But, we also get other stuff to try/experiment. Tonight for instance, we got a paneer (cheese) dosa, which is sort of like a GIANT crepe that is fried crispy on one side, then rolled into a loose tube with a filling. And also we got another thing, whose name I forget, but is basically like a super puffed up elephant ear (looks sort of like a pita pocket that has been filled with air, except is made with a fried dough instead). This place is amazing, and the people that work there are awesome, and we get TONS of amazing food (and we eat it all!) and never spend more then 5 bucks. We could easily get more then enough food for 2.50, but again we try lots of different things.
Other highlights from Darjeeling so far:
So, for now, that’s sort of an idea of what’s going on. I actually went to bed before this paragraph, and now I’m back up and awake on this paragraph, but I don’t remember exactly what I was rambling about. So.
I guess I’ll say that today, I took a shower with our hot water heater, which was amazing. It took roughly 30 minutes for the water to heat up, but once it did! My hair feels clean for the first time in a long time, because although I’ve been taking showers, they’ve all been cold showers which just doesn’t seem to do as good of a job.
Hello to Infield Design if anybody reads this. I miss you guys! I’m actually waiting at this very moment for a new vagrant box to start up – I miss programming and am going to install Magento and see if I have any free time in the next few days to do some old fashioned programming. Or maybe I’ll just browse the default store. One problem I’m facing currently is only half of our 12.5″ screen on the laptop is working. So I have to resize all windows to be half of the screen. This has been annoying, to say the least. On the bright side, it lets me see the responsive versions of most webpages, which is nice (not really).
I’m asking Lindsay after I type this sentence what we should do now, and will write her answer here:
“I’m going to email my parents and tell them where we are, then we can do anything. What time is it? (I told her 10:30am) I’d like to get some tea maybe. (I mention that we need to get our laundry) We could go check out the tiger hill thing, and we need to make copies of our passport for the train.”
So, that’s our current plan. The passport copy thing is because we weren’t able to reserve a train from NJP (the nearest train station) to Varanasi (our next destination) when we went to do this, and have to come at 6am tomorrow (this sounds like hell to me, btw) and wait for 4 hours in a line to get a “last minute” ticket for the next day, which for whatever reason requires a passport. I think because they save a certain number of tickets for last minute tourist purchases perhaps (??) and the passport is to prove that we are in fact tourists.
I’m not sure if I mentioned this above yet, but Darjeeling is amazing and we are incredibly happy here, and feeling very lucky. It is a place that I would recommend anybody come if you have the time to get here. I’m looking outside (now morning) from where I sit, for the first time, and I see mist and fog and interesting buildings and it’s pretty great and magical.
Love and miss you all!
p.s. I’ve uploaded a few photos, the internet is pretty slow despite having actual wifi, and I’m just going to sort of put the images randomly throughout this post as best as I can… sorry if they lack context!
A lot has happened since the last blog post. For one thing, we left Hampi and traveled to Kerala, which is a state in the South of India. Oh, and we went to Bangalore en route to Kerala.
Bangalore, because to get to Kerala, we had to take two separate trains from Hampi. Both of the trains were ~9ish hours, and both were at night. It was a somewhat long few days and we felt very dirty. That said, if I were to be honest, I’d have to say that the trip wasn’t bad, and although I’m happy we don’t have any super grueling travel (well, an 18 hour layover is coming up!) anytime in the near future, I think I’ll look back one day fondly on the trip.
The first leg brought us from Hampi -> Bangalore. We took a “sleeper class” (SL) train, which is a second class train. What that means, basically, is that we share a train car with a bunch of other people, there is no air conditioning, and there are quite a few beds crammed in a relatively small space. Well, 8ish. Which doesn’t mean much I guess, without a picture (which I can’t post, as I’m currently using a VERY slow GSM cell modem to use the internet). Anyway, the train seats are not super comfortable, and it’s hot, and there are lots of people around, and kids crying and people talking and plenty of men snoring on top/below.
The worst part, at least for me, about this train travel is that it’s hard to get a good night sleep because it’s not easy to know when you are supposed to get off the train. For example, the last two trains we were on were scheduled to arrive at 6:10am and 4:30am. And on one hand, it’s super clear when you are stopping because you can hear the trains brakes come on, and the train slows down, BUT the trains make a ton of stops through the entire night, so unless you want to be up every 30-60 minutes, you need a better way of figuring out when the train will be at your stop. Now, after the past several weeks and a relatively large number of train trips, I can say that so far I’ve been very impressed to find that the trains are generally quite timely. So, our train that was supposed to arrive at our stop at 4:30am, did in fact arrive at +/- 5 minutes of that time. Though, we ended up realizing that we booked to the wrong train station, around 4:35am, and had to scramble to find somebody to talk with and find out if we could stay on and what would happen if we stayed on, etc. It ended up actually working out pretty well, and we stayed on until 5:20am or so and got off at the proper stop.
Anyway, whatever. The point here is that the train rides were long and we didn’t sleep super well, and we certainly didn’t shower or change our clothes, etc, in 2+ FULL days, and we did certainly sweat plenty. But, again, in reality the train trip(s) were pretty uneventful and successful, and I actually slept (when I slept) better on the train then (than?) I had the previous several weeks as I’m finally getting over my stomach thing and my cold/congestion.
Bangalore, where we had a 10 or so hour layover was quite nice. We heard from some people that it was pretty crazy/hectic, and I’m sure in places it was, but we realized we would be tired when we arrived so we ended up (and I realize this sounds weak!) looking on the internet for a mall with a food court (which we didn’t end up finding exactly) and we took a taxi directly from the train station to this generally more Western area of Bangalore. And there we hung out for a number of hours, reading, drinking a coffee, we even ate a pizza at Pizza Hut (though it was not EXACTLY a Western style Pizza Hut, the pizza we had was pretty good). Basically we just relaxed and didn’t do much, but we did get to do some people watching which was nice. There were a number of colleges and high schools near where we parked ourselves for the day, so watching kids come and go was pretty fun. Or interesting, etc.
Then we took our second train and arrived in Allepey, Kerala. Allepey was/is/seemed great when we first arrived. It is (I think?) called the Venice of India, which is a bit misleading (and possibly not even true, I might be making that up, or maybe I just saw a hotel that was called the Venice and made the fact up myself, not sure) because it doesn’t really look like Venice, but there are waterways running all over the place.
