sweeter cambodia

angkor is face-slappingly beautiful. this morning i took a little moto to watch the sun rise over angkor wat and then spent the day tooling about the ancient head of this asian empire. i got 8 hours of touring in between 5 am and 1 pm, and then i crashed. it was hard work, boy howdy! our cambodian ancestors must have had thighs of steel and really short, wide feet, judging from the steps up to all these temples. each step is about 1 foot high and about 4 inches wide. going up was painful and coming down was an adventure. i sweat through my whole t-shirt by 10 am, and still got asked to pose with people in their photos. whatever illusions of gwyneth paltrow-ness i may have had have now evaporated. obviously, they just want a foreigner. even a sweaty, stinky one. with frizzy hair. stupid monsoon.
i've got a pass good for two more days, so i'll be seeing the sites tomorrow and friday, too. but no more 5 am mornings. well, maybe on friday.
um, i can't seem to figure out the computer here, so i'm going to pass on posting more photos for now. i'll post more this weekend from bangkok maybe. i get free internet in my hostel, so may as well make good use of that. so looking forward to thailand where i will be not so much a tourist as a vegetable.

sweet cambodia

cambodians are so friendly. they are like the ontarians of asia. :)
my first day in cambodia was lovely. the sky is amazing! huge puffy white clouds. bright bright gorgeous blue skies. i never noticed, but india has no clouds. hmm. the capitol, phnom penh, besides using consonants with reckless abandon, is another french creation in south-east asia. hooray for french bread and cheese once again! yay! taxis are motorbikes. the country is famous, FAMOUS, for their scarves. thus i have lifted my self-imposed scarf ban and have permited myself to buy one. oops, i mean six. i've had drinks, meals, and colorful chats with locals. i haven't had such a nice welcome into local culture yet. people here speak english way better than in lao. the roads are better, too. well, i'm in the capitol i guess. that could explain it. am i using the right capitol? capital? i don't care. the buildings are beautiful.
i love cambodia, but my heart is broken and i am ready to leave this city. when i visited halifax, nova scotia with my parents in 2003, i spent an entire day bummed out after visiting the maritime museum and learning about the halifax explosion and the titanic clean-up crew. halifax has a sad history, yes. but NOTHING like cambodia. nothing. the civil war and khmer rouge are terrifying. we're talking 1975-1980-ish. i told my new cambodian friend, sarim, how excited i am to go home to my family reunion at the end of july. how i can't wait to see my grandparents. sarim told me he has no grandparents. no aunts. no uncles. they were all killed by the government in the late '70s. between 2 and 3 million cambodians (depending on who you ask) were killed during the war. that's close to 1/3 of the population. i visited the genocide museum, which was a torture prison until the '80s. there's still blood on the floor. there is still blood on the floor. the chains are still on the walls. pictures of the torture victims' corpses hang over their empty beds. it used to be a secondary school. the fact that the building used to be a school is just perverse. all the while walking through the place i kept repeating in my head "this was a school." the khmer rouge killed the intellectuals of cambodian society. i don't know. i love school. it seems sacrilegious, a torture prison made from a school. plus, as a grad school grad, it creeps me out that they hunted down and killed their educated citizens.
today i toured the mass grave sites just out of phnom penh. i rode a motorbike under those sparkly blue cambodian skies to fields filled with grassy green pits and lots of colorful butterflies. i stood in a small room filled with human skulls and looked at the clothes gathered from the shallow graves of the victims of the khmer rouge. i stood in front of the tree used for killing babies. the paths of the field are still littered with small bones and scraps of clothing. that's how recent this stuff is. i was walking on human bones this morning. and it was a beautiful day. i can't take this anymore. i can't type about this anymore.
sarim and i went for korean food for lunch.
tomorrow morning i'm off to siem riep to see angkor.

