I wish I was a poet…
…. maybe then I would have the words to describe the sensory input I have experienced in the course of the last week and a half… I have heard it said that every place has its own sensory set, its own colors, sounds, smells, tastes, feel… India seems to have all of them: Brown dust on the ground is offset by loud colors be it of plastic products hanging in openings resembling stores or of women’s magnificient sari’s; beeping horns, Indian elevator music, the sound of a diesel motor grinding sugar cane dripping its sweet juices into plastic cups washed in a bucket of water that is as brown as the ground; the scent of delightful incense mingling with the scent of jasmine woven into women’s hair immediately followed by the smell of an open sewer running by the side of the street and the pile of possibly human shit at my feet. It seems impossible to walk in a straight line. The sidewalks are crooked, interrupted by hanging powerlines, plastic wrappings, an unfortunate sign of Westernization, lying there discarded with the same laissez-faire as banana peels that would not be there in another thousand years. Bananas… Never had one before I came here, I think. The green things they sell in super markets in the west seem if at all a remote cousin of the fruit I have had the pleasure of tasting here. The food in general has been most amazing. Every bite put into my mouth so far has been an explosion of flavors, tasting totally different by the time it is swallowed, in between jumping through a range of suprises, delights, tickles…
For the whole first week I was here I could not have taken a picture if I had wanted to. It was as if the sights had blinded my eyes and brain like film exposed to sunlight. Even now, I cannot honestly say that I have taken any real pictures. Below are a couple of touristy shots I took last weekend of a Dravidian temple from the 7th century and the building across the street from where I work. Although all new, every day as I am standing outside smoking, I see laundry hung up on a clothes line, people dressed only in Lungis washing themselves out of buckets of water, and similar sights that don’t seem to quite fit the steel and glass image the building is trying to pompously portray.
I apologize for not being anywhere near describing the experiences I have had here, I will do my best to capture more over the next weeks…
No rest for the wicked…
It’s been a while since my last entry. If I get this right, I have been in Berlin, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, London, Zurich, Milan, Hastings, and who knows where else since then. The picture on the right is from Zurich airport, which apparently has the longest business lounge airport bar in the world (it was indeed pretty long). My friend Brett once recorded a song with an Artist named John Fournier called “Drinking in Airports”, which kind of stuck with me 
Have been collecting my boarding passes and it’s turned into a cute little book. Have to figure out how I can use it somehow… In the least, I might scan them and then we shall see. Maybe I will use them for my Once-Around-The-World Party invite. That’s right, Once-Around-The-World. I guess that other people have done this before, and some in 80 days, but for me it’s a first. I thought I would return to LA after finishing my project in London this week, be there for a few weeks and then think about going to India for a vacation and to visit my cousin who is over there at the moment, but things turned out a bit different…
Looks like I will be going to Chennai (Madras) end of this week as soon as I am done here in London, and no, not (just) on vacation, but to work on a project over there… Of course, not having been home in the last three months (wherever that place was again), I will travel there with all my winter clothes that brought me through the cold months in Europe. There, I am told, it will be about 40 degrees Celcius and 85-90% Humidity. Think I won’t need my jackets… Then it’s on to LA to exchange clothes, catch my breath and all that good stuff. At that point, I will have actually gone around the world once this year having started in LA in February – thus the party.
After that it’s back to India until the end of July and then… we shall see… Don’t have a plan yet, but am sure I will have one eventually, even if no plan ever survives initial contact
How appropriate, though, that my mystic tour 2006 would actually lead me to India. What better place. Had hoped to be there this January to study with my Yoga teacher’s teacher. Then I had hoped to go there to visit Auroville, where my cousin is currently working on a project, but that, too, did not go as planned. Now I am going there for a whole set of different reasons, but I still hope that I will have the chance to study some Yoga, see Auroville, check out the Theosophical Society, and maybe a couple of Ashrams and magnificient sages… Ahhhh…. mystical it is indeed
On that note, here a collage with more pictures taken for a picture contest a friend of mine is holding. Of course, the topic is “toilets”…. The ones below are from Frankfurt and London (Camden Town):
Twitter- Worry be gone! You can do it! Just this week! Check out http://monkday.com and feel better!
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