Panorama of the Week: Udaipur Market – Rajasthan, India
We’re often asked about our favorite markets. The panorama below puts you in the middle of one of them in Udaipur, India. Continue Reading »
We’re often asked about our favorite markets. The panorama below puts you in the middle of one of them in Udaipur, India. Continue Reading »
So you think Indian food is just chicken tikka masala and palak paneer? Think again.
Recently, I’ve settled into a familiar morning routine: a masala dosa and sweet milk coffee in a simple canteen just down the street. Attendants make their rounds with metal pails full of sambar and colorful wet chutneys, ensuring that all customers have ample supply, more than enough to eat.

The activity, the flow, the smell and most certainly the taste all make me feel at home. Continue Reading »
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been uploading the remaining photos from our travels through India and Nepal in 2008 (This New Year’s resolution, if you’re wondering: NEVER EVER allow ourselves to get this far behind on photos.)
Experiences, emotions, and even memories of certain smells came back to me as I added labels and descriptions.
Sometimes a story behind a photo really stays with you. While sifting through our images from Udaipur (a terrific town in the Indian state of Rajasthan), I came across this photo of a girl we’d met in the market there. In some ways, it looks like so many of our other photos of children and people in India – colorful, human, evocative. But to me, this image carried a story — and a lesson.
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Bad luck in Berlin takes us on a flashback to southern India.
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I recently shared our stories of Chandigarh with a group of new friends over a beer and was shocked to find someone who not only knew of Chandigarh but also asked me what I thought about the “Rock Garden.”
As cool as the Nek Chand Rock Garden is, the story of its construction and evolution in the unlikely city of Chandigarh is even cooler. Continue Reading »
The driver carved his way across northern West Bengal through territory unknown to most, including the mapmakers. Our SUV eventually rolled to a stop at the end of a dirt road where a group of village women dressed in their best and brightest saris were seated in a semi-circle on the ground. They had been waiting for hours.
And they were waiting for us.
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To say that you’ve seen the world before seeing India is like saying you know yourself before taking a good long look at your naked body in the mirror.
Evening Puja (Prayers) in Udaipur, Rajasthan. Click Fullscreen (4 arrows) and move around the panoramic image.
Author’s Note: As we begin to write about our last visit to India in greater depth, I’m reminded of my first trip there — also my first trip abroad that I took solo in 1997. Those were the days of traveler’s checks, thick stapled wads of Indian rupees, and exorbitantly priced, poor quality phone calls booked from telephone wallahs on the street. The ATM machines, internet cafes and easy-to-purchase mobile phone SIM cards of today’s India seemed only a pipe dream back then.
This is the first of a multi-part series chronicling the bizarre experiences and lessons – about India, travel and me – that first visit imparted. No other trip since has affected me in quite the same way. Continue Reading »
Astute Chinese women told us what they thought about men in Ten Secrets of Women Call.
Now, men get their say.
For all the women out there who spend countless hours wondering what annoys men, this one’s for you. Continue Reading »
While sifting through papers tonight, I found this Kolkata (Calcutta) newspaper clipping from our time there in April 2008. I couldn’t have made this up if I tried.
Man swaps wife for goat
A Bulgarian farmer has swapped his wife for a goat – because she couldn’t give him kids. Stoil Panayotov exchanged his third wife with Elena, the eight-year-old goat at a livestock market. The extraordinary deal was concluded in front of a stunned crowd in the market town of Plovdiv, central Bulgaria. “The day before, a friend told me that he has had no luck with women and that he really liked my wife,” says the 54-year-old. “The deal was reached when my wife gave her approval. The goat has given birth to three kids and my wife to none. So this deal was more profitable to the goat owner, I got a secondhand goat and he got a brand new wife.”
I’m not normally moved to poetry, but India is a place of firsts. I wrote this in Kolkata (Calcutta), but was reminded of it today as I walked the streets of Thamel, Kathmandu’s backpacker ghetto.
This poem is for all who ceaselessly sidle up to me as I walk down the street, befriending me only for the sake of a sale. Although I’m certain those who inspired this poem are unlikely to ever see it, I offer it just the same. Continue Reading »