It all started Wednesday night.  We'd heard good things about the movie The Reluctant Fundamentalist and so took an autorickshaw all the way across town to the only theater where it was still showing.  When we got there we were told that it wasn't showing (error on its webpage) and since Wednesday night was Rs100 night, the place was crowded and the next show of any film that wasn't sold out wasn't until 9:40pm.  Reluctantly, we ate a rather lackluster mall dinner and went outside to bargain our way back to Nitin's house (where we're staying these last few weeks). 

Of, course, that was only the beginning of how crazy everything suddenly got.

We are just back from a three-week trip to Darjeeling (to visit ATREE fieldsites) and Sikkim (for a family trek). 

The visit north was fantastic and just what we all needed after so much time in the city.  May is peak tourist-season in the hills because it's right before the monsoon rains start and most Indians are on summer holidays.  Somewhat unfortunately for us, the rains (tho not the monsoons) came early this year and although we saw a bit of sun we didn't see much while there.  No worries.  We've been in the sun and heat for months on end now and no Volcano-raised person can be entirely comfortable without feeling the rain every now-and-then. 

After the Fulbright conference we traveled down the coast by bus, boat, and train until we reached the southern-most tip of India.  A very holy as well as a pretty-darn-cool place-to-have-been.  You can see three oceans come together and watch the sun rise in the Bay of Bengal, travel over the Indian Ocean, and set in the Arabian Sea.  Cool.

(you can tell how busy it's been the last few months -- I'm finally posting December travel (21-28) in March)

When Tim's folks made their plans to visit we were excited to have the opportunity to visit north India.  Unfortunately, they were unable to fly out until after Christmas so it meant that most of the boys' winter break occurred before they arrived.  We thought about hanging out in Bangalore and flying to Delhi on 28 December, but that many free-days in the city sounded painful so we pulled out a map and a guidebook and decided to travel part-way to Delhi in the week of vacation before they arrived.  After looking at lots of options, the boys decided that the coolest thing to do would be to travel to Gujarat and see the wild ass sanctuary (I'm not sure whether to be a proud ecologist-mother whose children chose a wildlife sanctuary over all other forms of entertainment, or to roll my eyes because I know that they really just wanted to get to say "asses" over and over).  So, the day after Kalani's train rolled in from the 35 hour trip back from Delhi we hopped on a plane bound for Ahmedabad.

From Jodhpur we flew back to South India where we spent a few days in Bangalore before heading to Mysore on a train, then back to Bangalore for a couple nights, then Immo and Diana departed for the US.

Our return to Bangalore coincided with a bout of stomach flu that I naturally assumed meant that we'd gotten bad water, but since a new one of us fell to it every day or two I finally realized that it wasn't something we'd eaten.  it put a bit of a damper on our South India time but it luckily passed pretty quickly so no one "lost" more than a day of touristing.   

We had enough time to find a beautiful kurtha for Diana (Fabindia, of course) and Immo even put together an invited speach at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research.

Oh, and yes!  It is blue! 

We stayed at the Haveli Inn Pal which promised to have the best views of Meherangarh Fort in the town.  It delivered fully with the most amazing breakfast views I've ever seen.  Like all of Rajasthan, Jodhpur was cold and I spent most of my time double-wrapped in first my Polartech fleece followed by a Pashmina shawl, that I almost never took off. 

The hotel was actually in the walled and gated old Sardar Bazaar which meant that all you had to do was step out the door and you were in the thick of it.  We asked about going somewhere when we first arrived and the hotel owner said that we should wait until after 10am the next day so that we could see it when it was "animated," and animated it was.  A veritable sea of people and goods and, and, and . . .  that made it very easy to squint your eyes a bit and float back in time to when the fort was still occupied and the markets were held here.

From Jaipur we traveled to Bikaner (north east of Jaipur and further from the main tourist trail).  By this time I was getting more than a little fed up with our driver who kept saddling us with "free" guides everywhere we went and trying to drag us into commission shops and restaurants.  My frustration peaked in Fatehpur (a new Fatehpur).  The small Shekhawati town is known for fabulous havellis but our driver refused to drive us into town, insisting that the police didn't allow cars in town (very much not so).  Luckily Bikaner is a small city and easy to traverse on foot and with autorickshaws so we were able to take a break from our driver for a couple days.

From Agra, we drove to Jaipur, the Pink City.  Jaipur is probably one of the most touristed cities in the world, but still utterly fascinating.  It's a beautiful place and was a nice start to our week in Rajasthan.  Rajasthan was the start of our luxury travel and we stayed exclusively in heritage hotels (all havellis) that were each remarkable.

On New Year's Eve we drove from Delhi to Agra to see the Taj Mahal.  Tim and I had been there right after we were married and Kalani had been there less than 2 weeks before, but it was still a magical place whose beauty wasn't diminished by second-timeness.  Temperatures were at record lows (falling to just below freezing) and on our second day the fog was so thick you couldn't see anything but we got there just in time for sunset on a lovely clear day and had a great time (tho Tim quipped that the first time I'd been there I nearly had heat stroke (August!) and the second time I was going to freeze to death).

Immo and Diana visited from 28 December - 16 January, 2013.  We flew up to Delhi to meet them then proceeded to travel through the Golden Triangle (Delhi, Agra, Rajasthan) then flew from Jodhpur back down to Bangalore.  It was a fun trip, and we got to see a really different part of India.  I'll start here with our three days in Delhi....