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…
Tag:
travel
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…
What is happening to time?! I’ve got barely two weeks left in India, and still feeling like there’s not enough time to do all the things (including doing nothing). And including blogging – I’ve still got three of the five senses left to write about, dammit. I’ve got a followup post in mind about Missy and Rorschach that would read like a soap opera. And yet another week goes by, vroom. It’s been a weird few weeks, actually. I had some kind of unpleasant digestive stuff going on – not food poisoning, but obviously something had thrown my system out…
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…