Emily Jeannette

Jan 29th - In Udaipur. The White City. Every city in Rajastan apparently has a colour. Udaipur the White City. Jodhpur the Blue City. Jaipur the Pink City. Jaisalmer the Golden City. Lovely. Mix in said colour with the poverty, trash, malaria, Hep A,B, and C, and you have an Indian city. Poverty and absolute splendor comes hand in hand. While looking out over the ghat (lake) to the City Palace, you can not ignore the women washing their clothes in the garbage filled lake. After an interesting first bus ride, with only one killed deer, we made it to Udaipur via a 15 hour bus ride at 5am. We bought chair seats - next time defiantly going for the sleepers! Yes, buses have sleepers here!! Doubles as well with glass windows. And in true Indian ... read more

Jan 15th - With twenty-five minutes left before we reach our next destination, Agra, I still cannot wrap my head around India. It is a place of extreme poverty. We have passed slums made of trash, concrete slums, slums made of mud and straw. However there was on mud hut that had a satellite for a TV - guess they had the priorities straight huh? There have been children playing cricket next to the railway tracks. Workers sleeping among the railroad ties. Yet everything is vibrant with every colour imaginable. From the bright turquoise paints, to the women’s clothing hanging on the clotheslines. We booked a second-class ticket for 150 Rupees (2.2 euros) for our 3-hour train ride. We have seats 23,24 upper and lower berth. Trains are filthy but well ventilated. Men and little children ... read more

Jan 17th- We are safe and sound in Jaipur after an interesting 18 hours!! Our train was scheduled for 7h40 - and was then confirmed at a 2h30 minute delay. Alright - so we settled ourselves in the second-class waiting room and then had to wait it out with the rest of the white people suck in Agra. We finally boarded our train around 16h30. Great first week of our trip. A nice little 9 hour delay for you, in the cold, wrapped in two scarves, a jacket, jumpers, and long sleeves. Sweet. Just what I left Belgium for. To be cold again. And this cold just seeps into you. It is the fog. This heavy dense fog that just settles onto the land and air making visibility hard. Getting into Jaipur around 23h30, took a ... read more

Yes, I did graduate university with a degree in graphic design. (meaning I have used HTML formats before - and as my Professor Scott knows only too well - I sucked at it for a bit :-( haha okay now I think I may have this figured out! So here goes. My gap year after university - well it has now become a gap (whever I want to stop/whenever the money runs out) year. I'm now in my 1.8 years of living out of suitcases, flying home to get more clothes, throwing away half the clothes that get ruined in traveling, buying more - you get the drift. Once again I will pack my few belonging into a backpack (more meds than clothes mind you) and take off to a subcontinent I really know nothing about! ... read more