The Courtney arrives

We've been in India for 2 months now, and just as we're getting homesick, we've been joined by the amazing Courtney Schroeder. Yes!! We greeted her at the airport wearing absurd headgear (we know, we know, shocking to all) and performed a hastily composed guitar ditty entitled "Courtney Smells Bad." We stayed up late into the night catching up on her gossip and feasting on the baby carrots and hummus and Reese's that she had brought halfway around the world for us. Tomorrow, Rahul shaves off the 1st piece (heh heh) of his month-old beard and we rock the Taj Mahal. Then, back to the Himalayas. For everyone else out there even slightly tempted to come meet us somewhere this year, we say "Hell Yeah!" We promise to compose a song all about you for your arrival, as long as you bring us chocolate.

---rahul and meg

The best day so far . . .

We're in McLeod Ganj, home of the exiled Tibetan community. It's absolutely gorgeous here, and there are bald-headed Dalai Lama lookalikes everywhere. We're riding a high after yesterday's morning jog evolved into a 9-hour trek across massive Himalayan snowfields to a little hut on the side of a mountain where we feasted on Masala ramen noodles and chai, cooked up by a jolly mountain man who had just tromped through the waist-deep snow the day before to open up his shop for the year.

During the hike we ran into a British guy who raved about a Japanese restaurant in town, so after we got home and had a long, wonderful, hot shower, we went out for our first (and likely only) sushi this year. While inhaling our food, we started eavesdropping on our tablemates, and Rahul suddenly realized that we were sitting next to his favorite travel writer, Pico Iyer. Once Rahul got over being starstruck, we introduced ourselves, told him that his newest book is on the short list of "necessities" (chocolate, red wine, tampons, hummus) we're having our friend Courtney bring out from America next week, and Rahul and he ended up bonding over being lazy Indians from the West who travelled in India without bothering to learn Hindi. Full and happy, we made our way to the local cinema (read: a basement room with six sofas and a big-screen tv) and watched a badly-subtitled bootlegged DVD of Sideways.

We had begun the day with inappropriate clothes, no water, and not much of a plan, and ended up finding a beautiful mountain, a teahut stuck in the middle of the snow, a Japanese restaurant in Little Tibet, a radiant, unassuming writer and a great American movie we'd been dying to see. Not to mention the best brownie we've had in a long time. Being on the road again is damn good.