Reflections on India and a Summary

Considering how long it’s taken to write this post, you might have guessed that India was…let’s say…challenging. I had wanted to visit India for as long as I can remember, and I know that Frank had similar feelings, but it was definitely by far the most difficult place we’ve traveled. To be honest, I think we were both slightly traumatized from the experience. And this was after expecting the worst–it’s just so different to actually experience it. Rather than complaining, though, I want to try to concentrate on some of the more practical and positive details.

We started in Kolkata, mostly to visit the Dakshineswar Kali Temple, which was a good introduction, but also quite a different experience than the rest of our trip. From there, we traveled to Delhi to meet up with our parents. It was great to see them, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend spending as much time in Delhi as we did. After a couple days just the 5 of us, including a rickshaw food tour of Old Delhi, we were able to join our parents’ tour for a couple days in which we visited many sites including the Jama Masjid, Red Fort and the Gandhi Museum and Memorial.

After we said goodbye to our parents, we took a day trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. This was definitely our favorite spot that we visited. Rather than rushing around and trying to see all the sites in that area, we decided to just spend our 3-4 hours entirely at the Taj Mahal, and we were so glad we did. The building (and surrounding buildings) are incredibly beautiful, and the grounds compare. It’s large enough that we were able to find some seclusion away from the crowds (but it is also great for people watching), and I think it was the first time we’d experienced actual quiet since we’d arrived in India. For those who’ve never been, Indian drivers use horns constantly. I actually think if someone played that prank where the brake is connected to the horn, you’d hear it less than you do now. Hearing the horns incessantly, you just never feel completely calm or relaxed.

Our next stop was Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram) where we’d signed up to take an Ayurveda course on cooking and nutrition. After meeting very few other travelers in India, we were excited to meet the other students. Little did we know that we were the only ones in the class. Once we realized that, we were excited to at least get to know the students in the yoga teacher training program. Unfortunately, only one of the 7 days did our lunch break line up with theirs. We thought we’d get to know them better, but it almost felt like the staff were purposefully keeping us separate…oh well.

Many of the Ayurveda courses you can find online are geared toward tourists and not necessarily authentic. I think we did manage to find an authentic course, for better or worse… This was a real, local Ayurveda center that was definitely not geared for tourists. Our teacher even left sometimes in the middle of our theory session (in which she basically just read from the book) to consult with patients, leaving us waiting sometimes up to 10 minutes. Our favorite part for sure was the practical session every afternoon in which our teacher and 2 assistants demonstrated the various food items and explained how they helped the body and for which body types. We loved learning to make and getting to try lots of different South Indian foods that we probably won’t see in the US (most Indian food in the US is from the North). We learned all sorts of soups, rice dishes, curries, dosas, snacks, desserts, drinks, etc. that we’re definitely going to make for our friends and family when we get back to the US.

While we were staying in Trivandrum, we did our best to see the local sites, but it seems to be a city that’s much better for living than for visiting. The best trip we took was to Kovalam Beach, about a 30 minute bus ride and seemingly a world away. We, having dressed modestly, were by far in the minority. I think it’s the first time we’d seen that much skin in public in quite a long time. Anyway, it’s a beautiful beach and made for a really nice afternoon visit.

After a week in Trivandrum, we took the train to Kochi. It was an ok experience, but again, even though there were some other travelers around, it’s just not set up for meeting people very easily. We wandered around a lot, visited some of the historic sites and went to the beach that would have been beautiful if not for the trash everywhere.

All in all, I just don’t think the overall culture or the structure of the cities was our favorite among the places we’ve visited. We both wanted so badly to like it there, and maybe if we’d spent more time in smaller places, we would have had a different experience, but even then, I’m really not sure how different our experience would have been. This trip gave us a good preview and next time we’ll find some more out of the way places to visit.

Important Travel Tool: Why Mindfulness Is a Superpower (from Happify.com)

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Mindfulness has been a buzzword over the last couple of years, but what does it really mean? And more importantly, how does being more mindful actually impact our day-to-day lives? Watch our new animation narrated by Dan Harris, and you’ll understand why it’s one of the single most powerful things you can do for your wellbeing.

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[kad_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6T02g5hnT4″ maxwidth=600 ]

 

Credits: Narration by Dan Harris. Animation by Katy Davis. Animation assistant: Kim Alexander

Source: Why Mindfulness Is a Superpower: An Animation

Cooking where no one cooks – Part 1

Where are we now?

We’ve now been in Chiang Mai, Thailand for just over a month this time around. It’s a haven for digital nomad expats–apparently, there are 40,000 expats living in Chiang Mai, and walking around town, I believe it. Living expenses are very low, internet is fast and widely available, and there’s lots of fun stuff going on all the time.

