Words of advice...
Two days on trains in India with no change of clothes and less than stellar sanitary conditions is NOT a good thing. The only thing that can possible get one through is taking a valium (or the like) and having some friendly Indian Railway Police share their bottle of McDowell's #1 Special Whiskey with you. After that, the 30 or so hours on the train and the stellar scheduling of the Indian Railway System (leave at 2:30 PM so that you can arrive at 4:45 AM) makes for a completely fucked head as well as a "not so fresh" feeling. In fact, I believe the reason the trains look somewhat shoddy is that the pungent prevalent BO on the trains actually, physically peels the paint from the cars...think about it.

No offense to any Indian friends I have, but all Indians who drive are completely and utterly fucked in the head. Those that drive two-wheel scooters or motos should simply be shot now, because they are headed for a very nasty end. This said, the other problem of navigating the roads of India on foot is the smog, I have never encountered anything like it and heard that the 3 wheel rickshaw drivers mix their petrol with kerosene for cost cutting...nice for the air, which is so black and thick you can write on your own forehead in soot and smog.
As you can tell from the above, we are no longer in the cultural mecca of Kerala, and have moved on to the silicon valley of India, Bangalore. Actually we are just here for a few hours...we caught the overnight train from Cochin here, and catch another train for Goa in a few hours...all this on 4 hours sleep. We arrived here around 4:45 AM and have been killing time quite nicely since then. The trains in India aren't bad, but pale in comparison to the luxury we encountered in Thailand...can only wait for Europe.

Time's Up....sorry

Sweet like an Indian Mango baby...that's how life is at the moment. We have been lucky enough to score a free place to crash in the town of kochin, in the southern state of Kerala, that is ultra phat. Not that this place is a modern pad or anything like that, in fact they don't even have hot water, but it is a two hundred year old british facility that was probabaly used as a trader's home/office. It is taken care of by a gentleman named Raman who is one of the best cooks one could imagine and it sits on the shore of the Arabian Sea with fresh, cheap seafood available roguhly 15 yards away. We arrived yesterday after a very early flight from Delhi, and thank fuck we are out of that...to hectic for my sensitve self. Our flight down was uneventful, but we were lucky to make the airport at all with the insane crackhead of a taxi driver we had...the guy even decided to stop for gas along the way...gee thanks.
Onto the good stuff, I have been able to work around my dislike of tumeric and have found a lust for Indian food, the Kerelan style prawns we had last night were vaguely reminscent of the Neener's BBQ shrimp and were just unbelievable. That coupled with a steady diet of butter dahl, tandoori over chow, and roti's and nan breads are keeping me from withering away to nothing. In fact, after I get off of the computer here, I will be heading down to the waterfront to choose tonight's main dish from the fresh seafood available...and there is a shitload...sort of like the Indian pike place market (at least the fish portion).
We strolled down to the local synogague today...only 14 jews left, but the temple was built in the 14th century, which automatically makes it kick ass.
Other than that, not too much is happenin'. We plan to head down to Trivandrum tomorrow, nearly at the southern point of the Inidian sub-continent, and then perhaps it is up to Goa, home of the best (arguably I guess) beaches in India. How you say....life is good!

Our sweeping tour of the major monuments of the golden triangle of India has come to a close. It was sweet, but a bit more pricey than I had hoped...cest la vie. We spent the last two nights at the Kaurali House in Jaipur as the guests, paying of course, of the royal family of the Kaurali region. Actually, it was by far the most interesting homestay type place you could hope for and dining with the family in a room adorned with zebra hide and other exotic animal trophies was pretty cool. Jaipur overall was also nice, although I was a bit burned out on the monument seeing by the end. I am definitely glad to be headed down to Kerala tomorrow for a bit more of the relaxed southern way of life. All in all one thing about our touring in India thusfar stands out...the Maharajahs and Mughal kings were fucking big phat pimps...my lord they lived the way Iceberg Slim does. We took the elephant ride up to the Amber Fort (I know, it's cheezeola tourist) and it was a blast to roll into the place as they did in the past...not to mention when the elephant went to the bathroom the sound that it made led me to believe that Neal had fallen off of the back of the elephant...but enough of that.
I would like to apologize for any lack of focus in my posts, but being that I am constantly overstimulated and going through some sort of circuit overload on a ten minute basis, it is hard to focus on just a few of the ten thousand strange and wonderful things I am seeing each day.
Enough there...some random thoughts:

I felt it my duty today to try and piss Neal off as much as possible. I think I succeeded by constantly needling him on the 5.5 hour drive back to Dehli...that was fun.

Indian movies kick ass! Why don't we have more song and dance scenes... I can just see then next big Liv Tyler / Ben Affleck movie now.

Tonight we plan on eating at a place called "Spice Route" in one of the shmancy hotels...for roughly 15 bucks a person we can dine at a place widely considered one of the best restaurants in Asia...kick ass!

I'm hot, hungry, and bored...so adios.