One of our big India Bucket List items was to rent a houseboat in Kerala, and that’s one of the big things to do in Allepey, and that’s what we did! We didn’t feel super into bargaining, and our guesthouse that we stayed at rented houseboats and we liked the people there, so we just rented through them. FYI, we paid ~6000 rs for the houseboat for one night, which is, roughly, $100. Which is the most we paid for anything since being in India, but we believe worth it. We could have probably paid less if we walked around and bartered a bit, but as I mentioned we didn’t feel much up to it.
So, we rented this houseboat. Which was pretty crazy really. I’ll post photos soon, but basically it’s a thatched roof houseboat, with a staff of THREE people on it. THREE people to cook, drive the boat, control the motor speed (which the person driving doesn’t control on this boat… There is a buzzer the dude driving rings to notify the person controlling the motor to speed up/slow down. One buzz == slow down or stop, three+ buzzes means speed up. I don’t know what two buzzes means, maybe the dude never buzzes three times.) We had a “welcome drink”, fresh hand squeezed lemon/lime juice with ginger. And we had no less than three spectacular meals, each consisting of three different curries, plus rice and chappati (which is like a thick flour/wheat tortilla sort of).
I think I really need to post pictures to do this experience justice, but we basically sat on chairs on the deck of this houseboat for 24 hours and read and talked and played a game of cribbage and just looked out at the people who live along this river fishing, taking baths, washing clothing, moving building supplies around in loads insanely large for the little canoes they had, etc.
Fake edit:
View down the river:
Terrible creature:
Fearless captain:
Dinner:
After getting off the boat, we tipped the crew (200 rs each, which was a good tip considering we didn’t barter… Around 3 bucks each), and took a tuktuk to the bus station. There, we met a very nice lady who helped us get on a bus that went from Allepey towards the direction of the Ashram we were headed to.
Something got lost in translation, but luckily we met (as always!) more nice people on the bus who had us get off on a stop different from the one recommended to us, but it ended up being perfect. From there, wherever that was, because I don’t know, we got another tuktuk and took it to the Ashram!
First thing to say about the Ashram is that sadly, no photos were allowed anywhere within the Ashram. That even included our rooms, technically. I actually really really appreciated this to be honest as you had a lot fewer people standing around taking photos of people and a lot more people just experiencing things first hand. Basically though, no photos, other then those that I find on the internet, and considering the internet is really terrible and viewing images is near impossible, I wouldn’t get too excited.
But, the Ashram. First, an Ashram, as I understand it, is basically a community of people trying to lead a spiritual life. Anyway, the Ashram we went to was the home of a Guru (yes, a guru) named Amma. I guess Amma is a diety, technically, or a saint, or something similar. Basically she is a person that is quite spiritual and important, etc. It’s a bit difficult to describe just how big of a deal she is, but at this particular Ashram there are 3000 people living, and the Ashram, and Amma, have outreach programs all over the world. We watched an orientation video and she is pictured with with former president Clinton, various TV news personalities, various UN people, etc. So she is a somewhat important person in the global sense, but much more so to the people who stay at these Ashrams or otherwise follow her teachings in the capacity of students/followers/worshipers/whatevererererers.
One of the things that Amma is particularly known for is her darshan, a word that means (according to google’s dictionary it sources), “an opportunity or occasion of seeing a holy person or the image of a deity.” Anyway, basically, Amma hosts these things called “darshan days”, in which she basically sits on a somewhat uncomfortable looking mat (sp?) and hugs people, all day long. Now look, this shit is crazy. I say that because, as a non-spiritual person, I’d have to see this to have believed it, but one day, Saturday, Lindsay and I woke up and go downstairs out of our room around 10am. Amma was on stage, hugging people. She sat there, in that same place, all day long, until after we went to bed (around 11:30pm), hugging people. I didn’t see her move once. I saw her drink some water once, and maybe eat something, WHILE STILL HUGGING PEOPLE, LITERALLY WHILE HUGGING PEOPLE.
And guess what everybody. Guess what. GUESS. NOW. GUESS NOW! Give up? OK, here it is: Lindsay and I both received Amma’s embrace. That’s right, me, a skinny white man from Michigan, received the embrace of Amma, my new guru. I say “my new guru” although what I really mean is “I’m not really in the market for a spiritual guru, but I may never have the opportunity to say that I have a guru again in my life, so I might as well capitalize on it because it sounds quite strange to me and I find it entertaining.” But although I’m somewhat flippant about the whole guru/spiritual/etc thing, I really must say that this Amma character at least was quite impressive to see and I must give her some genuine respect for sitting in one spot all day and hugging sweaty, often times crying people.
My own (and Lindsay’s, to a large extent, at least as far as practical matters go) experience went something like this: First, Saturday morning around 11am Lindsay and I got “tokens” (which is the way Indians, and maybe folks in the UK in general (?) say “number for your place in line) that we could use at an allotted time later in the night. We were told around 8 or 9pm. Then, we went about our day (more on that later). Then, around 9:30pm, a notice board (basically a spiral bound poster board that was flipped over to show which numbers were up) told us it was our time. So, Lindsay went to one side of this giant auditorium (the womans side), and I went to the other (mens side!). Then we sat in chairs, and waited for another hour or so, moving one chair at a time. We made our way along the side of this auditorium, then we finally were allowed to an area that was on the actual stage where Amma sits where there was another line. There were probably 30 chairs in my area, and we moved one at a time. Lindsay was on a similar line, on the other side of the stage.
The stage itself is full of people sitting on the ground around Amma, meditating or praying or reading or otherwise doing spiritual things. There are spices and things being burned around, and perhaps most importantly nearby there is a group of musicians playing very religious hindu music, chanting, etc. Picture something from a movie or something where something spiritual is happening in a hindu temple, it was like that, quite loud and generally pleasing and very much inline with the general mood.
So finally, it was my turn to go next. I got down on my knee, where various handlers (there are like 10 people crowded around Amma just making sure things go smoothly. People bring gifts and Amma doesn’t have time for gifts, so people are there to take gifts, people are there to literally take your head and put it on Amma’s shoulder, people are there to talk with Amma about varoius things while she is hugging, etc) physically pushed me forward when Amma was ready to give me the ol’ embrace. Then, she did it. She embraced me. And while embracing me, she chanted in my ear something like “muduri muduri muduri” which I think means “peace peace peace” or something. Oh, also everybody get’s a piece of Amma candy! Lots of people bring things up for Amma to bless (another big thing is to buy a necklace and have Amma put it on your), but I didn’t do that. Amma smelled nice too, because she had one assistant whose job seemed to be to spread essential oils on Amma. Anyway, it was a pretty cool experience, and again while I’m not super into the spiritual part of it, it was none the less a somewhat spiritual-ish experience and something I’m very happy to have done.
