India. Hot, hot, sandy, dirty, dusty. Eucalyptus, coconut-banana, exhaust, open sewer under bridge. Delicious everything -- soft breads, honey sweets, curries, sour yogurt, fruits. Overflowing. Loud, chaotic, peaceful. Busy, buggy, sticky, bright, full. Kids barefoot, naked, dirty. Smiles. Old men starving. Women beautiful in orange. In pink, blue, green, gold, purple, red, yellow. Rags, injuries. Kids with gold necklaces and silverbell anklets. Dying dogs. Men asleep or already dead on the sidewalk. Families on the dirt. Their sheets on the dirt. A beach for walking. Beautiful things. Thatch roofed huts. Cows crossing a bypass. Skin shades white to black. A man's bus, a woman's. Eyes black and starving, eyes fat -- all staring. All of that, all at once.

Now that we're all safely back on the ship, showered, fed and safe, students have begun sharing their experiences, some of which, as far as I can tell, are the most varied and dramatic any of us has experienced yet.

Hundreds of students went to the Taj, some went to Calcutta, some stayed in Chennai, some went outside Chennai to rural farms or Dalit (untouchable) villages. I joined 30 students for three days at an artisan village, DakshinaChitra, where we meditated and talked about pranayama philosophy and had fabulous food and several opportunities to support local artists.

The fourth day, I visited a family's home for their Navaratri celebration, and the last I spent at the Theosophical Society listening to yet another brilliant and aged woman talk about how these definitions we put on religions are completely nonsensical.

The country is so incredibly complicated and beautiful and wonderful and huge and broken. Not one of us had the same experience. Conversations over lunch varied in tone from crestfallen to deep sadness, pure excitement, reverence, and confusion. Zach, Lindsay and Michael went to a Dalit village overnight together and had completely different stories to tell. For Lindsay and Mike, the people were happy and proud to present their homes and host a couple of westerners for a few hours. Lindsay said. "It wasn't as scary as I anticipated." Across the table, Zach talked about his troubling experience that involved being offered a sick child by a starving mother who thought since Zach fixed their plumbing, he could surely fix her dying baby. He told us the child was limp and crooked. "Something was really wrong with it," was all he said.

All of the SAS students who went on that trip slept on the concrete floor of a nearby school building, not on the ground with the families of the village.

The group I was with headed out together on the first day for Mamallapuram, a popular tourist attraction near Chennai -- highlights included the giant sandstone monuments made from single stones, a Hindu temple and the 1,200-year-old shore temple. About six hours in the sun later, we reloaded the bus for the short drive to DakshinaChitra, where we would spend three days inside the walls of a retreat/artisan center targeted toward foreigners and visitors from Northern India.

It's a hard place to describe. And when people say or write things like "it's a hard place to describe" or "I can't really put it into words" and then pursue articulation, I get annoyed. So, there are a few photos of the center, and I can say it felt like a pocket of order sewn into a niche of Chennai's chaos, and for that I was slightly unsettled. I was expecting (never do this) a more ashram-style setup. It was comfortable, nonetheless, and pleasant. The food blew my mind (Good god, Indian food has no limits), the art people were selling effectively emptied my pockets of rupees, and the women in particular who were cooking and balancing the place behind the scenes were gorgeous and motherly and one of them seemed to fall completely in love with me because of my entire-back tattoo. Henna. Henna tattoo, those of you who don't look at photos before reading. (I said, "Tree, please," and pointed to my back and this henna artist went with it. She was painting me for at least 20 minutes.) The woman who loved the tattoo would lift my shirt and call all the women over every time I walked by her, or pull down my pashmina to see the base of the trunk. She spoke no English, but did the Indian head wobble with such deliberation and smile, her enthusiasm was clear.

Oh, the head wobble? I missed the morning diplomatic briefing held on the ship due to sleeping in. Apparently, the wobble was explained to everyone there, and I was totally confused by it the first night at the yoga center. It looks just the way it sounds. Instead of nodding or shaking the head for yes/no, Indians wobble the head (direction of each ear to corresponding shoulder) to express everything. It means everything and nothing at the same time. It's like the country, actually.

So, we're all in the big activity center (see photos) and I have to tinkle. I open up my meditating eyes and ask the director's (the man who led the entire "art of living" classes, and who also weirded me out because he was very pushy) wife if I could use the toilet. She wore thick spectacles that made her eyes look HUGE, and started to wobble her head with a complacent smirk of a mouth looking at me really close to my face and kept wobbling and her eyes looked huge and I had just been meditating so I'm all relaxed and had no idea what the heck her head was doing, so I asked again, clearer, and she wobbled even more forcefully. Oh my god. So then I gestured towards .. tinkle. What? Yes? I can go? No? Then a universal gesture towards the door made it clear.

