As long as I’m doing the shallow-tourism thing for now, being a skipping-stone across the countryside instead of delving (or doing the pilgrim-seeking-enlightenment thing which India is such a popular destination for), I figured I’d get an elephant ride in Udaipur. Woo-hoo!  It’s fun, hanging onto the basket in the sweeping rhythm of the walk, ( Read more... )

 Happy Holi, everyone!   For those that aren’t familiar with it, it’s a northern-Indian holiday, the festival of colors.  Which means flying handfuls of brilliantly-colored powder exploding all over you, and squirt-guns or water-bombs soaking the colors in, unless you can hit your friends first.  It means ganging up on people to dunk them into the ( Read more... )

Hello from Delhi!

I’ve been here a few days now, enough to get my bearings; came to sort of talk at a conference on technology & international development, but to be honest it was mainly just an excuse to go to India for the first time.  Woo-hoo!

Delhi and Seattle aren’t quite on opposite sides on the planet, but they’re close enough that the ( Read more... )

   Home at last, back in the land where the sky stretches wide and even in cities you can walk on real earth (though admittedly it's also the land where walking is sport, not transportation).  I'm in Seattle now, and the end of my trip took me through Hamburg, Berlin, and then briefly back down to Spain for Las Fallas in Valencia.

Germany was ( Read more... )

  The last couple weeks have sometimes been a romp through stereotype-land.  I went to England where everything you hear about the weather and food are true, then to the Netherlands, and am now in Germany where people are largely fitting the moulds as well (except the lederhosen).  And everyplace I've been working to break down some stereotypes of ( Read more... )

  So, the trip's more than half over.  It occurred to me that I like travel because it's accelerated living.  You experience more new things more intensely in a couple days than you ordinarily would in a month.  ..This week has been a whirlwind, but it'll slow down from here--much of the next few weeks will be meeting job people instead of ( Read more... )

  Spain is full of four-foot-tall octogenarians.  Their size and age make them so distinctive that if they weren't so well dressed, they'd be gnomes ( Read more... )

  So, my trip has hit its first little snag ( Read more... )

Hey, all, greetings from Paris ( Read more... )

Hey there, everyone!  Greetings from the winter wonderland that Colorado is swiftly becoming, sort of...  (Three inches of snow will stick one day, it'll be gone the next; rain will turn to snow and back and into a warm sunny day; some days the snow line will be halfway up the foothill across the road, and an hour later its blanket will either ( Read more... )