Yes, we cook

For those who may be unfamiliar, food in Thailand (especially street food) is cheap, convenient and delicious. So understandably, people we talk to are constantly amazed that we actually cook here (though, admittedly, most of the people we talk to are expats). They’re even more amazed that we cook daily, usually at least 2 meals every day. When you talk to expats who live here about getting a place with a kitchen, most will say “don’t bother.” But I say otherwise. If you’re planning to stay for any length of time, get a kitchen–even a little counter space and a sink is sufficient, as you really don’t need more than that, and electric appliances are very affordable. (More detail on that in the next post)

Here are my reasons.

1.  It’s also inexpensive to buy and cook food at home

Even the Western-style grocery stores by us (Rimping and Tops) are cheap if you’re careful about what you buy. Interestingly, both Tops and Rimping are inside shopping malls, one very modern, and the other…well, let’s just say its heyday has passed. You can find basically any food item you could want from the Western world, but much of that category tends to be pretty expensive, so we’ve tried to stick mostly to what the locals might buy there.

But even better–there are tons of local markets all around. These markets can either be pop-up style like farmers’ markets back home, or they can be more established in an open-air, warehouse sort of building. The latter type might require a bit more courage, and ideally, an orientation from a local. You can find everything from a huge variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, to recently butchered meats, freshly made curry paste, coconut milk squeezed while you wait, flowers and candles for visiting temples, and much more. They’re great places to find just about anything you’d want, inexpensively.

Admittedly, we haven’t taken advantage of local markets as much as we’d like to, but we’re going to start. This morning we tried one that’s more of the farmers’ market kind, at Baan Kang Wat, and maybe it’s just getting started, but it was rather small. We did find some delicious jam and a woman who sells hummus, but sadly she ran out by the time we got there. Frank did get a delicious grilled cheese sandwich, and we shared some nice local kombucha. But just remember, don’t shake your kombucha. I turned it upside down a couple times just to try to mix it and managed to explode it somewhat. Oh well!

 

2.  You can control what goes into it

Since it seems like all the other expats eat out for every meal, I’ve heard complaints that restaurants use MSG, too much oil, and often that vegan/vegetarian food is not actually vegan/vegetarian. The reason for that last complaint is one that I’ve personally experienced. Many Thai cooks don’t realize that fish sauce and oyster sauce aren’t vegetarian by many people’s standards. They just think of the meat itself and not the sauces. Interestingly, though, sometimes if you order your meal vegetarian, they do often ask if you want egg. Coming from the US as a vegetarian, it’s interesting that here they would be more careful about eggs than about fish sauce or oyster sauce.

3.  You’re probably tired of eating out for every meal

As much as we love restaurants, after 4 months of travel through Vietnam, Thailand, Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore, eating almost every single meal out, we were really getting tired of it. We absolutely love waking up, making some oatmeal, cutting up a bunch of fruit, making some tea, and relaxedly eating at home. This takes us maybe 5 minutes even when we’re not rushing. In the past, breakfast involved getting up and dressed, going out and often having to settle for something we didn’t actually want. If we were lucky we could find some kind of yogurt/fruit/muesli bowl, but that wasn’t always an option. Traditional Asian breakfasts are rarely vegetarian, and the “Western” alternative was often expensive and included some kind of unknown sausage, oily eggs and a couple pieces of white toast.

4.  It’s fun to use ingredients that you don’t have at home

Bird’s eye chilies, galangal, lemongrass, kaffir lime zest, kaffir lime leaves, Thai ginseng, passion fruit, star fruit, soursop, dragonfruit, many varieties of bananas, longan, rambutan, mangosteen, etc., etc. The list goes on and on. You may be lucky enough to have an Asian market at home, but odds are, these ingredients will never be as fresh or as cheap as they are here. And do we really want to support the importing of foods from all the way across the globe? So use them now while they’re local.

5.  You can practice new skills

How many of us have a souvenir cookbook from a cooking class that’s just been sitting on a shelf? Use it! Another side benefit is that getting used to cooking in a tiny space will make anything back home seem luxurious.

In part 2, we’ll get down to the practical stuff.

 

Some more photos from Baan Kang Wat

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photos from a market we visited in Bangkok in June

A Few Pros and Cons and Options – Bangkok

Staying at an airport hotel.

Pros: It’s quick and convenient to get to by taxi, especially when you arrive on a delayed flight around midnight, as opposed to a forty minute taxi ride into the city. You get a room to yourself, with a king-size bed (albeit with a Thai-style flat, hard mattress) and a large shower, and time to decompress. Breakfast is only a few dollars, and there’s great wi-fi.

Cons: It feels a little silly to have to get yet more transportation into the city, and it is more expensive than a hostel (ours was $20 a night). It might have been easier to just go directly to downtown, but we really wanted that time to catch up to ourselves.

Getting into the city.

