Home sweet home away from home

I currently find myself back in Delhi at my friends’ posh apartment. In the end, I decided that I really needed to stick to my original plan and continue on to Thailand. Goa would be cool, especially in the right company, but I’ve already deviated enough. I’m afraid that if I stay in India any longer, I will never leave. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I really feel like I need to see and do some things I’ve been dreaming of for months before I go and settle down anywhere. So perhaps another day I will get to Goa, but for now a nice quiet beach in the south of Thailand is on order. All I want to do is read, relax, and work on my tan for a little while. I arrived around 6:30 this morning after a 12-hour bus ride from Mcleod Ganj, one that was so rough that at times I expected to open my eyes to discover that I was actually in a military humvee headed for the front lines in Afghanistan. There was also no toilet on the bus, but fortunately we made a couple stops along the way. I swear, there is nothing dull about India. Everything is a challenge, sometimes fun, sometimes just crazy.

In any case, walking into my friends’ apartment early this morning was like walking into heaven. There was heat (!) and hot water on command. I’ve been taking bucket showers for a week or so now, with hot water, but there is nothing like a stand-up shower. Ahhhh… I didn’t have much for dinner last night, so this morning a breakfast of toast and hard-boiled eggs was most welcome. It’s so nice to have a kitchen at my disposal, one filled with products that I know and love. I will stay here one more day and then head out on Saturday, arriving in Bangkok early evening. I plan to spend a few days there, get myself a new iPod and fill it with illegal downloads (I’m not proud, but this is what people do here and I am in desperate need of travel tunes), then wind my way down to some less touristed island in the south.

Speaking of illegal, I wonder if the The North Face knows that there are millions of imposter jackets and other gear with their logo all over this country. I started to notice this in Rishikesh and it’s even more prevalent in Mcleod Ganj. They’re not bad quality, they’re just not North Face quality. I attempted to replace my hiking shoes here, but really good shoes are also hard to find. I settled on a pair of Converse All-Stars, that all-American classic which I have never owned before now. These too are also not real, I believe, but they will do. At least they keep my feet covered and me looking less like a flower child. Maybe I’m spoiled, but I find the quality of most goods to be much higher in the U.S. The ironic thing is, most of them are actually made here.