just got back from our winter trip around India and Sri Lanka. teaching definitely has its perks. if you can survive in the classroom, the long breaks are quite nice. also helps to live in a country where traveling is crowded, hectic, but very inexpensive.
all in all, we had a mixture of fun and tiredness, relaxation and the reality of suffering, good deals and bad ones, time together and time spent with old friends and new ones. Lynea and I got to spend more time together than maybe ever, and fortunately, she still likes me a lot. we dreamed about the future, tried to live fully in the present and talked about how we could learn from the past. here’s a few things we did (click on the images to enlarge):
our trip from Kodaikanal to Bangalore to Calcutta to Shillong to Darjeeling to Chennai to Sri Lanka. follow the green line:
lynea applying henna to her arm in downtown Banglore. notice the yellow “rickshaws”. those are fun to travel in.
a slum school we got to visit in Calcutta. a couple people went to the slums and started teaching kids a few things on the street (kids that don’t have the chance to go to school). next thing they know 50 kids are coming to their place for school each day. so they pull a couple women off the streets and say, hey wanna be a teacher. one of our favorite parts of the trip. hmmm...how can we get back here someday?
Lynea cut some hair at the school…and found lots of lice.
found a treehouse in shillong
at an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka.
beach!
stilt-fisherman
lynea made a girls week at the train station in colombo…I can hear her trying to tell her friends, “I’m serious! a white girl painted this on my hand at the train station!”
stumbled across a wedding at a temple in a narrow street in Calcutta. if you ever wonder what weddings, funerals, marketplaces, clothes, kitchens, relationships, life was like a few thousand years back, check out India. the traditions and lifestyles are rich and ancient.
