I was sitting on the bus the other day and thinking that India is a place where something new is happening every second that you look around.  If it's not the lady sweeping garbage into the street, then it's the kids playing cricket barefoot in the back lot, or the beggar on the sidewalk, or the cracked cement, the juice seller crushing sugar cane, the samosa vendor on the corner, the infinite saris, the storefronts that that are only about 3 feet wide but are packed with engine parts, the tuk-tuks, the cows and goats eating garbage in the streets, the metro stations that have no attendents or ticket offices and that look like demilitarized zones, the buses, the heat that stifles you, the breeze that cools you and always the people, people, people. 

 

You get used to it, though.  WE walk around and through the traffic like locals, and the tuk tuk drivers have stopped asking whether we want rides (well, not completely).  We eat with our hands...gracefully and Nathan can almost do it without getting anything on his shirt, though it's better if he wears his black shirt so that the stains don't show as much.  We are even getting used to the heat, though it's been 35 degrees for the past week, and it's only going to get hotter.  But we can walk around in it all afternoon and not be too much the worse for wear at the end of the day.  We find A/C too cold though, and usually turn it off at night, settling for the fan which is enough for cool, but the mosquitoes still love Nathan and if there is anything less than a gale force wind blowing, those little blood suckers find him and go into throes of ecstacy at the taste of his blood (you should see Nathan act it out...it's very funny). 

 

We still have trouble being understood though, and the Tamil language here is very fast, and practically incomprehensible.  When we think we are being our most communicative and understandable, we realize that our English sounds to them the way their English sounds to us...unintelligeable.  So, we don't have a lot of long conversations with people, though a lady did try to sell me Amway products while I was waiting to mail a parcel in the post office this morning. 

 

We missed India when we left, but now we are ready to be away from it for a while.  We head to Thailand on the red-eye on Friday night and will explore southern Thailand and Malaysia for the next couple of months.  As much as we love Indian food, we are ready for some Tom Kha Gai and Pad Thai.

 

I bought 4 saris yesterday for I'm not sure what purpose, but they are beautiful and colourful and I may not even wear them, just hang them decorously somewhere and take them down for Hallowe'en or a fancy ball (there are so many of those in Dawson).  Nathan grumped the whole time that I was buying that I would never wear them, and he may be right, but I had a pair of pants made in Mamallapuram out of an old sari, so maybe this cloth is destined for something great. 

 

We are still having fun, relaxing, eating, sweating, sight-seeing, enjoying life.  Nathan will try to post pictures in Bangkok. 

 

Love, ACDB