Keep moving forward

It took me a lot of time and effort to settle into India. By the time I mellowed out in Varanassi, weird things happened that twisted up our feelings again, but it was a good group experience and i feel like i learned a lot about feelings, communication, and the strange injustices that exists in the world that can never be fully understood or accepted.

But it clicked one crazy night on the train. What night was it? I couldn't have been the crazy train ride to Agra because that night was hell. we missed our train and ended up having to search for open seats on two different trains. It was a strange trip. The next day we were all Very grumpy. But to make it up to us all, IVS paid for us to go see the Taj Mahal. It was pretty amazing. We felt like we were walking onto the page of a book. Very big and very beautiful. We sang inside of it and it had great acoustics.

Okay, then that night on the train to Amritsar something clicked and i suddenly was enjoying India more thoroughly than i had before. One girl had a bad experience on the train, but my ride was very sound. Amristar was also very nice, though the room situation sucked. The smaller group of guys had the same size room as the girls, with softer beds, and we had to cram 2-3 girls to a bed. Hard beds.

The women though. that was what was interesting in Amristar, the sihks teach gender equality (though it wasn't perfect equality that i saw), but the women were far more outgoing and interactive. i never found one that spoke good english. i met a few very kind older men from canada. I found that i was mostly fond of Sihks. but "people are people" and good and bad people exist.

I have more to say about Amritsar that might not get said right away, but now i'm in Dharamsala, a wonderful break from the dirty cities (with fat, happy, unabused dogs- which makes me incredably happy). Now i'm going to go on a short hike to a waterfall.


love to all!