Hey everyone. It’s been a while since my last blog post, and I’m afraid this is probably going to be the last one. So I decided to choose the most important (and most frequently overlooked) aspect of my travels here: food!

And I have photos. As part of our last few days here I decided to go on a tour of the best meals in town, and I enlisted the help of my fellow food enthusiast Briana to help me make it through as many meals as possible over the course of the day. For the last six weeks we’ve been eating out for all of our meals, so I’m confident saying that we are experts about the food options in this town. So here we go!

Our first stop was the Green Hotel Restaurant, one of the more Westerner-friendly spots in town. They make some of the best “hash browns” (fried potatoes) with tons of tasty spies. And if this food looks green it’s because you can sit outside under a big semi-transparent patio roof that just so happens to be, well, green.

Our second stop was the Snow Lion Hotel. Many of the restaurants in town are also hotels, and we frequently visited these primarily because of their rather more robust internet connections. The Snow Lion has the best French toast in town, and we were so excited that we ate half of it before we remembered to take a picture. So just trust me when I say it was tasty.

Stop number three of our rampage was Common Ground, a Chinese and Tibetan place with all kinds of delicious stir fries and soups and meat dishes and so on, where we got this fantastic vegetable and tofu stir fry:

Next up we went to Lung Ta, the only really Japanese place in town and one of the favorites among all members of our group. We ordered the kakiage egg-don, a bowl of rice with a sweet soy sauce and clusters of fried vegetables topped with a fried egg and more delicious sauce. Basically a bowl of awesome.

For our mid-afternoon interlude we stopped at the Tibet Quality Bakery for a Black Forrest brownie, a soft and gooey slab of chocolatey goodness, and took it to the Black Tent café, which has one of the bigger tea selections and the immense virtue of unlimited hot water refills, which lets you stretch your cup of tea into three or more.

And as an added bonus you can play a game of Bananagrams while you wait:

Our next stop was Mama’s kitchen/the JJI café, a tiny establishment featuring momos (dumplings) and thenthuk (noodle soup) made with whole wheat dough. We opted for a bowl of the latter with lots of tofu, vegetables, and egg mixed in. Very tasty stuff to warm your toes on a rainy monsoon night.

For our last dinner session we visited Gakyi, and all-vegetarian and supposedly healthy Tibetan food place. We may have slightly downgraded the healthiness of the food offerings when we selected fried spinach and cheese momos and brown fried rice, but we certainly had no regrets except that the darkness of the location didn’t make for the best photos.

The final stop on our journey was Café Ri, a Korean food place with alright food but an exceptional selection of deserts. Our favorite and our choice this evening was a brownie Sunday made with real vanilla ice cream (harder to come by here than you might expect) drizzled with chocolate sauce. A perfect way to finish an excellent day of eating way too much delicious food, although I admit this photo does not do it justice.

I hope this has given you a taste of our food eating experiences over the last few weeks, though unfortunately only a visual one. As I mentioned before this will most likely be my last blog post as I am returning to the U.S. in about two days. I hope you have enjoyed reading!

Hey friends. Quick update: we are officially finished with classes, everything has been turned in, and we are now doing our independent research projects. Just in case you were wondering.

So we went on a pretty ridiculous adventure for our Spring Break a few weeks back. To be honest, we did more than I can possibly recount for you. In subsequent posts I hope to lay things out in more detail. But we did take lots of photos, and some of them are a little goofy, so I hope to be able to share those with you, give some brief descriptions, and give you a teaser of how things basically went. A more serious description of the trip will follow. But first, here's a map of our trip. Be impressed: http://goo.gl/maps/9pCFa

Without any further rambling, here we go!

So for reasons unknown to everyone including me, I decided early on that this trip required consistent blurry selfies to document our feelings as we went on our adventure. This is the first said selfie, taken after we took our first overnight bus trip from Mcleod to Delhi, which I think was just under a 12 hour adventure. We're waiting in the train station for our train to Agra.

We visited a place in Agra called the Baby Taj because it was constructed in the same style but it's a lot smaller. This is me trying to be artsy with my camera, and there's really nothing else I have to say about that.

We only had a few hours in Agra, and we failed to realize that because we were there on a Friday the Taj Mahal would be closed to non-Muslims for prayer. So the best we could do was to take a look at it from afar, which was still impressive. Agra itself isn't really that exciting, so we were mostly excited to check this particular tourist trap off of our list.

The selfies continue. This was our first night in Jaipur, with a pretty standard bed setup at a place called Zostel. You can see from the haphazardly thrown possessions and the insanity in my eyes that this was sort of a long travel day and we were pretty wiped out by the end of it.

