Day 44

Thoughts: In India!!! I love coming into a new country where I have never been before! It's so fresh and everything is new for the first time. I love experiencing first time things! So we fly into India and I look out the window and it is so foggy and hazzy I can just make out buildings. I was wondering if it was clouds or pollution, and my new Indian friend told me that the pilots can only see the runway when they land on it because of the pollution! The air is sooo polluted here! Its thick and smoky and challenging to breathe, my eyes are sore and my skin is dirrrty, I don't want to take in large breaths, and I suppose the people that live here get so used to it they wouldn't know any different! We are sooo lucky to have fresh clean air in Australia and it makes me so grateful and a little sad that these people have to live in these conditions. My taxi driver was hilarious! I got in this old sturdy rusty car and there was no seatbelt and I was sliding around my seat the whole ride! There are no road rules here, absolutely no integrity on the roads, everyone is for themselves, honking horns, driving in the middle on the lines, and my taxi driver said he has never crashed! It's like there is no fear on the roads. I saw 4 men sitting on top of each other in a two seater ute, and a baby sitting on his grandfathers lap in the front seat without a seat belt! I counted 8 men peeing on the side of the road, you don't see that in Australia anymore! And there were goats and cows wandering around the place! At my restaurant tonight a cow wandered in! Hahaaa! Hello Mr cow! Fancy some rice??? As for food...I was warned by a few people before coming to India not to eat raw, no salads, don't drink the water or anything washed in it! Sheeshhh! It's like the Earth naturally provides us with everything we need, foods, water, and then we pollute the earth so much that these things are a risk to us again! And the Indians are able to tolerate the water and food because they have built an immunity to it. This gets me because the earth is abundant, so is health, food, water, so why do people have to live like this? and experience being toxic? An example of man made operations destroying Earth's natural resources....

Challenges: Being in the pollution. And I'm not coming from a place of this is bad or this is wrong, it is just as it is. I have never experienced so much pollution before! And it's because of the amount of people who live here, the technology we are using, what we are consuming and creating as human beings. It inspires me to bring I Love Earth (the environmental organization I created www.iloveearth.com.au) to India to clean it up. India needs a lot of transformation though. Food related challenges: Not knowing how hygienic the stir fry rice I ate was!

Triumphs: Eating my dinner present and slowly. A few days ago I got present for the first time eating my food. Actually eating it, not just scoffing it down. Tonight in the Indian restaurant a gypsy man watched me eat half my rice and then said "If I ask you in 20 minutes how was your rice, you will say what rice?". Haaa! He was holding me accountable for what I created (to be totally present while eating foods) a few days ago and not even knowing it! So I slowed down and tasted the rest of my rice :)))

What I Ate Today:

Breakfast: rice and cucumber and peanuts and a green tea in Singapore!

Lunch: goji berries, an advocado, a pear

Dinner: vegetarian stir fried rice cooked in oil, with carrots and onion. Simple mmm mmm!

Dessert: no Indian dessert for me!

Snacks: goji berries

Cost: Fried rice and a 1.5L water was $1.80 in India.

Exercise: Some stretching on the plane, walking with my 15kg backpack! And a little walkabout in Dehli, but was quickly stopped by beggars, people selling me stuff, I let them stop me of course, so I turned around and came back to my hotel and here I am sitting on my butt again ;) I will do some yoga in my room tonight, or wrap a scarf around me head and paint myself brown so I look like an Indian, then when I walk out on the street I won't be stopped ;) Hmmm yoga it is! Off to the Himalayas tomorrow wooo wooo!!!

322 days to go!!!