a post is absurdly over due, i'm not sure how i never got around to making a post. i guess with sending emails here and there with scattered updates i neglected to comprehensively put things up here. I'm back in the States, and transitioning into Fayetteville from India is much harder and challenging then dealing with 'culture shock' in india. it's been a week nearly since coming back here, and it's funny how looking at old belongings and looking at how you left things before leaving, and re-evaluating very very familiar things can screw with your mind. i guess for 2 months i let myself completely forget about everything, and opened up to an experience that kept on taking surprising twists and turns. so coming back has been sort of a mental whirlwind, seeing things the old things bit differently now. really differently actually.

The last I wrote was about Lucknow. I was there for a total of 10 days, and although I had a great time staying with a friend of mine studying Urdu there (from UNC with a whole bunch of other American students) it would be a lie if I said I was having an awesome time in the city. We had gone to Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, and we had gone to Fatehpura Sikhri. I hate to hate on a city, but Agra was the worst I had seen in India, in terms of pollution. I can't generalize for the whole city, but the places where we were was insanely overwhelming. Fatehpura Sikhri presented to us the most intense vendor harassment of our lives. Seeing this historically rich city was wonderful, especially exploring the architecture of these amazing structures. however, the flock of vendors (young, old, all sizes) was unfortunately a huge hinderance in being able to enjoy these sites. Below is a picture of Buland Darwaza in Fatehpur Sikhri where we were :


Abruptly, about a week before my flight back to the States, I decided to push for going to the mountains. Another friend from UNC was at Dharamsala, interning, while another friend from UNC had just flown into Delhi, and had wanted to go to the mountains.
2 days after having this thought of just making the journey up to the mountains from Lucknow, the result was 3 tar heels in the gorgeous peaks of northern India. I could not have ended my India trip in a better way. My last four days in India were spent in Dharamsala, which is a city that I completely completely fell in love with.