The wobble means: yes, no, I don't care, it's okay, whatever, this is fun, I agree, I disagree, do you want this, are you okay, thank you, you're welcome, can I help you? Sure, go tinkle.

OK, now the important stuff. Eating. First: eat with your right hand only. Second: "wash" your banana leaf with a few drops from your water before the man comes around with the five different colors that he slops on it. Third: mix together the rice and one color at a time as you eat with your fingers. Fourth: take the crepe-like flat bread that is not na'an but is something else delicious and warm, and pinch the chunks of whatever they put on your leaf and eat in bite-size pieces. Fifth: eat plenty of yogurt with your spicy food. Sixth: order sweet lassi (I thought I knew what lassi tasted like. Wow. Didn't. Sweet, tart, thick yogurty goodness.) Seventh: dip the fried flat chips in the vanilla ice cream (really, it's cream). Woah, holy moly THAT is good.

We'd have curry for breakfast, and lentil fried patties, short bananas or sweet green ones, and cocoa.

One of the nights I wasn't sleeping at the DakshinaChitra (in a room that clearly used to be some kind of holding cell--the door locked from the outside. In a building that served about 20 of us, and had only one "bathroom" which was really just a swinging door in front of a few holes in the ground that were separated by walls. Our shower -- the one for the whole building -- was not a shower at all. It was a bucket. There was also a faucet. But a faucet bucket shower, which sounds distasteful, not to mention it was freezing cold, was precisely what my overheated body wanted after nine hours of breathing in a room with a guy who freaked me out and hallucinating about black birds flying at me holding saltine crackers in their talons and little school boy cookies in their beaks. Yikes.) Benjamin and I dealt with the rickshaw business.

So far, we've ridden in clean beautiful taxis in Japan, where the seats are covered with pristine white cloths and the driver wears white gloves, to open air Thai buses that don't allow for conversation between driver and passenger (but when there's a stoplight, the driver comes up behind you and says, "Hey!" so loud that you scream and jump and fall off your seat because you weren't holding on for dear life at that point but you will in a minute and then he says, "Which port?" and you answer but he's laughing at you because he just scared the bejeezus out of you.) Old wagons and pick-up trucks in Thailand that are holding about three times their weight capacity. We've ridden on motobikes in Vietnam with strangers and also with friends. But in India, you ride in a rickshaw.

This is one of the most ridiculous-looking vehicles I've ever seen. It's kind of a ... moto-tricycle: It's got three wheels, one in the front, which is steered like a motorcycle, and two in the back. The body of the thing is much like a carriage. There are no doors, but it's okay because there's a flimsy bar on one side, and there is a roof and windshield, and one large bench in the "back" where you sit with your friends. In my case, one friend. In Zach's case, it was five friends. So Zach drove it. I held my seat, and Ben's arm the entire time. Weird, because on a motorbike with only one other person among millions of other drivers, I felt my knuckles turn white but I eventually relaxed. Wonder why not so much in the rickshaw...

Maybe because the drivers are nuts. That sounds judgmental. Let me rephrase it. They're crazy. No, no ... they're ... eh ... very skilled? No. Out of their minds. They're completely out of their minds. This guy skimmed a kid who was riding his bike, and then yelled at the kid on the bike for hitting his rickshaw! And while we were going along, one from another rickshaw jumped onto ours! It was this guy's brother, he said.

So, B & I ate some great food, and I got some sketchy soy milk from a dusty grocery store (heave) and then bought candies for our driver's children for a tip.

We also spent some time in a family's home to see what their Navaratri celebration is like. Every one of their family members was there for a total of about 20, the majority of which were women who were constantly coming out with more sweets for us -- and, oh my god, thank goodness she did. There's this AMAZING orange sweet thing that looks like fish eggs rolled up into a ball but tastes like happiness and is warm and the grandmother scoops it with an ice cream scoop thrice on your plate because you keep finishing it and giggling for more.

Of course I'll have more! I haven't thrown up yet! Really, Indian food. I can't get over it. Then rum and date cake. And what kind of garlic is in that roll? Woah. And wow. Holy that is mango nectar for real.

(Addendum post Istanbul. Sorry for the delay -- must post Egypt, and now Turkey. India is a bit cut short. But beauteous just the same.)