uugh, india!

this pretty much sums it up
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I don't really know what to say about India. I do know that I didn't spend nearly enough time there to make any judgments about the place, but I can say that I did not love it. It has been a week now since I left, giving me some time to process the whole experience and honestly, I don’t know if I will go back. It was just hard. Thank god I was there with Bridget- alone it would have been really hard, especially those first few days in Delhi.

I think what got to me the most was the air quality. I just had a hard time being somewhere where I didn’t feel like I could take a good, deep breath. Besides that, I really didn’t feel comfortable with the people. There were very few women in public and the men were always just trying to sell us something or take our picture. “Just one snap, madam”, became the most commonly heard phrase. I simply never felt comfortable there. At this point I’m totally fine with people staring at me and laughing or whatever because I’m a foreigner but I don’t like the invasion of personal space that happened in India. I must say that I never felt scared of the people-they are just curious, I think, but wished they would keep their curiosity to themselves!

me
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While in India I also had this strange feeling of being unsafe, and a weird fear of dying on a bus or train or car accident. I thought that something was wrong with me, that I was developing some strange phobias but when I shared my feelings with some people I met who are living there they said that those fears are totally valid in India. It just feels different there- like there is so much less value placed on human lives than we have. I really felt as if I was just the tiny speck in the universe that I am, and that in any moment I could be gone. I guess that’s really true everywhere all of the time but I don’t usually feel it so deeply.

tibetan school in dharamsala
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We only stayed in Delhi, Rishikesh, and Dharamshala so maybe different parts of India are different, or maybe I just needed more time to get into the India vibe. I don’t know but I think I will have to think long and hard before returning. I would go back to Dharamshala in a heartbeat but that place is full of Tibetans- it hardly counts as India!

On a more positive note, flying from Delhi back to Hong Kong we got great views of the Himalaya and I saw Mount Everest and K2. I never thought I’d see that and even though it was from an airplane on a clear day it was still spectacular.