delhi rocks my socks

whoa. delhi. a lot of people and guidebooks warned me that delhi was the most difficult, dangerous, rowdy place to travel in india. it was said that as a single western female travelling alone in delhi, that i was bound to have troubles. that was a bunch of hooey. delhi is wonderful! delhi is the easiest of easies! i love delhi! it rocks my socks. in the 3.5 days that i have been here i have done just around 8 billion things. all the recent history here is cool: gandhi, indira gandhi, bahai temple. and there is an absolutely beautiful mosque and a neato old fort and the city centre is awesome. old delhi is just okay. kinda touristy. i'm staying in connaught place, which is a big, multi-layered roundabout just off the city centre. i have pictures, i'll post them later because i don't have my cord with me.
um. i guess i don't have anything interesting to say at all really. this post is boring. sorry.
i leave for cambodia tonight. yay! cambodia!

american celebrity visits taj mahal

travelling americans have the problem of explaining to the world where they come from. case in point, by "travelling american," i mean "travelling citizens of the united states of america." when i lived in canada, and people asked where i was from, and i said america, i was greeted with mucho hostility. afterall, america is a continent, not a country. fair enough. so i started to tell people i was from the states. then, i lived in korea. people would ask where i was from, i would say i was from the states, and i would get a blank stare. so, okay, in korea, i have to say i'm from U.S.A. not "the" U.S.A., and not USA (the nice man at the post office chastised me for 5 minutes once about how U.S.A. needs to have dots), but U.S.A. now i'm in india. in india, "U.S.A." i guess sounds like "blurgablurgablurfg" so in india, i say i'm from america. and if i try to be specific and say that i come from the united states of america, i just feel like a gomer. and i've learned that nothing dries up a conversation with a foreigner faster than saying you're from iowa. they have no response for that state. well, except for the few who ask me about potatoes.

so i went to the TAJ MAHAL!!! LALALALALALALAA! yesterday. i'm in agra, and i can see the taj from my hotel window. it's pretty awesome. i went early enough yesterday to troll around and then take a seat and watch the sun set. apparently, the taj is supposed to change colors while the sun sets or rises. now i've watched two sunrises and one sunset, and maybe i'm just insensitive to subtle changes in the light, but i wasn't wowed by any color changes on the taj mahal at either time. it's still awesome though. i think the only thing i've wanted to see more in my life was the eiffel tower (check) and the great pyramids (uncheck). it has been a fantastic few days. there's also a "baby taj," so it's called, that's a tomb for another former indian man and wife. it was built right before the taj mahal and is smaller and more intricate. considerably smaller, actually. they are both amazing to see and i can't contain a squeal every time i see the taj mahal, which is often, because it's right in my huge hotel window.

so while i was sitting and waiting to watch the sun go down at the taj, i was trying to read a book. it was hard, because people kept asking to take their picture with me. i felt like madonna. no, gwyneth paltrow. that's it. i felt like gwyneth paltrow. at first, i said no when anyone asked to take their picture with me because, at first, it was just indian men. packs of young, pretty gorgeous, indian men. so i shook them off. then it was families, so i started to say yes. then, there was a line, a line, a LINE!! of people around my bench waiting to take their picture with me. i just sat there and smiled and answered questions about myself and my family (good old steve) and took pictures with everyone and their children and their friends and their brothers and them again. they put their arms around me. they had me stand. they had me sit. one man even had me take a professional photo with him that he could get printed up by a local photographer. it was strange. it was really really strange. one family became my sort of photo managers and they were in most of the strangers' photos and they organized the lineup and they took some pictures with my camera as well. i've uploaded a nice assortment of these photos on my photo website, but i'd like to share with you the entire collection of "angry girl" photos. i've found that many indians don't really know how to smile for pictures. if you see the photos of unni, my martial arts instructor, you'll see what i mean. sinead had to pretend to hit him on the head with a spoon to get him to smile. okay. never mind. blogger is being dumb. you'll have to go check her out on the photo site. and put some comments on there people. let me know you're out there. :)

