On the last two days of my trip to India, I visited Pune. In my undergrad years I studied here and I couldn’t imagine coming all the way to India without stopping by to visit friends and see my old favorite sights. It’s incredible to me how much of the city I remember from 5 … Continue reading
Early this morning as the sun filled my room with light, I rolled over in bed and scrolled through the emails in my phone. One immediately caught my eye–from my baba (host dad) in India. He had received the letter I sent to him and was writing to let me know that both he and aai … Continue reading
“In a sense it’s the coming back, the return, which gives meaning to the going forth. We really don’t know where we’ve been until we come back to where we were. Only where we were may not be as it was because of who we’ve become, which, after all, is why we left…” –Bernard Stevens, … Continue reading
This one took me a little while to catch on to, but in India (at least in Pune) most people eat their meals with their hands–specifically their right hand. You serve food with your left. Most nights this means using your roti to pick up cooked vegetables and spoon them into your mouth, mixing warm … Continue reading
As we near the end of the program, the familiar tug of homesickness gently nudges our attention away from India and back to the states. It reminds us what take-out pizza tastes like, what snowflakes instantly melting into water droplets on our skin feels like, what our siblings’ voices sound like when we lazily roll … Continue reading
After our stay in Bangalore, three of us boarded a plane to Kerala where we met up with three other ACM students for a houseboat cruise. Few places in the world can boast the perfect temperature and Bangalore was definitely one of them. Just a little breezy, warm enough to wear a sleeveless kurta but … Continue reading
One of those things that I didn’t think I’d find myself taking pictures of in India… Dust bins (trash cans) here are so much more creative–and at times creepy–than they are in the US. Here are a few of my favorite dust bins from Bangalore. There was a great penguin dust bin at Mahabalshwar a … Continue reading
Right around this time in the program, with about one month to go, it seems like it is almost guaranteed that a person will be hit with homesickness. The newness and freshness of the first month has worn off, the excitement that you can now successfully catch a rickshaw, haggle for a kurta and walk … Continue reading
It was something that had been on my mind for a little while. I have wanted to get a nose piercing for a few years now, but generally when I considered it in the US, it turned into a quick internal discussion of pros and cons and I would talk myself out of it before … Continue reading
One of the first things I noticed about India (and Nepal for that matter) was the incredible amount of trash and waste lining the streets, overflowing from the dumpsters, being trifled through by stray dogs and carelessly tossed out of car windows by travelers. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that there … Continue reading
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