Option 1: just taking a taxi all the way to the city. A bit more expensive, but possibly faster and air-conditioned…but with a crapshoot as to whether you might get stuck in the infamous Bangkok traffic.

Option 2: a bit more convoluted. We took a taxi back to the airport, which yes, did feel a little silly, and then the rail-link into town. It was much cheaper, and the crowds aren’t as bad as most subways we’ve been in, and it looked like we dodged a lot of traffic.

Cell phone service and data.

Option 1: we got here being quite hopeful about our T-Mobile “free international data.” And it seemed to be working quite well near the airport – it even notified us that we’d have free texting! Buuuut, it’s terribly inconsistent away from that initial area, which is really quite frustrating when you suddenly find yourself unable to access maps or addresses sent to you by email in the middle of the chaotic jumble that is Bangkok. We did stumble across a few things, in that, though: a tiny Buddhist funeral procession that held us up, a tropical flora park entirely under a massive overpass, and a mall that was a mix of a warren of commodity-crowded hallways and dizzyingly high atriums within a tall narrow building.

Option 2: Get a dang Thai SIM card. We could have probably done that at the airport. Oops. Instead, we got it in the aforementioned mall, with no English-speakers remotely in sight for a good while (except for a very friendly and helpful random neighbor at the slushie stand we happened to be sitting at, thankfully). For about $15 total, we’ve got a gig and a half to work with, for when our T-Mobile isn’t working. So far, it seems very good, and it includes access to a bunch of wi-fi hotspots around the city.

Couchsurfing.

That data allowed us to finally start to get back on track to getting to our Couchsurfing host for the night, a British expat who lives a fair distance north of Bangkok proper and works at an international school nearby.

Pros: It’s interesting to see how people in Bangkok really live, with close, narrow streets that jumble together industrial and commercial and food stands and motorcycle shops. We got a nice room and another king-size, hard/flat bed and shower to ourselves, and a host that’s easy to communicate with.

Cons: It was a challenging adventure just to get to it, even when we finally got an address to give to a cab-driver, who was obviously challenged himself in trying to find it. Of course, there’s apparently a hugely easier train service to this area, but there wasn’t really any way for us to know that; womp, womp. But we can use that now, at any rate.

Finally Myself Again (and why everyone needs health insurance)

Since today is really the first time this week in which I’m starting to feel like myself again, I finally have the motivation to write this. In an unexpected twist of fate, I ended up needing hernia surgery, which I had last Monday. I didn’t share this with many people because I knew I’d just want to sleep all week.

Anyway, I was born with an umbilical hernia, which for most people goes away as a baby and never becomes an issue again. Well, I’m guessing this winning combination made it come back for me: the HIIT workouts we’d been doing to get ready for travel, the 30-day squat challenge I completed, and nannying for our 20-something pound nephew. The hernia was very tiny, and the doctor said surgery wasn’t completely necessary yet, but it was causing me a lot of pain and would most likely need surgery at some point. I figured, why wait until it is an emergency? And I definitely didn’t want that emergency to take place while we’re farming in some rural part of India! So fortunately, I’ll have just enough time to recover before we leave, but it means that I can’t lift more than 10 pounds for another month (we are planning to pack light, but less than 10 pounds is pretty ambitious). For now, this obviously makes nannying impossible, especially since our nephew loves to be held (and I love holding him)! It was really sad when he reached for me the other day and I couldn’t pick him up.

Anyway, it’s quite a bummer overall, and there were definitely times this week I really started to wonder if I’d made a mistake in having it done now. If this was a minor surgery, I can’t even imagine recovering from a major one! Let’s hope I never have to. But fortunately, today, I’m feeling like myself again and am starting to look forward to the trip again. My biggest fear with this whole thing was that we’d have to delay our trip, but I now think we’ll be good to go. And the best part is that I’ll have a bunch of extra time to prepare and research.

Because it wouldn’t have been possible without them, I can’t end this post without thanking my family for the wonderful TLC they’ve given me this week and all the well-wishes from friends and family. And most of all, thanks to our cats, Rogue and Bozo, for watching over me (except of course when they tried to sit on my tummy).

Oh, and thank goodness for Obamacare! I guess the other option would have been to have the surgery done when we get to Thailand and then recover at some medical-tourism hospital/beach resort…

 

Happy Holidays!

Although not exactly as we’d originally planned, 2014 ended up being a pretty great year. We saw lots of amazing places and visited with lots and lots of family and friends. We must say, though, that a major highlight was the time that we spent working with Will and Meghan on the farm in California. Frank, for example, would reminisce fondly about surveying the ponds and fields when he was overwhelmed by the crowds in New York – it was his “happy place.” So after dealing with some family stuff lately, it was an awesome surprise to receive a gift box in the mail from Will and Meghan.