"this is as young, and as free, as you'll ever be" -- gregory david roberts

i'm reading a book right now called SHANTARAM. it's written by a man, gregory david roberts, who escaped from prison in australia and ended up working for the underlords of bombay in the '80s. and it's fantastic. this guy puts a lot of what i feel about india, and can't express, into words. and sometimes we use the same words to express india. the first chapter explains how his first impression of india was formed by the wall of smells that hit him on the walk from the plane to the exit of the airport. sound familiar? this book is excellent, if a bit kitchy/preachy/poem-ish at times, and i recommend it. because i like that kind of stuff.
of course, being that he was/is a dude, a prison hardened dude with nothing to lose at that, a lot of his experiences are quite the more adventurous than mine. more than that, though, i think that his impressions of india, more specifically the men of india, are a lot different given that he was/is a dude. he put a lot of trust in men who i wouldn't have wanted to give the time of day. not that they would have asked me for the time. that's not one of the questions i've gotten. and he got a lot of respect from men, not just indian men admittedly, but dudes in general, who wouldn't have found me useful in their dark little crime-worlds. it makes me sad. i can be useful to crime lords, too! :)
i do love india, but it's like being on mars, really. mars, where people speak english, so you therefore get a clear glimpse into the stunning array of differences that human cultures can cook up. nothing is lost in translation. that's right. that's what they meant. everything is just that unbelieveably strange. and moustached.

a girl plopped down next to me a few days ago as i was eating ice cream and reading my book outside an ice cream store in ahmedabad. we chatted it up a bit, in broken english. she thought my name was "alien". she worked in marketing. her friend from work arrived a few minutes later and the two of them tried to sell me a "sauna belt" *as seen on tv, for shaping the waist, for the bargain price of 550 rupees ($11 US). the thing was huge. i've got enough to carry. do i look like i need a sauna belt? she said that i did. i said it was just the ice cream. and she and her friend left in a huff when i resisted their repeated urging that i buy the contraption.

i have had very nice luck recently with very nice older indian men. one was the security guard at the ice cream store. too many people in india amounts to old men getting paid to be security guards at the local ice cream store. but he took care of me and insisted that i move when the sun started to come in my face and plugged in a fan for me and refilled my water bottle with ice cold water and got me a taxi home when i was done. then, another wonderful old man took me past all the touts at the train station in rajasthan to ride in a small rickshaw with me to the local, but inconspicuous bus stand where i needed to get a bus into pushkar, where i am now. i have felt well taken care of by the retired men of india.

pushkar is amazing. just amazing.

the locals think i'm spanish. cool.

i don't like to talk to strangers on trains and planes and stuff. i just like to read or sleep or stare at the scenery. it's hard in india because lots of folks want to chat you up and i can't feel good about shaking them off. so for fun yesterday i told a woman on the train to rajasthan that i was a doctor. a brain surgeon. heehee! it's not too much different than my normal train-lying. the story that i give to men travelling alone who i meet on trains: my name is stacy. i've been married for three years. my husband, steve, is an engineer or a business man. he used to be in the u.s. army and then he worked as a body guard for imporant political figures for a while. we don't have any kids yet, but yes, we are praying for sons. he is coming to meet me in (insert name of city where i'm arriving). we're arriving separately because he had a special martial arts training seminar to teach this week in washington d.c. oh that steve. always on the go.

anyway, check out the UPDATED PHOTOS!!! finally!! for fun glimpses at elephants, birthday parties, my stellar swami costume, yoga, meal times, and varpus . . . you'll see . . .

aww biscuits!

so i'm in this really posh internet cafe with bollywood music and a/c, but there are no functioning cd roms here either, so still no photo upload. which is a shame, because this morning i passed a camel pulling a cart down a busy street. yay! camels!

