Anything But Boring

It's human nature to normalize to your environment.  The traditionally dressed people, 3 wheeled rickshaws and general disorder start to seem normal after a few days. I try to take a step back and put myself in my high school self's shoes to appreciate these unique moments.

In the past couple of days, I haven't had to do that.  I went to the biggest flea market in Goa, a ruckous assortment of beautiful people selling all sorts of bags, jewelry, clothes and other trinkets.  In walking through a guy hassled me to buy his hand made drum.  I told him I wasn't interested and threw out what I thought would be a nearly insulting offer of 3 dollars for his drum, a fifth of what he was asking.  I piqued his interest with this and after some laughter filled haggling I bought a little hand drum for $5.  

Unfortunately this tagged me as a sucker for drum buying, and from then on, anytime someone saw me and had drums to sell they would harass me to buy their drums offering trades for the one I had and trying to convince me to buy an extra for a friend.

The same day I sent a couple of travel friends who came down with a bad case of travel sickness off to the hospital to get intravenous antibiotics and listened to the harrowing story of a young Australian guy who naively got himself into a Nigerian drug dealers mansion under the guise of helping him to ship jewels illegally into Australia.  They befriended him in the streets and wooed him with the thought of quick cash.  He was flipping out when he returned to the hostel because they had tried to take him to the post office just before, to ship the jewels and he felt in over his head, as he should've.  So he changed his name on facebook and decided to skip town the next morning.

Now I'm in Ahemdabad, the industrial capital of India, and have spent the night learning Bollywood dances in the backyard of my friends place with about 20 of his cousins and spent the next day dancing like a wild man through the streets outside the city on the way to the wedding ceremony. Life is anything but boring here.