Bon Voyage

Hello friends,

As many of you might already know, I'm leaving in two weeks for a trip. It seems the easiest way to share my fun with you is through a blog."Karie," my friend said to me the other day, "this is a big trip for you. Perhaps no one in your family has ever been to India."

This is true. In fact, few people in my family have ever even been out of the country. The United States, and particularly the West Coast, can be very isolating. I thought about my friends statement for a while and I realized, not only was he right, but I am the only person I know of in my family, besides my little sister, who has ever even been to Europe. Luckily for me, my parents have given me a love of traveling, even if their choices of destinations are different than mine, and they have gathered about them plenty of family friends who have ventured far and wide.

I want to give you all, my family and my friends, the chance to travel with me for a while. It will be fun, AND you won't have to pack, you can sleep in your own bed and you can drink the water. I hope that you will share this with your kids or your parents (I'll try to keep the swearing to a minimum). For my friends who have been to India or who are from India, I hope it will give you chance to see your country from a different perspective.

I guess that you all probably know that India has been high on my list of places to visit since I was able to read. For those of you who don't know, I was invited to go to the wedding of my friends who are getting married in Chennai (Madras). They are the two in the upper right hand corner... As you can guess from the picture, they are lots of fun.

So, I wanted to start out this little travel blog before my trip starts so that I can give you all a little background on where we will be going. The final itinerary (I hope) is this: Varanasi (Benaras) - Kolkata (Calcutta) - Chennai (Madras) -Delhi - Agra.

I would guess that some of you will find that India is a very different place than what you expect. It is modern, it is ancient, it is layered and it is a complicated place. There is no one thing anyone can say definitively about it. We'll start simple, with Wikipedia:

Home to the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation and a region of historic trade routes and vast empires, the Indian subcontinent was identified with its commercial and cultural wealth for much of its long history. Four of the world's major religions—Hinduism,Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism—originated here, whereas Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam arrived in the 1st millennium CEand also helped shape the region's diverse culture. Gradually annexed by and brought under the administration of the British East India Company from the early 18th century and administered directly by the United Kingdom from the mid-19th century, India became an independent nation in 1947 after a struggle for independence that was marked by non-violent resistance led by Mahatma Gandhi.

The Indian economy is the world's eleventh-largest by nominal GDP and third-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Followingmarket-based economic reforms in 1991, India became one of the fastest-growing major economies; it is considered a newly industrialised country. However, it continues to face the challenges of poverty, illiteracy, corruption, terrorism, and inadequate public healthcare. A nuclear weapons state and a regional power, it has the third-largest standing army in the world and ranks eighth in military expenditure among nations. India is a federal constitutional republic governed under a parliamentary system consisting of 28 states and 7 union territories. India is a pluralistic, multilingual, and multiethnic society. It is also home to a diversity of wildlife in a variety of protected habitats.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_India