One Week

The air is cool and comfortable, filled with music drifting up from--somewhere--it sounds devotional, but maybe it's Bollywood. I'm seated on the floor on the roof of the Cosy Guest House in Jodhpur, the Blue City of Rajasthan, eating bananas and oranges and sweet peas from the pod (only things that come in natural packages). I burned my mouth on a samosa and the juice from these sweet little oranges stings and smarts on my lips. I'm barefoot happy and wrapped in the soft gauze scarf I haggled for and won in the market today. My body is clean but my clothes are dirty, and the smells wafting from the kitchen make me wish I hadn't spent my budget for the day. But the scarf is warm now and shaded me from the sun, and today I also bought sunscreen, so it's worth it for my skin.

I've been on the ground in India for one week today. I'm at a loss to understand how I've managed to live so much in one week. It seems like I've always been here, but if that were the case then I wouldn't be so disoriented. And my Hindi would be much, much better. I've had a few scary moments with Indian men overstepping boundaries, and a few really stupid moments where I was naive enough to get cheated out of a tidy sum of money. But I'm learning from those, and the good parts are much better.

Short version goes like this: I was in hotels in Jaipur for three nights, then spent two nights at my newfound friend Rahul's family home in Amber, a town right outside Jaipur and full of life. His family didn't speak much English (the kids learn English in school, but it's rudimentary still) so we communicated mostly through food, headbobbing, gestures, sheepish smiles. The food that Rahul's sister cooked was incredibly delicious, but had me dashing in and out of the toilet room and doubled over with stomach cramps. Turns out that when it's spicy going in, it's still spicy coming out...enough said. Rahul and his friends Lala, Mann, Vinod, and Vijay went out of their way to show me a wonderful time in Amber, from introducing me to a baby elephant to throwing a party in honor of my older brother's birthday. And then on December 18th I hopped a train to Jodhpur, the Blue City. How long have I dreamed of coming to Jodhpur? Long enough. It's not as blue as I imagined it, though to be fair it's pretty blue. And tomorrow I'm jumping on another train to Jaisalmer, to meet up with Shiva Singh, who runs Dumpal Khadin organic farm, my first WWOOFing connection.

My innards seem to have quieted themselves, and the food here in Jodhpur has been amazing. Amazing masala omelettes for 50 cents on the street; amazing saffron lassi from a shop under the clocktower (they have a whole menu, but Lonely Planet mentioned their saffron lassi and now they don't sell anything else; they don't even ask when foreign people come in, but just clunk a saffron lassi on the table. and it's incredible); the best samosa I've ever had (I had three for lunch/dinner). Even the cheapest street food here tastes wonderful. Everything is full of flavor. Surprisingly, the sweets aren't great. Jalebi, little fried squiggles of sugary dough, turn my stomach. Really, it's just fried sugar. Raju, a boy I met in Jaipur, insists that people eat them for breakfast. Yeah, right. And most of the other sweets I've had so far are similar concoctions of sugar and butter (held together with a little gram flour) without much flavor.

Today, really for the first time since I got here, I was alone. In Jaipur Rahul and his friends were my constant escort, and yesterday in Jodhpur I met this awesome American couple at the railway booking office and ended up spending all yesterday and a lot of today with them. They've known each other since they were 15 and have been traveling for something like 5 months, on an epic journey around the Ring of Fire starting in Alaska and down the West Coast, then to south Pacific and across Eastern Asia into India. They were so even-headed, so real. They helped me to break through my inability to haggle, and they helped me to find a new notebook and pens (which was a day-long journey from bookstore to stationary store and everywhere in between). And they recommended the omelette shop where I'm having breakfast again tomorrow. The dude who runs the omelette shop has been making omelettes there and nothing else for 13 years; he goes through over 1,000 eggs each day. Lonely Planet talks about him, too, so of course everyone goes there. In the afternoon I parted ways with Galen and Jeff (they're bound for Goa) and I hiked up to Jaswant Thada, this beautiful white marble memorial to some Maharaja or another, built in 1899 and overlooking the whole city. There's a garden there where I sat and broke in my new notebook. I felt peaceful and relieved to be alone. I heard the call to prayer resounding out above and through the whole city. It's so eerie and amazing: several lead voices on PA's, sounding amplified as if only by reverence and spirit, and this deep thrumming beneath of thousands of voices amplified only by their unity. I want to get up before sunrise tomorrow and hike up to the hilltop to see the sun come up over the edge of town. It's my last chance to do so, since I'm getting on a train tomorrow night for Jaisalmer. Maybe I'll just watch the sunrise from the roof of my guesthouse, which is a bit above the main part of the city, in the Old City, the blue part of the city.

This is a really challenging place. I'm learning strength and awareness, and dealing with a lot of thoughts about necessity, luxury, equality, entitlement, humanity. Waste, garbage. Generosity, kindness. Desperation. I'm reading a dark and cynical William Burroughs book called The Western Lands, based in ancient Egyptian writings. He writes of Sek, the second soul, life energy that abounds in disaster and desperation. This place is rich with life energy, with Sek, fertile with life energy.

I've only been here a week; seven days seems like an awfully short time to change your life.