My Life in Words

Hello Everyone Firstly, thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes.  It's nice hearing from home when I'm so far away from everyone and everything. So, since I last wrote, we've spent 5 days traveling around Rajasthan. On Saturday we drove about 5 hours to Jodhpur aka "the blue city". Many of the buildings in the city are painted a periwinkle blue colour, which gives a  very pretty effect when looking over the city.  Apparently the blue colour helps keep the buildings cool and the bugs out.  I don't know if I buy that - if it were true, I would think there would be more blue cities out there. But it looks nice at least. When we arrived we went to....take a guess.....another fort! I wasn't super excited, however I ended up really enjoying it and it's my favourite one so far.  There was an audio tour with it, which was spoken by someone with a British accent (so it was understandable) and was quite well done.  The palace within the fort was in use until

Ok, post number 3. Week 2 is in the books and I don't have a lot to report.  It was a fairly quiet week; working at the orphanage in the mornings and sight seeing in the afternoons. To be honest, I'm pretty Forted out.  I think I've been to more forts in the past 2 weeks, then the rest of my life combined.  We've probably seen 5 or 6 now.  They are all beautiful, but I'm a bit over it. They are all starting to look the same - the amber fort, the tiger fort, the red fort, the monkey temple, etc.  They sound very different by their names, but in actuality they are not.  They are all similar colour (due to pollution), they all have monkeys, and none have tigers.  Anyway, think its time to lay off the forts for a while so that I appreciate them more again. I figured I would use this post to talk about Indian life a bit - what it's like to be here.  The day to day cultural differences are the most interesting thing about this trip so far; how even simple things are r

Hello again. Im glad that everyone enjoyed the first post; it's likely all downhill from here.   Its been a busy few days which started on Wednesday when we decided to go to the cricket.  Australia is here playing India in a series of one day tests, so we thought it would be fun to go check it out.  However in typical Indian fashion we couldn't figure out how to go about buying tickets.  After a few failed phone calls, google searches and a day before trip to the stadium, we decided our best approach was to just turn up on the day and try to buy them at the door.  We were all a bit apprehensive though, as we had no idea whether there were tickets available or at what price (the tourist price of things is usually 3x more than the Indian price). Things were weird right from arrival at the stadium. Upon entering, we had to walk through metal detectors; men in one line, women in another.  We were then haphazardly  searched, and stripped of miscellaneous possessions for no good reas

India, India, India. Where to begin? I've always been on the fence about traveling to India. Sometimes, the idea of it is exciting in the opportunity to see the Taj, the Goan beaches, the amazing food and the completely different culture.  Other times it has scared me; the poverty, petty theft, dirt, stink, and high likelihood of stomach flu. After Egypt in 2010, I decided it would be a while before I traveled to the third world again.  But 3 years on, I'm here, 350km south west of Delhi in the city of Juipur, India.  I was able to get 5 weeks off work and I figured that if I didn't come now, I may never.   I decided to do something a little different for this trip.  Rather than just do a tour, I signed up for a voluntourism program. It's a mix of volunteering during the week and traveling on the weekends.  Yet to be determined whether that was a good idea or a huge mistake.   I flew into Delhi where a driver from the volunteer program was to pick me up from the airport