Here is the candy we got, which was wrapped in the paper you can see below:
But! I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. The ashram itself was probably my favorite part, for the following reasons:
When you walk into the Ashram, it feels like (and is) a small walled town. There are ~3000 people that stay at the Ashram, including around 1k students, 1k families, and 1k others that stay for various lengths of time (anywhere from a day to a year+). A lot of the visitors are foreign, and there are a lot of domestic Indian visitors as well staying at the ashram.
The thing is incredibly well run and that was one of the themes throughout. When you first walk in you see “International Accommodation Check In”, “Linen Rental”, “Tea, Chai, Milk, Ice Cream”, “Western Canteen”, “Indian Canteen”, etc. Basically everything you could want. Oh, and free (though not particularly exciting) Indian food if you wanted! You didn’t have to buy food, if you didn’t want. There were also various stores to buy things like essential oils and organic foods (no joke), there was an ecology center where you could rent books and watch free movies (Lindsay and I went and watched a movie on the Saint Francis of Assisi, and while watching this terrible movie I read a book about the healing power of water, orbs, and how angels can heal our shakras and bring us to the 5th dimension), etc.
Although I’m sure there is paid staff, most everything I saw was run by volunteers. There is this concept of “seva”, which is basically as far as I can tell volunteering. So if you stay at the Ashram for more then a day, you are supposed to register at the “Seva Office” (again, another well organized office run by volunteers, all western/english speaking) where you can sign up for various jobs that generally require 1-2 hours of work per day. Not bad. A way to meet people and fill your day with something slightly productive. Sadly, we only stayed for 3 days and didn’t end up doing any seva. Maybe next time.
The food as I mentioned was great. The free Indian food we ate on the first day, but the second day we went to the “Western Canteen” and paid a bit of money for amazing western-ish food. Stuff like sesame and carob (sp?) raw bars, and a beet salad. It wasn’t CRAZY fancy or anything, it’s all very much down to earth food, but great tasting.
As in many places in India, the cups/silverware are all stainless steel (or something similar), and you washed your own dishes as well as dried them. For the Indian food (which you ate with your hands, unless you bought a spoon, which Lindsay and I did) you got a plate/bowl thing, washed it, got your food from a line, ate your food with your hand, then wash the plate and put it back in this giant container. A super well run, sort of cool system.
So, the food was great. During the first day, we walked down to the beach with a bunch of people, where we meditated with a bunch of people (I mainly just tried to hold my breath as long as I could, which was hard because I kept coughing), which was pretty cool, Amma was there also to answer questions in a Q&A session. Then we went back to this giant building where everybody sat and listened to music that people sand about hindu related stuff for 2 hours, then we went to bed.
Here is the view from our room (10th floor – we took this one photo, plus the photo of the candy)
For anybody who has had the chance to go to Harvest Festival in Michigan (and I’m guessing at least a few people reading this have), the vibe at the Ashram was very similar – volunteer work, lots of friendly people, etc. Except no drinking as it’s banned in the entire state.
Here are a few videos of Amma and all of the Amma related stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lwTAYeyv9U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHS89vH-pFs
No photos of the chaos that was Mumbai (thankfully Delhi is still a few more weeks away :)) But here is some of the beauty located not too far away….
Tamarind and palm trees and monkeys galore: Elephanta Island off the Mumbai Coast.
Kev reading up on the symbolism behind the cave carvings.
Shiva.
This was pretty funny though.
Kev, Oli and Eden (new friends) in temple.
On the way back to Mumbai, you will see the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel (oddly (or maybe not so odd? This is India after all…), located only 21 hours away from the Taj….)
First legit Indian Meal: Paneer Masala, Rice and hella naan and chapati.
For a grand total of: 218 rupees ($3.58)
Sunset at Chowpatty.
After Mumbai, we took the train down to Goa. It was pretty awesome.
A Sleeper 1st AC car (probably the only time in our life that happens) which pretty much meant for 13 hours, I got to sleep (ya’ll know how I like to sleep in mobiles!) wake, drink chai. Rinse and Repeat. Again, pretty awesome.
Like you would expect? Some of this for sure, but also a lot of beauty.
And then. We got to Goa.
Full disclosure: No one swims on the beach. Especially not women. So fully clothed, in the scorching hot sun (thankfully this day, under an umbrella) this is what we did. Therefore, we did not swim in the Arabian Sea.
I also found a new favorite drink: Salty lime soda. So that was pretty nifty.
Besides drinking beer and lime soda – we looked for rocks…ans shells…and crabs….
Goa has a huge Portuguese influence – behold the Virgin Mother all blinged out -Indian style.
Mini Thali Dinner.
Due to the heat, we really didn’t have a huge desire to eat – BUT! We found this AMAZING street food cart that had THIS! Dahi Aloo Puri, I believe. If ONLY you could taste the Ratatouille happenin’ with each bite…Yowza!
This morning, we packed up shop, and were on the move again to HAMPI! 
Today, no AC. cramped seating, Indian families and kids sharing apples and snacks with us, and broken conversations in English trying to alert us of breathtaking views ahead. Vendors and noise and vendors and noise, BUT! Cruising up and down the isles for 8 hours straight I’ve come to learn probably my favorite Indian phrase thus far: Garam Chai! Garam Chai! (hot tea! hot tea!) It was the perfect way to go.
And so you have it. Today, we landed (once again) in Hampi – Which I truly believe might be our own personal bit of heaven. Quiet, dirt roads, smiles and questions galore and awesome ancient ruins (from the 3rd century BC – WHHHHAT?!?) to be explored tomorrow (did I mention the quiet?) Currently listening to the monsoonin’ rain smacking on tin panels outside and embracing the rickety fan’s love, snuggled up under the mosquito net as I write to you. Life is good. We’re doin’ this thing.
