steps toward an uncertain yet hopeful future: January 2007

It's a Saturday night in Athens- that would mean I'm sitting in a coffeehouse, scouring the Internet for job openings, sending resumes and cover letters out into cyberspace, and cursing Hot Corner's eradic wireless connection. Life is back to normal.
Athens didn't change much in the month I was gone in India. The house by the railroad tracks on Pulaski, where a constant ebb and flow of punk kids lived and decorated the porch with strange hanging art and held numerous musical gatherings and no doubt consumed large amounts of illegal substances, is boarded up. And the undaunted owner of the restaurant that was Mia Madonna and then Cafe Moulin Rouge has now decided to try his hand at putting a Spanish tapas bar in this apparently profit-challenged location. And the location on College Ave that was a bar called Lunch Paper and then a cell phone shop is now what appears to be a bar called, of all things, the Chapel.
I love this town. It's just so weirdly out of place in Georgia. Actually, it's just weird, period. The skinny guy with a big bandage on his cheek and a discman with headphones who dances and sings to himself outside the bank on College, oblivious to the amusement of passing students; the Tuesday afternoon war protesters by the Arch; the hippy organic grocery stores and bizarrely dressed "townies" confident in their defiantly noncomformist musical insular subculture and their smug disdain of the strapless dress and make up wearing sorority children, the latest out-of-control rant of a certain nameless law professor in the Flagpole. I love that this place makes me feel normal for riding a bike and recycling, and that at the same time it challenges me to not be too "normal."
I do get annoyed by some stuff here, of course. The clueless rich kids drinking their daddy's money away downtown, drowning in entitlement and laziness and complacency. And on the other side, the same homeless guys downtown who have absolutely nothing wrong with them and yet will try to get a buck out of anyone who looks sympathetic, and all I can think about when I see an able-bodied overweight guy asking me for money is the guy on the train in India, crawling on his knees through the train aisles scraping up trash and getting a few pennies, and I just get angry. Don't get me wrong, some people are homeless for good reasons, and are legitimately in need of help. But I spent two winters doing occasional volunteering at a homeless shelter, and I got really fed up of people complaining that we didn't have their favorite kind of bagel for breakfast. The more I see poverty in other countries, the harder it is for me to muster up much compassion for someone who walks around downtown all day asking for money.
What we need is more immigrants. I read about these guys who got arrested in California I think- they had crawled underground through a two-foot wide pipe, from Mexico to the US. Why are we not greeting these people with a welcoming band and a certificate of citizenship, instead of putting them in jail and deporting them? How many American citizens would crawl half a mile through a sewer pipe, or walk for two weeks through the desert, for the opportunity to work two minimum wage jobs at the same time, while living in an apartment with 15 other people? Just my personal opinion...

Here are pictures, in no particular order (actually kind of backwards) because I am a technological idiot, sorry. A crowded street market in Ahmedebad, where people shop by ancient city walls

Moghul architecture- the Red fort in Delhi.

Detail of the Taj Majal. Below, clothes spread out to dry around the tents where people live by the side of the road in Agra (location of the Taj Majal)

Detail of stone gratework and stone inlay at the "baby Taj" (an earlier building in the same style as the BIG Taj)in Agra

a group of kids who we found playing in the dry river bed beneath the Taj Majal's riverside location.

The Taj Majal in all its glory- it is huge.

A camel in Udaipur, all dressed up.

A traditional Rajastani dance performance in Udaipur. Vendors amid a crowd of pigeons in the old city of Jaipur.

the Wind Palace in Jaipur- all red sandstone.

A saree shop in Jaipur- amazing color.

A vendor at a train station- I took this photo out the tinted train window.

The Gateway to India in Bombay/Mumbai.

Thali- an Indian all-you-can-eat plate that is delicious! The waiters keep bringing you food and bread until you can't eat another bite, and then they keep bringing it.