Study vs Experience

Palolem in south Goa has been absolutely gorgeous. Bright sun, bringing a delightful tan to my previously pasty body, the cool Arabian Sea swirling around your feet, dodging the advances of beach vendors who just want to ask you something. So much more relaxed than Mumbai was, way less honking and just a generally slower pace to life. The beach hut I'm staying in is fantastic, only a couple hundred yards from the water with real live electricity! (sometimes) The food continues to be excellent, I've been eating seafood in almost all my curries, except at the times I can't resist having biryani. Goan seafood is often very spicy, but a butter roti takes the sting off the tongue as surely as a glass of fresh squeezed pineapple juice does. Ah, the pleasures of a tropical country!

Still trouble meeting Westerners, but I've been hanging out and talking to a lot of the Indians I meet on the beach and that work in the complex of huts I'm staying at. Its a fascinating experience to go from book learning to meeting and knowing the way these people live their lives. Talking to a 16 year old beach vendor of jewelry, or the roving pineapple/coconut salesman, I'm really getting a sense of India. The 16 year old, Dimple, has been coming to Goa to sell jewelry for 10 years. Since she was 6! From Rajasthan in the north, shes here, sans family, for about 8 months out of the year, returning home only to make more jewelry and spend a few months with her family in their village. She is uneducated, other than the things that her younger brothers have taught her, but is only desirous of being able to help her family in any way she can. Even more interesting, she is waiting for her parents to arrange her marriage for her, a common practice in India. I pressed her about wanting to have a love marriage and she replied that she trusted the decision her parents would make, and wanted only to cultivate the skills that would help her to succeed with her husband and her husbands family. Fuck! was all I could think. I knew about these things before I came here, but knowing is one thing, and actively experiencing it, an entirely different one.

I am planning on leaving tomorrow (I've been trying to leave for the past two days, but its just been too gorgeous) for Panaji, the capital city of Goa to catch a bus to Hampi in Karnataka. Hampi is supposed to be really cool, the ruins of a medieval imperial capital, razed in the 16th century by a group of Deccan sultans. Can't wait!