In the past, when traveling to a new place, Kev and I have splurged and opted for the extra fancy amenities. Now, mind you, besides a bed with (what we’re hoping are relatively) clean sheets, and a private toilet of some kind (you never know just how handy that might be!), every living situation we have truly ever stayed at is meager at best. BUT when we just arrive somewhere, we might opt for a room with A/C – just to get acclimated, you know?
Well, our arrival here was no different. We chose to go all-out, and with our rickety double bed, “clean” sheets and private bathroom, we went for the A/C. Great choice. Upon arriving in Mumbai at almost 11 pm it was 84 degrees. We’d be happy to have it.
After a rough night of sleep our first night due to myriad issues (incessant honking outside, torrential downpour thanks to the lovely monsoon season, dogs barking, overall jetlag, and various unfamiliar noises, we also had to struggle with our unbelievably loud air conditioner unit. When turned on, old man A/C was noticeably agitated having to work so hard to cool our tiny sweat-inducing room. Grumbling, moaning – coughing with frustration, hour after hour he bitched and moaned about being needed.
Yesterday turned out to be a pretty rough day on the streets as well for us. After waking up close to 1 pm, we finally ventured outside to exactly what we knew to expect, and worse. A simple task of finding me a suitable outfit to wear (after finding a place online just minutes from our guesthouse, securing GPS coordinates, and feeling fairly confident that we could find our destination just .1 miles away) took over 2 hours, with nothing to show for it. A trip to check out the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminu train station to learn how to purchase tickets to get South turned in to a comical 3-hour scavenger hunt to find various individuals responsible for the acquisition and approval of various applications by various people which were needed AFTER the purchase of our (quite expensive!) tickets (that we weren’t ready to even purchase).
“Please, sir. Yes, yes. Just go there and find Department Manager of Operations at the end of platform 1, CCM Building 2nd floor….yes, yes. You will find him.”
*On second floor at the end of platform 1…*
Us: “Namaste. CCM Building?”
“Oh no, sir. Not here. CCM building on 2nd floor! (then motions outside, beneath us and down the street) In ancient building. You will see.”
seriously?
—
“You need to submit application for coupe.”
Us: “What type of application? We don’t have an application?”
*rips off giant hunk of random scrap paper*
“This is your application, sir. Write these things and give application in box. Does not need to be formal…”
guess not!
3 hours of this craziness and more. This, along with cows, limping dogs, scrawls of families, bright colors, dim lights, blaring Bollywood music, dirt, garbage and monsoon rains in open air train terminal. On some level, all stuff we have seen traveling before – but yet so. so. different.
6,000 questions later, 300 wrong places visited, and our application finally submitted – we left on the verge of tears coupled with crazed, maniacal laughter. It was exhausting and frustrating and hilarious at the same time. Again, exactly as we expected, yet worse.
Needless to say, I was really looking forward to getting back and having a rock-solid night of sleep. If there’s anything I know about myself, sleep is paramount to a successful day for me. So we crawl into bed and within minutes, I’m wiping off the slime that has accrued all over my face. With old man A/C turned on, we attempt to ignore his grumbles without avail. On and off. Off and on. Beady sweat, face slime, on. Grumble, grumble BITCH, off. All. night. long.
So, now, here I am, awake – writing and reflecting on our last 24 hours at 6 am, when sleep is what I want most. Old man A/C, you win. I suppose though, this has given me a chance to nail down more specifics about our day…
On the docket today are the following tasks:
1) Purchase salwaar kameez to wear
2) Check out Fort (our current “neighborhood) and visit Eros theatre to watch Bollywood film with new friends
3) Head to Girgaum Chowpatty to watch sunset, and witness dunking of Lord Ganesh idols into Arabian Sea to end Ganesh’s Birthday celebration
Sounds feasible (and pretty fun), right?
Here’s to another (in the words of our new British friends) MENTAL day!
Last night we started our India trip. In short, the travel went about as smoothly as we could hope. We traveled with Swiss Air, and went Chicago -> Zurich -> Mumbai. We didn’t have any brutal layovers, no delays, no baggage problems. The food was pretty good on the flights (we had FOUR meals).
I managed to stay up most of the time, Lindsay slept a decent chunk. My hope (and I had thought I had succeeded) was that I’d avoid most of the jet lag if I was just really tired when I arrived.
When we got to Mumbai, we could right away feel the heat and humidity. Normally when you walk into an airport you automatically feel the cool, crisp, sterile and filtered air and I love that feeling. In Mumbai, we both swear you could smell spices. The air while cooler, felt humid and perhaps a bit dank. And the walls were all wooden panels and the floor was I’d say an Indian print. Basically, coming into the airport it already felt like we were in a different place.
I had read that there were prepaid taxi stands at the International Airport, and more specifically told that there were two sets of taxi stands. One taxi stand was run by private companies (generally more expensive), and one set was run by the government. Of course neither is clearly marked as such, and we were told originally that the non-government taxi stand was the government taxi stand. Pretty standard stuff I’d say. We had an idea of what to look for though, so we ended up going outside and asking a security guard who pointed us in the wrong feeling, but actually right direction.
580 rupees was the cost, and that got us a ~1 hour taxi ride South to Fort, which is an area within Mumbai.
And here is the crux of this blog post: driving through Mumbai at night after being very tired and having not really been around such a place in a while was a crazy, crazy experience. Much of this we’ve experienced before, such as the multiple near-death experiences we had. But, it’s difficult to explain just how insane things seemed. Men, primarily, everywhere on the sides of the streets standing around chatting. Piles of garbage (and when I say piles, I mean hills), complete with large sleeping cows and foraging wild dog. What appeared to be multiple (10? 20?) carnival type lighting situations (think bright, blinking, festive looking christmas lights) that I think may have been temple/shrines. Honestly, it’s just really difficult to explain. But, to be honest and not totally positive, I think both Lindsay and I were overwhelmed. Are over whelmed.
Our plan was to stay in Mumbai for two days then head off somewhere else, but when we were driving I said to Lindsay, “I think we might need a few more then two days to acclimate.” One thing that I think we’ll have to get comfortable with is the lack of females. There were by FAR more guys out last night walking around, and very few females. I want to make sure we’re safe, so it might be just that at night we don’t go out as much, at least not until we get a better feel for what’s safe, what’s not safe, etc.