So in order to help ourselves recover, we decided to hang around and make breakfast, knowing that this might be our only chance to have access to a kitchen. Elizabeth had a pretty late night, so this is Becky and I being happy about our breakfast success...

...and this is the food that we made.

And this is the art that was decorating the walls of the place. Our trip was primarily a Rajasthan adventure, though we certainly travelled through some other areas. 

Our adventure was filled with rickshaws, buses, and trains. Especially trains. This is us eating ice cream as a reward for just barely making it to the train station and onto the train in time, and we are gross and hot because that was the nature of this trip, and it was absolutely outstanding. Feast your eyes:

Night time taxi blurry photo shoot. I don't actually remember where we were for this part, maybe Pushkar?

By the time we had arrived in Pushkar we had been toting around and also accumulated a ridiculous quantity of snacks, so we decided to feast upon the food that we had been carrying and we actually succeeded in making something like a meal out of protein bars, digestive crackers, cookies, fruit, gatorade, beer, and who knows what else. Dinner of champions right here.

And finally, here is us eating some mangos on the floor of our hotel in Jodhpur, which ended up being one of our favorite places that we stayed. Also these were some tasty mangos, made all the tastier by cutting them open with a pocket knife and dribbling juices all over the floor.

So this has been a teaser for what is to come regarding our Spring break adventures. I will try to come up with a better description and more complete story later. For now, I've got to go do some research!

Hey all. It's time for another photo post! I've said a good deal about the city, but I haven't shown you what the area around here is like. Here are a few photos I took along one of my favorite hikes. I'm not going to explain them in detail because there's not a lot of say, except that the center of the last photo is the town of McLeod Ganj, where we have been staying. Enjoy!

Hey everyone!

Before our Spring break last week we finished up the homestay portion of our trip, so I thought this would be a good time to do a “day in the life” kind of post, and show you all a little bit about what life is like here. I don’t have too many photos, but I do want to share some basic-but-hopefully-not-boring details about what it’s like to live here in McLeod, and in India more generally.

The most important thing I have to say about my homestay is that my host parents were absolutely spectacular. My host mom spoke excellent English, so I didn’t usually have a problem communicating what was happening, which is absolutely essential when you’re living together for three weeks. I had some great conversations with her while she was making food or knitting or sitting on the front porch ordering chai by shouting down at people on the street below. My host dad spoke less English, but was also one of the funniest people I’ve met. This is a photo of us having a dinner of momos early in my stay, when a couple of other study abroad students were also staying with us:

Food is an important part of every experience I’ve had in India, and for the homestays this was even more true because we had breakfast and lunch together every day. This is the breakfast that I had brought to me while I was still in bed, at or just after 7:30 every morning. It’s an omelet with a sweet roll and peanut butter and jam, the standard breakfast fed to westerners all over town as far as I can tell:

You didn’t notice it in that last photo, but I have not been without a water bottle at any time during our trip. Which is my way of segueing into mentioning that you don’t drink the water in India, because it’s never to be trusted. We drink only bottled or filtered water, depending on what you have access to. I was lucky enough to have a supply in my homestay so that I was able to fill up my bottle, but members of my program who didn’t have that had to go through a whole lot of plastic bottles, which is really problematic in a country that doesn’t do so well disposing of waste, as I've mentioned before.

Speaking of things that India doesn’t do so well with, power is absolutely sketchy. Outages are frequent, and everyone carries a flashlight ("torch" due to British influence here) because they tend to occur while you are trying to open a door or just finishing a bathroom experience (more on that in a moment). This is a terribly blurry photo of me eating a dinner (of absolutely spectacular fried rice and momo soup, in case you were wondering) by candlelight:

When you eat lots of tasty food and carry water everywhere, you also have to be aware of what your bathroom options are going to be. This means carrying toilet paper at absolutely all times or stealing napkins from meals, not being too concerned about the state of your clothes and shoes, and in my case being willing to get dressed and go outside to the place next door whenever you needed to go number two. This is due to reasons of plumbing that I will not describe for your sake. Here’s our bathroom:

The squatty toilet will be familiar to those of you who have travelled Asia before, but the big white tank up on the wall on the left side might not be. It’s a miniature water heater, which is the fancier (as opposed to solar heat) way that you can get hot water. This does not mean a hot shower, but a bucket of hot water, which is absolutely essential in a place as cold as it is here in the Winter and early Spring.