 

Fortunately, it sounds like all the hard work we put in over the summer has continued to help yield some exciting things! In the mail we received hot sauce, catsup, and apple butter. This is to add to the pickles and jams we brought home with us and have been enjoying already (albeit we’ve been pacing opening each jar to best savor them, of course). Although we have to “settle” for grocery store and farmers’ market produce now, it’s nice to think that we can still enjoy a bit of the farm, even from this distance. It sounds like things have changed a lot, and it’s nice to be able to keep up through their blog. We’re of mixed minds as to whether we’re disappointed to miss the great bear assault on the vineyard or glad we weren’t there given the destructive aftermath.

“Basically, our wives were stalking each other…”

True story. That is, we realized in explaining how we met our friends Rosie and Ari that the title is probably the most efficient way to boil it down. There is a longer story which we’d be happy to tell you, but it involved some social media stuff, wedding photo websites (and a shared photographer) and some small-world coincidences.

Anyway, the point of bringing this up is:

Rosie and Ari got hitched! Legally.

#winning

 

We were luckily in town for a casual reception they had following their second round of nuptials at Temple Emanu-El (their first was a Jewish ceremony a week after ours, but we didn’t know each other at the time). We’ve been excited for them ever since we heard the news about marriage equality coming to Arizona while we were traveling back east. As the court decisions started rolling in this summer and fall, we kept hoping Arizona would be next!

In conclusion:

Would you say…there is a plethora?

Three Amigos reference, anyone? Anyone? Anyway, we’re in the middle of traveling and all, but just thought we’d share a list we pondered over – it’s of all the professions we’ve encountered so far while traveling outside of Arizona. We think, anyway; there’s a good chance we missed some (they’re all out of order, as well). Although we’re being nomadic at the moment and reflecting on our potential future professions, it’s been very interesting to see what everyone else is doing along the way!

• Rabbi (married to another rabbi)
• Neuro-Critical Care Fellow
• Radiation Oncology Doctor
• US Park Ranger
• Psychotherapist
• Deli Owner
• Freelance Writer
• Software Engineer (and breakdancer)
• Optical Engineer
• County Administrator
• Software Troubleshooter At Large
• Sustainable Farm Manager (x2)
• International Charity Cause Scout
• Stem Cell Post-Doc Researcher
• Power Systems Engineer
• FDA Inspector
• City Council/Environmental Consultant
• USAF Reconnaissance Pilot
• Global Health Grant Funder
• Bodyguard For Famous People
• Social Worker/Counselor
• US Marine
• High-End Consulting (x3)
• Unfinished Wooden Furniture Store Owner
• Gut Flora Post-Doc Researcher
• Jewish Community Engagement Strategist
• Medical Device Engineer
• Fracking Researcher for State Government
• High School Math Teacher
• Nursing Student
• Hedge Fund Reporter
• Stay at Home Dad
• Composer
• Community Health Post-Doc Researcher
• Graphic Artist in Advertising
• Itinerant Journalist
• Stay at Home Mom
• Community Organizer (Art-specific)
• Business District Community Organizer
• President at a Software Startup
• Physician’s Assistant in Urology
• Something in Finance
• Manager at a Chocolate Factory
• School Garden Educator

Retrospective: Last Week of Work

Now that I’ve had a few days to think about it, and I’m not completely bogged down by dealing with stuff, I’m starting to really think about how things ended in Tucson.  And you know what?  I’m very happy about it.  Although it’s very likely that we’ll return to Tucson in two years, this definitely was the end of an era, and a good one at that.  It’s amazing to think about how much has changed in the five or so years that I lived there.  Ask me if you want more details on that, but in the meantime, I’ll just talk about the last week or so.

I’d originally planned to leave my job at the Community Food Bank as soon as my regular after school lessons ended, but they talked me into staying for a few weeks to help with summer meals.  It actually was really fun, although it included a lot of driving.  Driving 2.5 hours each way to Ajo wasn’t as bad as you’d think because it’s a completely open road, and a couple of the times it ended with finally getting to try Desert Rain Cafe in Sells, which did not disappoint.  It also included lots of good car conversation and interesting podcasts.

The other traveling I did was to the Amado Youth Center, which was about 45 minutes on I-19.  The kids were a lot of fun and were very receptive to my lessons and activities.  The staff was also incredibly appreciative of my being there, and I feel like in just a few short weeks (and 3, or was it 4 visits), I developed a nice rapport with the staff there.

The food bank does a good job of saying farewell to its employees.  It seems like if you spend at least a year working there, they provide some sort of going away party, usually pizza, in which people stand up and say nice things to you/about you.  After 3.5 years of working there and getting to know lots of people in lots of different departments, I felt pretty sad to leave, and it was a great feeling to leave a job on such good terms.  I know that I left things such that the new person can easily pick up where I left off, and I feel very proud of what I accomplished while working there.  That’s the work stuff, so I’ll write about the other stuff next.