After we got to our hotel/guest house (expensive, though relatively cheap for Mumbai I’m told, at ~30 bucks a night) we took showers, and went to bed. Somehow, I fell right asleep, but then woke up at 4:25am and couldn’t get back to sleep until almost 6am. This was, literally and figuratively, a dark time for me. Feeling both hot and cold (we have AC in this room which is incredibly loud), and wishing I was under a “real” blanket (as apposed to my silk sheet bed liner), thinking about the chaos that is just outside my door, and the fact that in the morning I was going to have to go back outside and face all of that. I knew that in the morning with some rest I’d feel better and more positive, but at 5 am that didn’t matter much.
But, sure enough, this morning I feel better. It was very nice to be able to talk with Lindsay. I’m very happy to be traveling with her. Full disclosure: I have yet to leave the room yet and it’s almost 2pm! We ended up sleeping in until 12:30, then took some time to organize our packs, get our money situated, and now Lindsay is reading up on Mumbai while I type this up.
By the way, Happy Birthday Brittany!
OK, off for now, time to start the first day in India.
p.s. The reason I Sai this is different than Bangkok, is because I don’t remember feeling like there was just SO MUCH “stuff” everywhere in Bangkok. It felt a bit more like a “normal” city when we arrived, the driving aside.
Well, blogging while in Canada proved more difficult then I had expected. Mainly because of a lack of power, the fact that it’s not super easy to drive and type, and the fact that we were nearly always moving somewhere. So now I’m home, short on time as our India adventure is about to begin, and looking back.
So, in the interest of time, I’m going to post a few photos that will generally give an idea of what the rest of our trip looked like.
First, Lake Louise/Banff/Jasper.
We really liked Banff. It was, for us, more enjoyable then Yosemite. The water was all very beautiful, though not super practical as far as swimming went as it was pretty cold (glacier runoff) and mineral rich and so not great visibility. But awesome. The actual town/city of Banff was pretty awesome as well.
Here’s a video of some of the non-glacial water:
And here is a video of glacial water:
Lindsay at Lake Louise
We went to a hot spring pool in Banff (the Upper Springs). This was awesome, although I’m guessing the water was about 1% spring water, 99% tap water. Still very nice.
The campground itself we stayed at in Banff was a very nice national park. Of interest was the fact that our campground was completely enclosed by a electric fence to keep the animals from eating us.
So, after Banff the plan was to head to Calgary and check out the city. After arriving, we realized that Calgary, while nice enough, didn’t really have a huge draw for us personally. We decided to move on, but wanted to see at least one “touristy” thing before we left.. We saw the Calgary Stampede from the outside, and then we read in our guidebook that there was a “bazar” with lots of interesting shops and coffee. Coffee sounded pretty good, so we opted to check this out. It was a crappy strip mall, it turns out. Thankfully, I had refused to pay the ridiculous parking meter so stopping into this place didn’t cost anything, but still we were not impressed.
After leaving Calgary we ran into something that we knew we’d hit: flat wheat fields for ~1000 miles.
Honestly, we knew that we were going to have flat land because everybody and everything we read said as much, but it really was crazy. Almost flat roads, for days of driving. We camped along the way and ran into some of the worst mosquitos either of us had ever experienced.
One night, near Regina, Saskatchewan Lindsay and I decided we wanted a short break from driving and to eat dinner at a sit down sort of (cheap) restaurant. We drove forever, looking for SOMETHING that was open that wasn’t fast food. We ended up sitting down at a place, looking at the menu and realizing that the food, even at a small hole in the wall crappy sort of place was super expensive (for our budget at least). This isn’t a very exciting story, but it was one of the most frustrating things that happened on the trip. We wanted so bad to eat, to stop driving, etc.
During this boring part of the drive, while I was driving, Lindsay often played The New Super Mario World
We stopped, for some reason, in this beauty of a town: Grenfell.
Eventually we made our way to Ontario.
First, we bought some smoked fish near Lake Superior:
Video of Sai eating some great smoked fish
Then, we camped for a night at Lake Superior Provincial Park, which was awesome awesome. Probably one of our favorite places actually that we camped. We managed to catch a sunset which was awesome, and I was quite excited about swimming in Lake Superior…. On the down side, in the morning, just as I was coming back from taking a “shower” in the lake, Lindsay said, “well I think Sai has ringworm.” We looked at Sai’s stomach, and it sure LOOKED like ringworm, so we packed up camp and headed for the/a city.
To be continued/finished…
Well, we’ve done it. We are on the road. Currently writing this blog post from my cousin Alicia’s kitchen table [edit: this isn’t actually correct any more, but I wanted to finish this post and post it for historical purposes anyway – we’re now in Sault Saint Marie].
The past few days were a bit of a whirlwind, although that’s a bit of a cliche. I think. Honestly, maybe it’s not, I don’t know.
Let’s call it a whirlwind. Basically, I worked up until Monday, June 30, and cleaned and packed. And when I wasn’t doing that, I was saying goodbye to great friends/people. The weekend before we left we painted the walls in apartment, fixed holes, replaced blinds, etc. Frankly the entire process was a little frustrating as we moved into our apartment taking over somebody else’s lease and the apartment was never cleaned or painted originally. Much of the paint on the wall was pealing, not because of our use or misuse, but just because the paint had been applied poorly some 4+ years ago. One night we were up until around 1 am painting walls. It got to the point where we literally DUMPED paint from the bucket onto flat surfaces (like our lofted bed) and rolled it smooth. And I replaced two different sets of blinds, which, let me tell you, was a pain in the ass. In the future, at least in my own house, I’ll buy the $15-$20 blinds instead of the $5-$7 blinds as they are about 5x more difficult to hang.
Anyway, we packed our car. The car packing has been a bit of a touchy issue between Lindsay and me. In short, I wanted to have lots of room in the car so we didn’t feel like we were totally crammed in, Lindsay wanted to save money by getting more stuff in the car. We had more arguments then I’d care to admit about the car, over a greater period of time then I’d like to admit, but in the end we got everything fitting. We basically have the car packing down to a science, and at least the camping stuff we need on a daily basis (tent, sleeping stuff, cooking equipment, and food) is easily accessible.
I’m going a bit out of order here (it’s been really tough to sit down and write anything!), but basically after work on Monday we had one last night in Oakland. We had a sushi dinner at Ichiro, our favorite local sushi restaurant, and spent a few last hours cleaning and doing a check out with Dan, the manager at our apartment. Then we went to bed. The next morning we hit the road.