i'm in ahmedabad, india.
i just got off a 40-hour train ride from kerala.
the five-year-old girl who slept above me didn't believe that i couldn't understand hindi. so she chatted away while i smiled and nodded and snuck her animal crackers when her mom wasn't looking. it was a very fun linguisticky moment for me. i imagine that she has met loads of people who speak hindi and not english, but none the other way around. i don't fit into her venn diagram of language reality. (shout out to the logic peeps, and brendon, who doesn't read this blog, i hope) this little girl has about five languages under her belt. fantastic. still, i couldn't get a word of english out of her, other than goodnight.
general observation about indian kidlets: the attitude towards strangers that indian kids take seems to be different than what i was raised with. they don't seem to feel any "stranger danger." it seems to be normal for kids on the train to go and lay down next to anyone, really, in their car. there's a lot of contact between the kids and other passengers, they eat anything given to them, and parents don't seem to mind other passengers disciplining their kids. this is based on only a few experiences i've had, but that's my impression.
three different indian men tried chivalrously to help me with my rucksack in the past few days, only to find that it was actually too heavy for them to deal with. i asked them to step aside while i hoisted it effortlessly (sort of) up onto my back and went on my way. haha! take that indian men! haHA!
i also find myself a lot better adapted to not taking any hooey from anyone during this solo venture through indian cities. i really like ahmedabad. it's way more chill than mumbai or kerala. the arab architecture is gorgeous, and the food is tasty. i'm catching a bus down to the farm this evening. i hope they have cd roms there.
i've been pretty crap at posting while in india. it's been kind of hard to get any internet time, for one. and also, it's hard to know where to start. everything here is so different. so i'm just going to ramble for a few minutes. first off, lots of stores have hand-painted signs and advertisements. it's very striking. things like detailed pictures of computers and accessories, and even movie posters will be hand painted. cool. everything is more colorful in india i think. the way people dress and decorate things. food isn't all that spicy in the south. korean food is the spiciest of all spicies that i've ever had. i eat a lot of tomato soup and cheese sandwiches on the weekends. very yummy. and lots and lots of coconut. there are lots of mustaches here. men wear button down plaid shirts for the most part. especially in kerala. and skirts called dhoties. but they do wear underpants under said skirts. (i know you were wondering, megs). men in ahmedabad don't wear the skirts so much, and i know nothing of their underpants. i watched napoleon dynamite twice at the yoga centre and all of your moms go to college. i spent three weeks slowly watching the movie gandhi and i've changed my mind about ben kingsly in that movie from when i was little; now i think he's kind of sucky. my blonde room mate from ireland sinead didn't feel that she got much attention from indian men while she was travelling. i thought i got too much, and our friend suki from london whose parents are indian got way way more than either of us. that being said, suki is way way hotter than us, i know sinead will agree. like fire hot. she's b-b-b-beautiful. she also does her makeup and wears pretty clothes, cheater. however, also, suki said that indian men fancy (and molester) western women of indian descent more than those blondie girls from ireland, for example. since people keep assuming that i'm part indian, i think that explains a bit how i find indian men i meet on the street treating me so obnoxiously. my swami thought i was a gujarati, so that's probably bad news for me, being in gujarat now. but i can't lie, i do love it when people (excluding random men on the street) ask me if i'm indian. i mean, i think it's pretty obvious that i'm not a local. then again, with all my awesome malayalam (the language of kerala, the name of which is also a palindrome) it must be hard to pick me out of the indian crowd. but not really. one of the best parts about being in india is that i'll finally be able to go eat at indian restaurants and understand what's on the menu. i know the breads, i know the sauces, i know the names for the veggies and the spices. hooray! no more nan and butter chicken for me, boy howdy! i also sent a huge package home full of indian cooking appliances, mostly to make all the yummy breads. according to the wood carving teacher at the centre, 60% of indian men cheat on their wives. however, if a woman is raped, she becomes a disgrace to her family and is thrown onto the street. the inequality of the sexes seems to be pretty rampant still in india and it makes me really sad. there is no way i could ever live here for that reason. i read a condensed version of the ramayana, the indian cultural epic story. in the story the main character's wife is kidnapped and held by another man/god and he almost doesn't take her back into his home after he rescues her because she may have been too friendly with her kidnapper. one cool thing about the ramayana was learning the 5 deadly sins of indian folk-lore: lust, anger, miserliness, egoism, and envy. hmm . . . interesting. there's also a lot of lore about jesus having spent time in india during his life. my swami believes that jesus was a yogi. i read the davinci code while in india, or thailand or something, and i read a book explaining the davinci code and i'm on jesus-theory overload these days. the indian newspapers are in a tiff over banning or not banning the davinci code movie. the indian prime minister only allowed the opinions of the christian camps before deciding to ban the movie or not. it wasn't banned in the country, but several states have banned the movie. notably, not the christian states, but the muslim ones. hmm . . . i don't know. and the movie comes with a disclaimer reminding everyone that it's fiction. duh. and the government is pushing right now to allow for quotas for students from OBC (standing for "other of the backward class") communities entering medical school. doctors all over the country are on strike against the quotas. so other doctors have gone on strike against those who are on strike against the quotas. i just can't believe what OBC stands for.
read more here: OBC craziness
i get lied to a lot in india. i don't know if it's just the way business is done or if it's because i'm a tourist, but i get blatantly lied to all the bloody time. a rickshaw driver will tell you that the ferry is closed and ask you to pay ten times as much for him to drive you around the island, for example. and then there's the triple pricing of everything for foreigners. the travel agent man in kerala told me that my plane ticket was arriving the next day for about a week, and it never arrived. the tailor told me my things would arrive the next day for about three days. rickshaw drivers say that they know the restaurant or store or street you're talking about, when they don't and they just drive you around and try to drop you off in the middle of nowhere. hotel staff will tell me that all the cheap rooms are full and if i want to stay i have to take the way expensive room, until i start to leave and then one mysteriously becomes available. and today a woman in an internet cafe told me that hers was the only internet cafe in the whole city of ahmedabad when i decided not to buy the $20 internet pass required to use the computers at her cafe. there was another cafe right down the street. before i left the yoga centre one of the students did a tarot reading for all the students in the yoga course. i chose the fool card, which made my swami giggle. a 30-year-old indian yogi man, giggling. one of my best memories. but it turns out the fool card is actually quite a nice card to get, so says jose-louis from chile. the tarot book said something about that card meaning something about continuing to trust people over and over and over again and how that's good because you don't live in the past or the future but now in the present. that's kind of a nice idea, but i think i'm becoming a bit embittered. and all information says that things will only get worse when i get into delhi. i'm afraid of returning to iowa city and going to target to get some shampoo and going to check out and being like, "yeah? who says i have to pay $2.75 for this shampoo? i'll give you $1.75 for it maybe. don't you know, in my country i specialize in selling shampoo and i know that this is way overpriced." or the woman at the olive garden will tell me there are no tables available and i'll kick up a fuss and storm away in a big scene meant to leave her chasing me out onto the street and offering me the table that's actually available. or i'll give a cab driver only half of what he's asking for because i know that he got lost on purpose to hike up the price of the ride and he'll chase me down and give me a good smack. so anyway. i recognize that that's the way things work here and i'm making the best of it. but i'm just tired of always having to be on my toes. then again, if my rickshaw driver hadn't stuck it to me today by taking the seriously way way far out of the way way to town i wouldn't have passed by the camel in the crowded street. yay camels!

