It’s been well over a month since the last post, and what a time it’s been. Mainly because I now know where I’m going to be living for the next good solid chunk of my life. My near-year of nomadic wandering is drawing to a close soon. I’ve bought a home. Everyone’s first reaction when I told them was “I didn’t expect you to find something that quickly!” And I didn’t either, actually. It all just sort of happened. After leaving Bowen Island at the end of April and just before heading back to another yoga/meditation workshop with Oda Lindner…
Category:
Travel
It seems really odd to be writing this blog now. It feels like adding one more scene after the movie credits have already rolled. I mean, I’m back in Canada. That’s like neutral territory. I’ve been keeping this travel blog and now I’m not really traveling, not the same way. Why am I writing? What do you want to hear about? Hi, um, I got my taxes done this week and I found a good price on avocados? Okay, I guess there’s a little more going on than that. I came over to Bowen Island last weekend to stay for…
In the past week, I’ve gone… from a land where even stop signs are flagrantly ignored… to a land where people diligently obey the myriad signs with warnings, cautions, and rules such as “do not use selfie sticks on the train” from a land where I’m glad enough to find a sketchy concrete hole in the ground for a toilet… to a land where I scoff if the toilet seat isn’t even heated from a land of brightly multicoloured houses and dazzling, dramatic clothing… to a land where houses and humans alike are mostly dressed in shades of grey and…
While I made several wonderful new friends in Tiru, it’s the street dogs that I’m most driven to write about. (This is also because they don’t mind me airing their personal business on a public-facing blog.) Here’s where things stood with them at the point that I left town. Rorschach The day I posted that last story about the dogs also happened to be the night of the full full moon. This is when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over India come for girivalam and walk barefoot around the holy mountain Arunachala, a 14km trip, which is said…
It’s finally happened. After four months without leaving the orbit of Arunachala, I have broken free of the gravitational pull of the mountain and made it to Chennai as planned. I really did expect to do some short trips outside Tiruvannamalai at some point in my visit. It just never happened. For the first two months, I felt no desire to go anywhere else; then by the time I was starting to get restless, I either had weekend plans, too much work during the weekdays, or was having enough intermittent issues with my digestion that the idea of a long…