Not that interesting, but I have to say that at no point during all of this did I feel particularly emotional. Which is sort of sad really, because generally I’m a very emotional guy. I think the sad truth is I had SOO much going on in my head, so many little stresses (health insurance while traveling, figuring out what to do with our mattress before we left, money, canceling various things, etc, etc). I regret not having had the chance to “mourn” the loss of our life in Oakland. Since leaving, I’ve felt a bit of sadness from time to time, but I think that might just be the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Oakland was such an amazing place, and I have so many amazing memories. I still can’t think of a better place to live.
Anyway, the first place we stopped on our road trip was Portland, Oregon to visit my family (Aunt Kim, Alicia, Justin, Jack, Charlie, Andrew, and Malia). We spent two and a half, three-ish days there and had an awesome time. My cousins (though I hope one day I might be called Uncle Kev) Jack and Charlie are awesome little kids and I’m very happy to have been able to see them for a second time. We went swimming, drank coffee, drank beer, etc. A very nice time.
We started our real trip in Seattle – we camped in a pretty great campground called Saltwater State Park, which was great. On a whole, of the places we’ve camped so far, this was probably a nicer campground – we’ve for various reasons ended up camping at a lot of RV Parks which are generally flat, ugly places (that are easy to get to, relatively cheap for tent campers, and most importantly close to the cities we want to visit!).
Working on a website
Seattle was great. We did a bit of research on the different neighborhoods within Seattle so that we could get a feel for the different areas within Seattle. We went to perhaps 4 or 5 different neighborhoods, walked around in some, etc. A highlight for us was Green Lake, which was a place for “power singles” and “power couples” (I mention this because I thought it was funny), had a really amazing lake (the neighborhoods namesake). It’s a bit tough to tell you how great Green Lake was, but it was just a super busy, high energy lake. Lindsay (or maybe me) described it as Lake Merritt with a nice beach and a raft with a high dive in it with swimmable, warm water.
Next up was Vancouver. Which we loved. Vancouver was very much a West Coast city, and especially as we drive East across Canada it becomes more and more clear there there is a different between a West Coast city and a Mid-West city. I’d say Vancouver is a city that we could very much live in. For one thing, it seemed really well organized, and clean! One of the small strange things that stuck out to me was that every garbage can in the city had a nice, high quality garbage bag in it. Coming from Oakland where garbage bags were done away with and in their place heavy duty inner garbage cans were used, I appreciated this. I’m not sure trash bags are as efficient, but even the garbage seemed cleaned. Vancouver also felt very multi-cultural. There were TONS of different accents and languages that we heard walking around.
It’s a bit difficult to explain how Vancouver felt. We were there for two days. It felt very different from the US, but I can’t say if that was all in my head or not. Everybody we talked with was friendly, and the place felt like it was healthy without being over the top or preachy about being organic or vegan or etc, etc, etc. The other thing that was a big confusing was that there were SOO many people outside in bathing suits, on the beach, etc. From what I understand, the weather in Vancouver is generally worse then that in Seattle, but we didn’t get a good sense of this because it happened to be an incredibly nice few days of weather when we were there. Even on a weekday, it felt like a busy day in the busiest of beaches. I went swimming (twice!) in the ocean, and Lindsay ran and swam both days we were there. This was all in Stanley park, which was great, if anybody ever visits.
Parking in Vancouver was generally a bit of a chore. Actually to the city planners credit, it was pretty impressive that when downtown we almost always ended up easily finding parking, but never at a place that wasn’t pay by the minute. This was something else that stuck out to me.
I visited the Maritime Museum, which I really enjoyed. One thing I’d like to do more on the trip is visit museums, but that can be a bit difficult with a dog (it’s HOT outside, so we can’t just leave Sai in the car unless we happen to find covered parking), but I was very happy to visit this museum. The Roch, which is a famous ship, was there, as well as a much of displays about various ships/tugs/etc that came out of Canada.
We camped at an RV park in Vancouver, the first of many to come. This is a bit sad, that we are camping at so many RV parks, but oh well! At least we were close to the city.
I’m going to post more, and hopefully a lot more photos, but internet is a bit scarce at the moment. More importantly, time on the computer is a bit scarce at the moment.
Packing is now fully underway. Lindsay has spent the past week+ organizing, cleaning, and selling our stuff on Craigslist. Sadly, we still have a long way to go – as I lay in bed typing this, I see our bed stand, our alarm clock, our covers and sheets, our mattress, the artwork above our head, etc. All of that stuff needs to be gone in two weeks. And that’s just in our bed area.
Still, we’ve gotten rid of quite a large number of things:
Here are a few photos that don’t quite do the madness justice.
..and a bunch of other stuff. Five, six, seven, eight, maybe more bags of “garbage” have been thrown away at this point. Sadly “garbage” doesn’t mean “totally garage”, but things like pans that are too scratch to be of much value to anybody, but not bad enough to replace. Semi-used craft supplies, clothes with stains, etc. Hopefully by the end of the week things will START to come together, and by next weekend we’ll be ready to sort out the final pieces. The big unknowns at this point are just how much stuff we have in the “keep” pile, and whether it might warrant getting a storage space (Lindsay is very much against this, I have mixed feelings but feel it may be required), etc.
In other news, Lindsay and I (and Sai) went up to Russian River this past weekend with a bunch of friends. We stayed at this great cabin/house/thing right on the river (near Guernyville). There were perhaps 15 of us, and we spent most of the day swimming, playing cards, drinking 1 or 2 or more beers, and just generally hanging out. The water on the river was low, but it was BEAUTIFUL. Possibly BECAUSE it was low and the sun was able to get down to the bottom of the river easily, it was very bright and I had an awesome time swimming around. I got a new housing for my GoPro Hero 2 (Thanks Teeples!) and recorded a few small little video clips which I put together in a video. Sorry for the shaky camera, next time I’ll not move around so much I think.
First, as a few of you know, Lindsay and I are leaving the Bay (at least for a while) and moving to India. “Moving” is admittedly a slightly strong word, as we have no intention of staying permanently, but we are going for a year. Or up to a year. At this point we have very few details as far as what we’re doing in India, but we know this: July 1st, we’ll get in the car and drive from Oakland, CA to Vancouver, CAN (Canada!). From there, we’ll drive across Canada over the period of a month, until we get to Quebec City, Quebec. From there, we’ll go back down through Canada to the US, where we’ll end up in Grand Rapids, MI. We’ll spend the rest of August in Michigan with our families (and I’ll be trying to work as much as I can, if possible). Then, September the 3rd we’ll fly from Chicago to Mumbai! And that’s about the start of the India trip. I’ll post a lot more soon about more details that we do have (our rough Canada camping plan, etc) soon.
