Darjeeling ended up being a nice little vacation from India. It was surprising how different it seemed from everywhere else we'd been so far. Up in the mountains, it was colder. The people were friendlier. There were no cows or rickshaws. No one stared at...
On our way out of Varanasi we were mobbed by rickshaw drivers, each shouting numbers without really even listening to where we were going. We chose one who gave us a reasonable price when we said which train station we were heading to and ignored...
Varanasi is a strange mixture of haunting beauty and desperate aggravation. It's a holy city, sprawled out along a sacred river. A river people use to both wash their dirty laundry and wash away their sins. People bathe there. Cows bathe there. The dead...
I still don't quite get India. There are cows everywhere and no one who lives here seems to notice. Like, hey, there's a cow standing in the entrance to my restaurant and I'm just going to walk right by like that's normal. That's not normal. And...
You can't tell Jaime and I that there are sex temples in India — temples that feature erotic depictions of sex, orgies, oral sex, anal sex, bestiality, random sexual positions no one on earth can possibly maintain — and not expect us to book the...
After spending hours googling the route and searching train time tables it became inevitable: to get to our next stop, Jaime and I would have to take two trains, backtracking through Agra, spending 24 hours on a train. We'd been dreading the 24 hour train ride...
Burning two weeks of used toilet paper in Setrawa, India....
My name is Valerie. I am 31 years old. My favorite color is green. My favorite fruit is bananas. My favorite vegetable is eggplant. My favorite animal is a dog. Today my feeling is worried. Every day we sat in a circle with our Sambhali Trust butterfly class and one by...
Jaime and I spent two weeks in Setrawa while we volunteered at the empowerment center. It sometimes felt like we were on some kind of Wizard of Oz meets Truman Show movie set. Everything perfectly placed to remind you that you're in rural India. The...
