When I told Leah I was going to Portland, she suggested Voodoo Dooughnut as a must-see destination. So, once the sun came out I went in search of Leah's mecca.

Ironically, since I've recently been traveling in India, the public transportation system here in Portland was a bit baffling. One of the trolley lines is under construction, so you had to take a bus to the next working trolley stop, take the trolley to the metro line, and then the metro line to a stop near my destination. Later I realized that I could've just walked from my hotel and it would've taken about 20 minutes.

How do you know when you've arrived at Voodoo Doughnut? Look for the line!



The menu inside is a bit baffling. When you order a "Blood filled Voodoo Doughnut" what on earth are you going to get? (answer later ... discuss amongst yourselves)



There is also a showcase of all manner of bizarre dooughnuts:



Including the maple bar with bacon?



And, because I don't want you to be in suspense for too long, here's the Blood filled Voodoo Doughnut. It is raspberry-filled, and there's a pretzel stake driven through it's heart.

Leah's been doing a much better job of catching up on her blog than me. Check out her posts about Rajasthan. Mike has a blog too, with some cool photos that he took on our late-night village celebration walk.

Now that I'm back to my blog reader (with a month of accumulated posts), I'm finding some pretty cool stuff. For example, this game-in-progress, where you navigate a maze in black and white using ink splatters.


The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.


Scenes of New York (composed with legos).

The best (and only) advertisement I have seen for nuclear energy:



A Washington Post photo-mosaic of the inauguration.

Here's a look at per-capita discretionary spending from the New York Times.

An unbelievable video of a machine that eviscerates trees.

Tomorrow I leave India and head home. It's hard to believe I've been here for a month - where has the time gone? I'm ready to return, but at the same time, I'm not. I could so convince myself to take another trip in a month or two (we'll see how I feel after traveling around the U.S. on and off for the next month).

What do I miss about America?
Salads, Chocolate cake, Bacon (that's Leah's fault), fast and reliable Internet, you can order food (or coffee) and actually get what you expected, women who have lives outside of being housewives (not many here), walking down the street without hearing a symphony of horns, orderly trash disposal.

Anyways, I hope you've enjoyed reading about this trip (what's up so far).

While we were on one of our village walks, we came across a group of women digging in these strange dusty pits in the hot sun. This is a government project to make a man-made "lake" in the village. It is being dug by hand. Everyone may send one family member to be employed by the government project. Looks like fun, huh?

All we can figure is that this is the Indian government's way of providing a type of welfare in return for manual labor. I find it a bit disturbing that the women (who also take care of the children, gather and carry firewood, cook meals, and sew clothing) are the ones doing the digging.

Okay ... so it's fairly difficult to find fast Internet and you have to pay to upload every photo in some places. So, my vacation may continue on (in this blog) for several weeks after the actual vacation.

Here are some pictures from our "dress up" night at the fort.















Our trip is almost over now, and today we've been SHOPPING!! (that's all caps because Leah and I have really been shopping today - great jewelry, great clothing, great everything in Pushkar). Well, the beggars aren't so great, but we've been having fun spending our money.

To answer Stephanie's question - we're on an Intrepid Travel trip, so I haven't had to decide on any accommodations or transportation - it's all done for us. And if you're going to go to India, this is definitely the way to go!

Tomorrow we'll be back in Dehli and I'll be home on Thursday (unless I decide to shun all my responsibilities and go to Bali ... ).

We've been staying in some rural places with no Internet for several days ... a fort, a palace, a tent city. Having a great time and will load more pictures in the next day or two.

On a side note, I just finished reading "Girls of Riyadh" which I highly recommend.

Before we went to visit "the Taj" we went to the Agra Fort. Here are some pics.
















While we were all staring (mesmerized) at the Taj Mahal in the distance, this monkey jumped up on the windowsill to pose with the Taj.

Northern India is certainly different than southern India. In comparison, southern India seems now to be lush in my memory, full of green fields, palm trees, and rice paddies. Our bus ride this morning took us through a red dust bowl with more stark poverty within arm's reach of a highway. After several hours on a local bus, we were dropped off at (what seemed to us) a random marker of the road. Here we were met by three jeeps, which took us and our things to our next overnight destination. The ride was bumpy and the scenery passed by too quickly to photograph, so I jotted down some notes about life by the side of the road in rural Rahjastan.