But for now, the start of the India trip…
Today was a bit hellish. Not really, all in all, I had oatmeal which I really like, and I got a new battery for my Nintendo DS (thanks Nick). I’m trying to catch them all in Pokemon Black at the moment.
But let’s go back in time, to a simpler time..
The time is last week. I had just gotten done spending days researching Indian visas and navigating the very terrible visa websites. See, the thing is, India outsources the visa application processing to a company. As of today, that company is BLS. As of next week (and this is critical!), it’s a different company. Apparently BLS had many complaints against it, so India cancelled their contract and moved to a different company.
Here is our application (well, part of it), which was one of five or six documents we needed to have ready.
Because of this switch to a new company there was/is uncertainty in how BLS (the current company) would handle this trade off, what would happen if you were midway through the visa process when this transition happened, etc. I thought long and hard about this, but decided that I would rather just take care of everything asap. By “everything” I mean “getting our visa.” We are applying for 5 year multiple-entry visas, which means (long story short) that getting the visa early is not a problem. A 6 month tourist visa is good for 6 months from the date that the visa is issue, and technically the 5-year visa is “used” starting the day it’s issued, but we obviously won’t be in India for 5 years!
Anyway, the BLS website is incredibly confusing, but after spending some time reading and re-reading all of the various instructions on the website I got together what I believed to be all of the paperwork for our visa. I made an appointment (also confusing) and went to the BLS office in downtown San Francisco on Geary. I waited in line for a while, but ended up having no problems.
Until a few days later, when I got an email telling me that I needed to submit an additional document for processing. Basically, the visa application (a from supplied by the Indian government) had a field in which to put the address of your “sponsor” in India. I didn’t realize (and ultimately this is my fault) that the form automatically truncated the address I copy/pasted, and “Mumbai, India” was cut off. So, I had to resubmit the application.
This involved filling out a new application, which wasn’t so bad. Then printing everything out. Also not so bad. Well, as I mentioned it was a bit stressful know that the company I had given 300 bucks to and had my passport was going out of business completely in a few days time, and the website now looked like this:
Anyway, I filled out the form, and immediately the next day went into BLS, making sure to get there at 8:30AM. This was on a Wednesday. Well, I get to the front door and what do I see, but this sign:
Of course there was no notice that BLS would be closed on Wednesday on the website, and what’s more, this was one of the last THREE days the office was open, period. Before the limbo/uncertainty while switching visa processing over to the new company. I was very sad at this point, as I had really tried to do everything “right”, but kept having random problems. Also, though I’m tired and it’s a bit difficult to explain the feeling here, a number of the employees working at BLS actually came up to the door while myself and another person were outside talking about how bummed we were that it BLS was closed. The employees were, from what I can tell, trying to get into the office for one reason or another, but the door was locked. So they were pounding on the door trying to get somebody to let them in, but it didn’t seem like anybody was in the office. It was just a strange feeling, being locked outside of the office with the people who worked in the office, on the side of a busy street in San Francisco.
I tried to get more info about what would happen, when we should come back, if I would have enough time to get my visa processed before switching over to the new company on Friday, etc. They (understandably) told us (as they were calling people and banging on the door) that they weren’t sure what would happen, that they themselves didn’t have jobs anymore at the end of the week, and that they couldn’t tell us anything. Not particularly reassuring. I asked if we’d at least be able to get our passports back, the person I was speaking to said “I don’t know,” which was awesome! They advised me to come back the next morning, early. The office doesn’t open until 9, but they said to get there by 8:30 for sure.
Luckily, being the nerd I am, I got to the office at 7:45 AM the next day (45 minutes before recommended!), Thursday. One day until BLS shut down. And I’m very happy I did, because already that early in the AM, this is what I saw:
After waiting an hour and fifteen minutes for the office to open, I took care of things relatively quickly. Despite the less then ideal experience I had with the BLS and the general Indian visa system, the people at BLS were very friendly and were as helpful as I honestly think they could be. I gave my documentation to a very nice lady, who told me that I would more then likely be OK. She said that if the Indian consulate didn’t finish processing my visa by the time BLS closed for good, then the new company (Cox and Kings I think is the name) would more then likely get my passport and send me an email to pick it up.
Luckily, that never happened. Friday, the next day, around 1pm, Lindsay and I both got emails telling us that our visas were processed and ready for pickup. Marc, being the nice guy he is, let me leave work early (around 5) and I headed to BLS as fast as possible. The office was packed, and seem on the brink of chaos. This was, literally, the last 30 minutes of BLS before it closed for good. I’m very, very thankful, that I was able to get our passports back, barely.
You can see they had already posted the sign up saying that the office was closed.
And here are some of the people waiting.
Anyway, long story short, we’re going to India!
edit: turns out I think we made the right choice to go with BLS. Looks like the new company is currently having a rough time! http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/outsourced-indian-visa-company-angers-crowd/Content?oid=2806904
edit again: And a video showing the continued chaos: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/New-Indian-Consulate-Service-Sparks-Frustration-Over-Delayed-Visas-261037461.html
Lindsay had a few days off for spring break. “Wow, that’s great” – That’s what you might be saying. But YOU ARE RIGHT! It was great! I took a few days off (three, if you want to know) and we had a 5 day great weekend. I should add that prior to this amazing weekend I had an amazing birthday party, thanks to Lindsay, complete with oysters (and a super cool dude who shucked them for us), friends from all over the place, etc.
Anyway, last weekend. Wednesday night we drove down to Big Sur and camped right off the 1 at Kirks Creek, an awesome campground right on the coast. To be honest, I was not in a particularly great mood on Wednesday, mainly because I was very tired, so I took a nap (the second in a week, which is some sort of insane record for me). I woke up from the nap, Lindsay and I had dinner (I believe we had chicken bratwurst, if such a thing exists). Then, we played a game of cribbage, which was a great game of cribbage. After these exiting events, we went to bed (around 9:30pm, although Lindsay stayed up for another hour or so reading).
