i am in Goa, staying with a friend at her grandmother's house... it's a 400 year old house - 14 foot ceilings, carved teak furniture from 1647 - that has been in her family since the Portuguese colonised this part of the world.

This house is twice as old as Canada.

Incredible.

I haven't really been able to put India into words. The cities are constant chaos. Walking through the markets, I overhear a mix of konkane, english, and portuguese. Practice my bargaining skills, but i always pay more than everyone else... it's okay. Budget or not, I can afford it better than most people here.

I can't get used to so many people begging. It is worse here than anywhere i've ever been. It's always little children with the most innocent, cherubic faces. Running after you, tugging at your arm, getting into your face, asking for just 10 rupees...

Or else it's mothers with tiny babies, or oldoldold men and women with emaciated arms and legs. Or no arms and legs. Rags, shanties, poverty. It's hard.

City
sights:
Overturned oiltruck; family of four on a motorcycle; close to 100 people packed onto a bus - hanging off windows and doors, sitting on the roof; street vendors selling every food you've ever wanted - hot, cheap, and potentially stomach-destroying. Eating the food off the street is like playing russian roulette. [sidenote: i forgot to write about the fact that they have vendors walking around with deep fried larvae, scorpions, and worms on the street in Bangkok. The perfect late-night snack]

Other sights: kindergarten children, lined up in their uniforms, peeing into a ditch; mounds of dried chillis and all the colours of the world - every spice known to man.

Smells: spicy food; urine; sewage; dust; smoke; petrol.

Sounds: men hawking and spitting into the street; Car horns. Constantly... it seems that the average driver honks his horn once every thirty seconds.

country:
Monkeys; bison; deer; wild dogs; kingfishers; five wild elephants./ One 10 feet from our jeep, calmly munching on pounds and pounds of grass. The most beautiful, peaceful, gigantic-yet-graceful creatures ever. How do these animals exist? What a wonderful world we live in.

Later, one mock-charged us - it was scary, but not so much as it should have been, because by the time i figured out that he was actually RUNNING at the car and that trumpeting sound was coming from his mouth and not a Disney soundtrack, it was all over.

sights: cows. everywhere... no one can slaughter them cause they're sacred to hindus, so they just wander around eating all the time. This country has more milk than it knows what to do with, and it all goes into lassi, milky sweets, sweet curd, raita... oh lactose intolerance, i refuse to give into you.

Villagers plowing their fields with harnessed bulls and cows. Rice paddies. Palm trees. Monsoon rains... i didn't know that it could rain this hard. Men dressed in undershirts and dhotis, gossiping on their doorsteps. Women washing their brightly coloured saris. Carrying jugs of water/bales of hay/baskets of food on their heads; Children walking to school in matching uniforms.

sounds: silence, thank god. Or at least a break from the eversounding car horns; Cicadas droning like didgeridoos (sp?); A Grand Orchestra of Crickets; Faint sounds of goats drifting on the night air; Roosters (and who said they only crow with the dawn? They crow ALL THE TIME). Rain on tin roofs. Dogs (where are all the cats in this country? I haven't seen any.)

smells: clean. *deep breath*

I can breathe through my nose here. The country is quiet, but it's such a relief.

The city is so overwhelming... I stop in the street middle of the street. No i don't... i would be killed by a cow, a cart, a motorcycle, a rickshaw, a truck, a bus, or a bicycle. I stop on the sidewalk. And try to capture it all in my head so I can remember it later. As if I could ever forget this place.