Climate control isn’t a thing here, so you learn how to adapt your personal climate to whatever is happening outside and to always be prepared pretty quickly. Exceptional layering strategy is essential, and at night you might be wearing all of your clothes and also using blankets. For a month or two of our time here I woke up being able to see my breath, but by being smart and planning ahead it’s always possible to avoid being cold or to warm up. This is the room that I stayed in, which was absolutely beautiful in the early morning and afternoon and truly a pleasure to wake up in:

That’s all the photos I have to share, and I’ve covered most of the basics, so that last thing I’d like to mention is the internet situation here. Because Mcleod is a tourism-dependent town, wifi is absolutely everywhere. That said, it does not exist in houses—unless you’re lucky enough to be across the street from a giant hotel like I was. As clever and constantly connected college students, we were very quick to learn who had the best wifi, what the passwords were, and what kind of café you like to do your work in. The only downside is that it’s usually kinder to order food and drinks. But when a cup of tea costs maybe fifty cents there are certainly worse things in life.

That’s all I have to share for now. I’m holding off a bit on posting about food because I want to make sure I really do it justice. I’ll be back soon with a post about our Spring break trip, which is certainly worthy of substantial documentation and explanation. For now, thanks for reading!

Hey everyone, I've got some new photos to share with you courtesy of Tyler Sit, and I'm pretty excited for you all to see some of the things I haven't been able to describe yet.

This is us having class on the roof on a sunny day. We saw those mountains every day, no big deal.

These are the puppies that I've mentioned a couple times. I've been told they're really cute but I haven't quite made up my mind yet.

This is our group making momos, the Tibetan version of dumplings.

These next few photos are from when we visited the Norbulinka, a place that works to preserve Tibetan arts and employ Tibetan artists and sell spectacularly expensive things to Westerners. We got to visit a lot of the workshops, and it was amazing.

These are stupas, they are everywhere and they are stupendous.

This is a monkey in its peaceful, safe-distance state. Weaving through paths covered with dozens of these buggers is less tranquil than this photo suggests.

And the rest of these photos go with the blog posts for this week and next week, to give you an idea of where we were hiking and how spectacular some of the temples were in ways that I was not able to capture.

Hello friends and other special people! This post is going to be about part two of our pilgrimage. Later I will fill you in on the adventures of our Spring break, but for now this will just have to do. Enjoy!

First, I’m going to tell you about one of the more intense hikes that I have done, mostly using photos because I think those pretty much tell you what you need to know. Then, I’m going to share a few things I have learned about travelling—the good and the bad.

For the last couple days of the trip we were staying in Tso Pema, Rewalsar. This is the location of a semi-famous but completely gigantic statue of Guru Rinpoche. Here are photos of him from really close and really far away:

I wanted to share those two perspectives to emphasize the extent to which this portion of the trip involved walking adventures, which is to say a lot. Our first day we wanted to hike up to a cave where the previously mentioned guru is said to have meditated and taught. I’m not going to go into detail describing what it’s like to go on an intense walk, because I am sure each of you can related to feeling like your heart is about to explode out of your chest. But here’s a view of the halfway point. Our hotel was by that lake you see:

And here is us stringing up a massive line of lung-ta (also known as wind horses/prayer flags) that we put together all the way at the top. You can’t see the lake anymore because it’s all the way down at the bottom to the left, but the height we’ve gotten to should give you an idea of our progress:

While we are on the subject, I should mentioned that the wind horses/prayer flags are said to carry good karma out as long as the wind keeps moving them. So you write the names of your friends and family on them, and then those people accumulate merit as long as the wind keeps blowing. So some of you owe me a thank you because good things are coming your way from the foothills of the Himalayas.

Here is our group finishing up that massive chain you saw in the last photo:

Speaking of groups, here are the things I have learned about traveling in the span of just these few days, in no particular order:

1. Waiting is ok. Waiting is inevitable. Waiting is an opportunity to take a few deep breaths and realize that you’re living in a place that you can’t see on the globe at the same time you could see your house.
2. Car rides can either be miserably boring or excellent bonding experiences. Luckily for me, my compatriot travelers make excellent company as long as they stick to subjects that are not musical theater (I’m talking about you Tyler and Briana).
3. Strangers on the street and in the restaurants have some of the most interesting stories you will ever hear—whether you want to hear them or not.
4. Keeping your eyes open really means keeping your legs moving, because sometimes you have to go well off the beaten path to find the really cool stuff.
5. Take lots of photos, because it makes writing blog posts after the fact a whole lot easier. Speaking of which, here are a few more for your viewing pleasure. That's all for now friends!