if a picture is worth 1,000 words, I have a lot of typing to do

I'm finally putting all of my photos online. You can see them here, courtesy of flickr. I'm slowly but surely adding descriptions, tags, and geographical information to all of them, but I think that's going to be a loooong process.

snazzy

I was just flipping through some of my journal from my trip, and I found my favorite piece of Indian English. I don't have a picture of it - because I was too shy to pull out my camera at the restaurant - but mounted proudly behind the counter of the restaurant in our hotel in Amritsar (Mohan International, and oh how I wish I had some pictures of that place) was a sign that read:
HAVE SOME SNAZZY
NEW TEMPTIES
SPECIALLY PREPARED
to SATIATE your TASTE

Yes please!

very very fun

"Horn OK Please" by Flickerpix Animations. I feel a little bit pathetic that I identified with the hapless tourist; on the other hand, India was very, very good to me, so what's an overtip here and there? However, I am proud that I knew the Gateway and the Taj Hotel all on my own and needed no one to point them out. Baby steps.

read this now

Really really great blog, Proxy Indian, sent in by alert reader Kamla.

the man, the legend

Legendary, I tell you!

If you want to know more about Rajan - and who doesn't?!? - go here. I made him this photo album so he could download everything easily - I swear I'm not obsessed. Just amused. Besides, he called me "didi," which is totally nice.

things I thought about today that have to do with India

1) I am wearing (on my toes) some nail polish I bought at a grocery/drug store in Mumbai with Debbie one very fun afternoon (when we went to the bunk-bed computer lab and had lattes at Barista), which is clear with orange glitter in it, and I love it a lot, even though my shoes cover my toes.
2) Trivial Matters told me about the Welfare of Stray Dogs organization that helps take care of stray dogs in Mumbai, which is the perfect organization for me. Here are two of my favorite dogs in India

in a tuktuk in Ahmedabad

and on a park bench in Mumbai. I took this photo because my dog sleeps like that too, although he is lucky enough to get to do so on a sofa.
3) I keep hearing about Lage Raho Munnabhai and it made me remember meeting Arshad Warsi in the hotel in Kolkata and what a strange and funny experience that was.
4) And then I realized that it's been four weeks since I got back, and it doesn't feel like that long, because in some ways I feel like I was there yesterday and India is still very close by and a very big part of my existence, and in other ways it feels very far away indeed and that makes me really sad, because I loved being there.
5) And THEN, just as I started to log in to write this, the NPR archive I have on started up a story on the whole pesticides-in-colas mess.

this photo uploading process takes forever

So. Here is my photo album. [For whatever reason, these appear in reverse chronological order in each album (or in the slideshow or film loop thingy) - so if you want to see things as I took them, start on the last page of each album and go forward. No idea.] There's a sub-album for each city/area we went to. (Bollywood people, I'm making a separate one for film-related photos because there are so many. That will come later.) At some point I will go back and make posts here, city by city, narrating a few select photos from each place. A few, I promise. My dad sat through all of my photos last weekend and it took four hours. I'm not even sure I like my stories that much.

happy Indian Independence Day yo!

(Detail of a truck somewhere in West Bengal.)

It sure is great! And yes, this is a smidge early by my clock, but it's Indian Independence Day somewhere in the world - like, in India!

The trucks were beautiful, and after a few hours of seeing countless painted trucks and buses out the window, all of a sudden painting trucks with flowers and cows and little scenic views of lakes seemed a perfectly everyday - in fact, noble - thing to do. Why don't we all do that? (Because then West Bengal wouldn't be quite as special, that's why.)

This is one of the ways in which I don't quite feel fully readjusted yet - a little part of me keeps expecting to see a peacock or a painted truck, or hear those multi-tone traffic horns or Rajan's mobile phone ring - but I'm wondering if maybe that little part of me doesn't want to be fully readjusted and she's just holding out.