First, there are the tractors, which seem to be the most common road vehicle. You may now be imagining a westernized version of tractors - green and yellow John Deere tractors driven by farmers wearing baseball caps. Dump that. Here, tractors are brightly painted – the blue of the sky on a bright day, the color of rice paddies, or a traditional “tractor” red. Many come with stereo systems which blare out Indian music which sounds to your ears like the siren on an ambulance as it passes your jeep. Many of these tractors are decorated, hung with silver and gold tinsel, strings of beads, and folded foil Indian décor. Most tractors pull cart behind, usually a different bright color, decorated with flowers, symbols, and sayings (painted by hand).

We pass a camel pulling a load on a cart – the load on the cart is wrapped in a white tarp, but it bulges out so far on each side that the load looks like the belly of a pregnant white elephant stuffed into a milk crate.

The road is shared with bicycles, motorcycles, jeeps, pedestrians, dogs, street cows, domesticated cows, goats, and clusters of children wearing matching school uniforms. The red dust is everywhere and coats everything. We have this joke in India now – how do you know if the cow is a newborn? Because that's the only time you see a white cow.

A flock of sheep blocks the road for a minute or two. The flock is moving across the road like a long train with no end in sight. The sheep are a dusty red shade of off-white.

Men gather under thatched open-air huts, squatting in the dust and discussing business, the matters of India, and (most likely) their wives and children. We still see women in colorful saris, dotting the fields or walking by the roadside, but now some of the women where saris that have seen the wear and tear of layers of dust, days in the hot sun, and lack of water to clean.

We pass many hand-pumped wells set in concrete. Sometimes they are attended by women, pumping water to carry home for the washing or for cooking the next meal. Children play at some – wearing plaid uniforms and splashing the water a little in fun. Some pumps sit empty, gathering dust and waiting for their next customer.

Many of the large trucks that pass us are TATA trucks, and many of these trucks are also brightly painted and decorated with tinsel, beads, flowers, and the like.

We pass two men riding on a bicycle, two men digging a ditch in front of a shop, piles of stone and circular cairns of carefully stacked red bricks. We pass a woman wearing a neon peach headscarf and carrying a huge bundle on her head, and a man with a red turban, stopped with his motorcycle on the side of the road, talking on his cell phone.

A scarecrow made from two sticks in a “T” and draped with a men's long-sleeved business shirt stands guard over a cultivated field of dusty green crops.

In deference to the summer heat (even though it is winter now), a field with rows of bushy green plants is shaded by rows of dried hay, placed at a slant on each row to shade the crop.

Spindly brown trees dot the fields, the dusty open areas, and the yards of dwellings. There are many abandoned brick buildings – only shells consisting of open spaces where windows and doors once took up residence. There are no roofs on these buildings and the walls are often no more than three feet high with some variation in their height and depth.

In the shops and homes, you can see ancient pumps, generators, and engines. These simple and heavy machines carry decades-worth of dust. A minute later, we pass a modern radio tower and large satellite dish sitting in a field.

There is colorful laundry hanging out to dry (and receive a fresh coating of dust). There are clay pots, stacked pyramid-style, in front of a business along with mounds of clay plates.

Drying patties of animal dung are stacked and arranged in patterns in front of some homes and shops. This is one of the local fuels (trees are not an abundant source of fuel here and are likely more valuable as shade). On the subject of dung, we also pass quite a few men and children relieving themselves on the side of the road. Modesty while emptying the bladder does not seem to be a trait here.

A freshly-painted green, white, and yellow John Deere advertisement pops off the wall at our eyes; it is one of the only things we have seen that has not yet been coated with fine red dust. The weeds in the ditch by the side of the road are so heavy with dust that it looks like someone came along with some dust-colored spraypaint and just gave them a heavy dousing.

After all this scenery becomes commonplace, we finally our destination, a fort high on a hill that is owned by one of the former royal families of Rahjastan.

For the rest of our lives, Leah and I can now casually refer to the time we sat and chatted on a bench outside "the Taj." It really is fabulous, but it was also about what you'd expect from one of the major tourist sites in the world. Lots of tourists!