Latest news, and coming home soon
Hi there, Chris here. It's been a while since we posted, and our time in India is almost at a close. Let me just recap quickly some of the events of the last couple months:
- My parents and brother came to visit in February, a couple days after our last blog post. We had a great time, showed them around Bombay, and went off traveling to Jodhpur and Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, and Ajanta and Ellora Caves in eastern Maharashtra. They got into the India travel mode pretty easily and enjoyed themselves, and their design eyes spotted a bunch of cool stuff to take back with them.
- Lydia came to visit a week or so after they left. She stayed with us in Bombay and we painted the town red.
- After a bit of a visitor break, Sam and Kaleem came to visit us in April. I went off with them to travel in the foothills of the Himalayas in Sikkim and Darjeeling. Beth went off to Bangalore and Kolkata.
- Bollywood redux: I decided to go back for more, and ended up scoring a starring role in a music video, which I shot in April. The video is for playback singer Kumar Sanu, and will be played on Channel V and MTV. We'll link to it when it shows up, but let's just say I'm a member of a boy band who dances some Bollywood moves while crooning in Hindi into the ear of a young starlet.
- Phil has been visiting us in Mumbai for the past two weeks, and we hooked him up with a Bollywood experience of his own. He's just arrived back from Goa, where he shot a TV commercial for a tech company. Beth headed off to a small town in Gujarat for a couple of days.
- Tomorrow night, Karen flies in to Bombay, and she and Phil will hang out for a while and see the city - then go traveling on their own.
- I'm currently on doctor-ordered bed rest after what appears to be a viral fever that ended up with me getting jaundice. I've been resting now for almost a week, and have taken more blood tests and X-rays than I hope to experience for a long time. Happily, all the tropical diseases we were really worried about - malaria, dengue, leptospira, etc. - came back negative. And the remedy for what I've got is to take it easy and drink a lot of fruit juices. Done!
- Desiree and Joe arrive next week, and soon afterwards the six of us (including Phil and Karen) will meet up in Himachal Pradesh and go traveling and hiking around the Manali area - back up in the Himalayan hills.
- Beth and I are moving out of our apartment at the end of May, and will spend the first two weeks of June traveling with our friends in Himachal Pradesh and on our own in Ladakh.
- We come back to Bombay for a weekend halfway through June, and fly home on June 16. Just a month from now! Time feels like it's flying, and we're trying to make sure we pack up our stuff, buy everything we want to take home to the States, and generally enjoy our last few weeks here with our new and old friends both.
