gone living

since arriving in baga beach, goa with the 3 friends i made at my hostel and on the bollywood set, it's been back to the beach life for me.

i've set up on the top floor of a guesthouse with tile floors (key for all the sand getting tracked in), a large balcony overlooking some ramshackle buildings, cold water showers to cool off in the humid afternoons, and the kind of open-slat windows that you can only have in places where the weather never gets too cold anytime during the year. not bad for US$6 (300 rupees) per night.

mornings are all about sleeping in, and then the morning text messages start moving between us to put together some kind breakfast plan before 2pm. long leisurely breakfasts merge into afternoons spent at local flea markets or wandering around on the beach. evenings kick off with movies playing off of someone's ipod on the tv while we have dinner, and then heading out into the bars and nightlife scene of goa (tito's is literally one block from my guesthouse), which usually keeps us out until at least 3am.

the local dive shop is closed until at least next week (high season is just beginning here, and baga doesn't have dive operations year-round), so it's most lazy time here. but it's good -- i feel relaxed, lazy, and happy in a way that i only get when just doing not very much by the beach. when i walked past a cafe on my way to writing this post, 10,000 maniacs on the soundsystem reminded me that these are the days to remember. to be honest, i haven't felt this content since my time on the gili islands in indonesia.

while the forecast predicted a gloomy 100% chance of rain all week before i left, we've only had a few showers since arriving, and have had at least grayish sunlight the rest of the time. (although another rainstorm is swooping in on us even as i write this, although it was sunny when i walked into this internet cafe about 20 minutes ago).

this morning i finally picked up my schedule book that lists what i'm supposed to do, and realized that to make it to nepal, i need to buy a plane ticket from delhi to kathmandu by october 9th at the latest. luckily, a quick search on lonely planet's thorn tree found this thread with a $90 one-way ticket from Delhi to Kathmandu on the oddly-named "Cosmic Air".

so while it's off to find a travel agent to buy a ticket to kathmandu leaving in a few days! (and hopefully there's a camel fair at the end of this month involved as well, but it'll take a few days to iron out those details)