Around 12:15 we woke up, got in the car, and drove ~20 minutes along the 1 to this insane compound/cult/spa/retreat/magical place. Basically there is this thousand dollar a day spa that is huge, but in the middle of nowhere, and then open up every night from 1am until 3am for clothing optional natural mineral baths. These aren’t just your normal run of the mill mineral springs, they are in this (as I’ve mentioned) insane space, on top of a cliff overlooking the ocean. You could see/hear the ocean crashing on the rocks below, and the stars were out and it was a clear night and probably in part because of how tired/dazed I was it was an amazing experience. I’m very happy we went.
The next day at breakfast we weren’t exactly sure what we were going to do to be honest. We had originally planned to go to Disneyland, but earlier in the week we were worried that it might not work out with Sai. But with a bit of sleep I felt a bit more positive/energetic and gave Nick a call to see if he’d be cool with us leaving Sai at his place during the day while we were at Disney. Being the great friend he is, he said “no problem” and the rest is history, which you’ll read about next.
We drove down to LA (which btw, if you have never driven from Northern California to Southern California on the 1, it’s worth doing, it’s a beautiful drive, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it EVERY time you’re driving) which took us way longer then it should. I sometimes talk shit about SoCal (always joking of course), but one thing I really don’t like is that we seem to end up in shitty traffic every time we drive down. Oh well. We drove down to LA OK? That’s the point.
So anyway, Thursday we had dinner and that was great. Then we went to bed. Then we woke up and had what I would classify an amazing day. First, on the drive down to LA we spent an hour or so reading through various tutorials on how to maximize your time at Disneyland and minimize wait times. I won’t go into many details here because you can easily find tons of information on google if you’re interested, but things like how exactly the FastPass system works, which rides tend to have longer lines and at which times, etc. When we got into the part, we ran past all of the families pushing strollers and got in the front of all of the lines, grabbed FastPasses while the other figured out the shortest lines, etc.
Now, + and –
+ We rode most of the big rides without waiting more then 10 minutes (which was insane)
+ Related, but the park was busy (of course), just busy enough, but not so crazy you couldn’t find a place to sit if you wanted, etc
+ I was not scared on any of the rides (the last time I went to Disney I cried on Space Mountain)
+ I genuinely felt really happy to be there, and like it was a “magical” sort of experience. Part of the “magic” was probably just the number of people there that seemed to be having a good time, but it was also fun to be a “kid” (as cliche and Disney commercialish that is to say) and I really appreciate all of the attention to detail, etc. Just a happy sort of place (“The Happiest Place on Earth”!)
– The rides, if I were to be honest, were not as spectacular as I remember. I think a big part of that is just growing up, but on most of the rides we went on I left feeling at least somewhat underwhelmed. Some rides (such as the Matterhorn Bobsleds) I felt very underwhelmed
– Lindsay was perhaps not experiencing the “magic” feeling as much as I did above – not to say that she didn’t have a very good time (she did I think), but she didn’t feel depressed when we left (I did!) and perhaps wouldn’t be as likely to go back next year. I think I could go back to Disneyland in a year and have an amazing time again
– It seems to be maintenance season at Disney, so a number of the bigger rides were closed. Most notably (for me), It’s a Small World was closed, and most notably for other people I tell was the Indiana Jones ride. Also the Finding Nemo ride.
– Autopia was insanely not great IMO, perhaps great for a 3-9 year old kid, but I was pretty upset because I was a great driver and this terrible kid who could barely drive still beat me, even though he kept running into the track and loosing speed! (I’m 90% kidding)
Honestly I was surprised that I liked Disney as much as I did. If I just write down my thoughts about the rides, the food, etc, I wouldn’t probably paint a very pretty picture (just “OK”). But there was something great about the experience and I’m excited to go back.
I took a bunch of photos (black and white, unfortunately) but I haven’t finished the roll yet. I’ll post them when I get them developed/scanned. Also thanks to the Teeples, they purchased my ticket for my birthday and I don’t think we’d have gone without that incentive.
After Disney, we went home and went out and had some great Thai food. Then Saturday morning we woke up and drove home. And that’s about it.
Well, quite a bit has happened since my last post here. I spent two weeks solo in Chicago for work. Lindsay and I went to a wedding in LA. We spent a day in Santa Cruz. I shaved my beard (and am now growing it back again). Actually that’s all I can think of.
Chicago was a great time. I stayed in a fancy hotel and went to a pretty interesting training. Anthea came to visit, as did my mom and Tristan. I ate some great donuts, and a (not pictured) great pizza.
Anyway, long story short, I took a few photos and figured I might as well post a few of them.
Anthea in Union Station
This Panorama turned out pretty well, except that I somehow (even though I SWEAR I did, I always do!) didn’t lock the exposure. So I ended up with two differently exposed photos, which I didn’t spend the time required to try to match more evenly and instead just used photoshops (generally pretty good) “match color” feature. So you can see the seem. I’ll probably go back at some point and do a better job.
This donut place was a chain (or at least there were a number of different locations, I don’t know if “chain” has a technical definition, but in the case I use it to mean “more then one location”), but was very great. The donuts were expensive-ish (2-4 bucks I think?) but were creative/quality enough to justify the price I believe. Case in point: the creme brulé donut had a very hard caramelized sugar shell on it. Which is easy enough to do if you are making creme brulé, but I don’t know they kept trays of the things hard/crackling all day.
This was a really cool old (50s? 60s?) arcade machine in one of the arcades on the Santa Cruz boardwalk area.
We really like Santa Cruz. The rocks are cool and all, but honestly the coolest part of this was the group of kids bodysurfing in the water.
I took this photo because when we move from this apartment someday, I’d always like to remember the few (see:currently in a pretty serious drought) but awesome rainy days we’ve spent in our apartment. I may not want to remember the crocs, but there they were! Edit:Actually, I also should point out that there is a ridiculous amount of grain (if this were digital I’d call it “grain”) on the crocs. To be fair, I did try to bring out more detail from the shoes, so ultimately this is my own fault, but I didn’t actually notice how bad it was until posting this. It’s my fault.
A portrait of Nicola that I like a lot. Good looking guy!
Edit: I realized I mentioned a wedding, but didn’t actually post any photos from it. That’s mainly because, to be honest, I didn’t take any photos that were that worth posting. But, for the sake of keeping track of memories:
This should be an interesting next few months, lots of fun stuff planned. For now, time to go to bed and read “Code Complete” <3 p.s. I finished reading the Gentleman Bastard's third book ("Republic of Thieves"). I really enjoyed it.