“TWO HUNDRED RUPEES?!” our India tour guide, Manu, gasped. “That’s WAY too much, David!”
“Sheesh,” mumbled my brother as we walked out of the Gandhi Memorial in New Delhi. “Three and a half dollars isn’t a terrible price to stroke one of those fancy snakes, especially since the guy said the fangs were removed. Anyway, I bargained him down from 1,000 rupees.”
“Next time,” Manu instructed my little brother, “Pay only 20 or 50 rupees– [...Read More!]
Snack shopping in a foreign country is hilarious. Who knew that Lay’s potato chips made a popular flavor called “India’s Magic Masala” in Asia?
During our India tour, my brother eagerly bought a bag of the snack, shoved a handful of chippy goodness into his mouth then screamed: “SPICY!”
“What did you expect?” asked our guide with a grin. “Masala usually means spicy here!”
We moved down the snack aisle and came face to [...Read More!]
I couldn’t stop laughing, flipping through these final Old Delhi photos from our teacher tour of India. As you may have seen from the previous two articles, Old Delhi is chaotic on foot, so you can imagine how much more of a crazy rainbow whirlwind things became when our guide hailed a pack of bicycle rickshaws to zip us around! In the moment, I hardly realized what my camera was capturing.
Now [...Read More!]
Here’s a budget travel secret: One and a half blocks in Old Delhi, India can provide more delicious photography opportunities than miles and miles of another region of the world!
When we last left off, our teacher tour of India was in day two of our adventures. We had lapped up the sights at the largest Mosque in India, and gotten some fabulous stares, sights, and photo bombs from our first steps into [...Read More!]
“You will like the Sikh temple we’re about to visit,” our guide, Manu, explained after our intense first hours in New Delhi, India. “Gurudwara Bangla Sahib has a great vibe to it.”
We perked up. Our teacher tour needed a good vibe after the hectic sights of India we’d gulped in all day. “Just one thing,” Manu cautioned. “You must remove your shoes for the remainder of the visit.”
We yanked off our shoes [...Read More!]
During the first two hours of India travel, we had already seen an elephant, ox, monkey, thick smog, endless vehicles, and a good chunk of the 1.2 billion people of the country. If I tell you this article is about the third hour in India, what the heck will it cover?
Easy: The inadvertent modern art created by walls, doors, trash, and laundry in the Paharganj neighborhood of Central Delhi.
Our first activity of the [...Read More!]
Where to start? We went to India for 12 days and it was… so much! So much of everything all together: people with animals, rich with poor, fragrances with shocking smells, beautiful colors with dismal grays, chaos with order… I could go on all day. India was everything that everyone said it is, and more. All those rumors are really true!
After 38 hours of travel (including an epic 14-hour layover adventure in [...Read More!]
According to the theory “The 5 Love Languages,” each person has a different ranking of the following five manners of showing and receiving love: Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, and Physical Touch.
What this means is that there is a whole set of people (myself included) for whom gift giving is the lowest ranking way in which we understand love. Shopping for, giving, and receiving gifts is [...Read More!]
Today marks the three month anniversary of our epic wedding (married life has been lovely so far, thanks for asking!), so let us commemorate it with a final wedding article: an entertaining yet educational piece using the final photos from our nuptials to illustrate the glorious traditions of a Jewish wedding.
The Ketubah is the sacred Jewish marriage contract, and Colin and I signed it in an intimate room right before the actual wedding ceremony. A Ketubah [...Read More!]
As you saw in my recent fall foliage article, I was in the heart-stoppingly gorgeous middle-of-nowhere, New Hampshire for my birthday. Throughout the weekend, the theme of “unplugging” and “being cut off from civilization” recurred… in part because my husband‘s friend decided to live for 24 hours on a raft and boat.
Let us call this friend “Cory” to mask his identity. See that lake in the photo, above? See the raft forty [...Read More!]