moo.

stupid crappy pants india dumb face internet poo cafes in cochin don't have cd barfo roms or usb functioning stupid harry potter pants ports so i can't upload any more photos right now. poo.

i'm leaving kerala (sniffle) in about two hours. i'm going to gujarat to pick dates and milk cows. and upload photos. i've got some doozies.

i cried my eyes out over leaving my yoga centre. it was such a fantastic month. i actually fell in love with several men with mustaches. how is that possible? and i got up this morning and did yoga on my own in my hotel room. while watching the movie hook. how is that possible? and then i went for ice cream at a secret baskin robbins and e.t. was playing on tv and i watched the whole second half and cried in the baskin robbins while the indian folk stared at me and then i ate a second ice cream cone. i forgot how easy it was to cry at e.t. also, i empathised at the end with e.t. and elliot and their sad parting. (sniffle). i was completely unprepared to leave. i am completely unprepared. i keep considering chucking all the rest of my plans and just moving back to aranmula and marrying my yoga instructor and being a yogini forever. then i remember that in kerala i'm not allowed to swim at the beach or bare my shoulders in public or ride the buses at night or drink alcohol in restaurants or wear jeans or tank tops or shorts or sing karaoke or much of anything really, so then i dry my eyes and fix my heart on visions of dancing my little butt off with beer in hand in kansas city in july and things seem a little bit better. sigh.