Inaugural Airing of the Laundry

I've decided - in the interest of posterity - to put online individual entries from the journal I kept over the summer. In May, I traveled alone through India; in June and July I worked as a writer in Beijing; in August I traveled through China's northwest Xinjiang Province/Autonomous Zone, and journeyed to the tropical cum Tibetan Yunnan Province in China's south.

I shall post the entries as I wrote them, and make only small edits. This is the inaugural post - two of my earliest entries.

Friday, May 5 - 6:20 a.m. / Delhi

It seems bizarre, and slightly unreasonable, that this is my third sunrise in a row in a different country. The sun crested the 401 as we drove toward Toronto's Pearson International, then it lit up the industrial smoke stack and hustle of north Beijing, and now, from a rooftop in Paharganj, Delhi, the slums of the Indian subcontinent are waking up. I'm not one for reason, or sanity, if any of those means I can't feel "this" - the personification of an evolving internationalism, the understanding that the sun rises on a shared humanity.

1) lizard on wall of hotel
2) two women named Marissa from Montreal
3) all is well

May 6, 8:24 a.m. / Border, Uttar Pradesh

We're in a colum of cars at the border; old, wizened men with cobras slung over their backs walk up and down offering to pose for pictures. Toothless bears with rope threaded in through a torn hole in their face and out their nostrils stand up for little children and their nervous parents; the bears teeth seem to have been forcibly removed, and, either from malnutrition or from the harness, their snouts are shriveled and drooping.

ETC. Indian countryside, dung huts or mud huts?