In a D.C. Minute: JuMp StArT yOuR DaY

You could preface India with a lot of things: never ending traffic, incessant beeping, overwhelming smells, cheeky people, shrewd businessmen...circus animal mayhem. Being prepared sometimes isn't enough.

Before I left for India I emailed friends that were either from there, living there or had previously been there to ask for advice, and I got a lot of it. The main theme was: be prepared to have your senses assaulted. "India and I have a love/hate relationship," one friend said and another chimed in with, "one minute you'll love it, the next you'll hate it, just be prepared." I even had two people say "DON'T GO!!!!"

With those warnings in mind I expected to be walking through piles of trash, have people banging incessantly on our car doors petitioning us to buy sundry items and being forced to plug my nose so as not to gag for the entire two weeks I was there. Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised. Sure there are dirty parts but I think we managed to avoid really bad areas (as you should.) As for the smell, of course I occasionally wanted to gag, but that was just as often from the car exhaust as it was foul smelling unmentionables, and even then it wasn't too bad. However, after surviving food poisoning, a fall down wet marble steps (where I thought I broke my arm) and having green hair... and still liking it, I've realized that I'm a lot more laid back than I ever thought I was. Well that and perhaps my imagination is worse than reality? Let's call it a healthy mix of both. So while that makes me personally very happy, it doesn't make me an accurate litmus test.

If I had the money and PTO, I'd go back next week. I want to hike the Himalayas, go to Mumbai, Jodipur, Pondicherry, Darjeeling, Varanasi, Ladakh, etc. India is vast, it is huge, it is chaotic, it is amazing. However, by the end of our trip there was one "definitely go back", one "may/may not go back" and one definitive "will never go back." My fellow compadrecitas experienced the ups and downs far more acutely than I did. If Delhi Belly was visiting, the driving too chaotic, the vast amounts of people too much, they'd break. After day seven they were ready to scrap India and go on an R&R to the Maldives. The only thing that stopped them was my --bane of my existence--single entry journalist visa and a semblance of loyalty not to ditch me. Even then they tried to figure out a way to get us all there. (Although I have to admit, at 1am after 2 hours of vomiting, I had a nice long cry on the bathroom floor.) But if we'd meet amazing people (which we often did), eat fantastic food (pre food poisoning I often did) or see something breath taking (we often did), they snapped out of it and fall in love all over again. Sure, it sometimes felt like a roller coaster, but that's India.

Amidst the extreme ups and downs, one way we found to release stress was to just do something that was so ridiculous you couldn't help but laugh, and it usually involved a camera. For example, measuring our ears/noses/head sizes with a coffee straw to see who's was biggest. And jumping photos at the Agra Fort. Or, due to the fact that children on planes in India run up and down the isles, kick seats and grab hair, we'd mimic the mile-high family reunions and how we felt about them. Did we have an audience every time, absolutely. Did we care, absolutely not. A healthy way to cope, don't you think?

Agra Fort