The Indo-China chronicles

I have been away for about 5 weeks. First to India, then to China. Hope some of you you are familiar with this story (read: excuse) - despite your best intentions you never have enough time in India to write posts, and accessing the internet via dialup is not pretty anymore. In China, I could not access blogger.com at all. (More on the freedom of internet access later.)

After having been 5 weeks away from my lab, and also from blogger with 500 photographs and with a ton of stories to tell (some should not be disclosed publicly) I find myself with NO TIME! When you travel every day is worth 3-4 different stories, but a few weeks later you cannot recollect many of them.
We are a sum of our experiences and as time passes it becomes harder and harder to separate the individual components. These stories have the benefit of hindsight but will have lost some of the freshness of an account written the same day.

It was a great break. A couple of important personal milestones and revisiting India after more than 2 years was a little different from what I expected.
The US-India-China-US trip was a good three-way basis for comparison. In retrospect, visiting China was better than visiting Europe. For most people, India and China represent the future and the shape of things to come. Though I might have not had the benefit of extensive sampling - seeing is still believing. Quite a few popular perceptions that were floating in my head were altered and I have more reason not to trust the pop-pundits in the mags and newspapers.
I will try to keep the accounts mostly chronological, though some overlap is unavoidable. Before I lose all of the stories I better write them down. I plan to post one each day. Let's see how that goes.