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…
Tag:
nature
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…
Street dogs are an everyday sight in India. Like a secret network that spreads itself out over a city, they have their territories and areas of influence; as you wander down any given street you’ll see a variety of dogs dotting the area. Wander down the street often enough, and you’ll get to know these dogs and their usual haunts, their personalities, and witness natural free dog behaviour that we don’t often get to see in a land of sweater-clad Chihuahuas and full-service dog spas. These dogs’ lives are nothing like the lives of Western dogs. They are not seen…
Being at the Krishnamurti Educational Centre of Canada is like being in a series of time capsules. Most of the buildings were built in or around 1958, and while they’ve been lovingly maintained, they haven’t been updated except for perhaps a few features in the 1980s. So there’s some textures and patterns that have a weird childhood familiarity from parents’ or grandparents’ places, but still well-kept and cared for. And then if you step outside, and wander off into the fields and forests or down to the cliffs along the ocean, and pick a spot and sit there for a…