Bea goes to India 2006

A place to house periodic comments from Bea while she backpacks her way through India and Nepal.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Photos, slowly

I am working on putting pictures out -- they are going to be in a second blog, since they continue to fail to post to this one! Access with the link on the sidebar called "Photo Gallery" or at www.beagallery.blogspot.com

Please bear with me as I do this, it seems to be a random and rather fragile process.

grins, b

Monday, June 05, 2006

somewhere in space-time

I know this much is true -- my body is in Utah... my head, now that seems to be a different matter! :) my biological clock isn't set to here yet, so sleep is strange, but improving...

I'm also culturally not fully here either -- some things surprise me, other things seem familiar and natural. I still hand money to sales-clerks in the respectful way -- in my right hand and the left touching my right forearm -- so far it hasn't been commented on by anyone, but I notice that I'm out of step w/ THIS culture, even though I think I wasn't in the Indian or Nepalese world long enough to be fully immersed in their world either.

mostly unpacked and relaundered everything, even those items that were "clean" since that is relative! planning to scrub my backpack in the bathtub [the euphemism my British friends used for the stink was "it hums" -- actually an apt way of announcing it was well-used I guess!]

miss my traveling companions, and the easy familiarity of a conversation over a meal or a game of cards in the afternoon -- keenly feel that 8 of the 11 on the trip could be life-long friends, but also realize that the river of time diverges us quickly and it is likely that I will not see one or more of them again... even though we talk about getting back together... 7 of them in the UK are more likely to maintain the relationships. Andy in Nepal will rarely visit the UK and declared he would never come to the US, so unless I journey back to his part of the world... some of us expect we could go back to India/Nepal in the future -- others are certain that they will have too many other locations to visit...

I'm sure that I will readjust to a solitary journey in time, and will likely value the connections I have more because I know that TV is a poor substitute for face-to-face chat.

Reinstalled my memory card adapter's driver and was able to upload my pictures and some that were given to us at the end of the service project. Knew I'd had difficulty with my camera, so wasn't expecting a lot of pictures, but found the ones I took to have focused on architecture and decoration of buildings... Dave and Alex have both promised to share their digital collection, so I'm hoping for more people-photos from those, as well as some location shots that I know they captured [so I didn't even try!]

I'll try to not bore with a mountain of shots, but will put a couple of subject-related posts up next.

cheers, b