Sarah: Now that it's been fully a month since our last update, some of you have probably started wondering where in the world we are, and whether you'll ever hear from us again. As of a week or two ago, we were pretty uncertain ourselves where we were headed. We knew we were getting ready to depart India. Despite the fact that there are years' worth of sites and cities that we would be missing out on in that vast and fascinating subcontinent, we could tell that after spending about two months there, we were going to be ready for a change of pace and a change of scenery. We also knew that we'd be flying to wherever we headed next, which opened up a whole raft of possibilities.

Sarah: Our journey to Kolkata gets off to a fairly inauspicious start on Saturday when we arrive at the Gaya train station for a 9:00 a.m. departure and are told that our train is delayed and now expected in at 11:30. This is a train that had started in New Delhi some 17 hours before, Gaya being just one of many stops on the long line to Kolkata. We all groan a little -- a couple days before, Patrick had met someone whose train ended up arriving at its destination 18 hours late, and we’ve been told that the Indian Railways policy is that late trains always defer to on-schedule trains for station stops, track changes, and so forth -- which basically means that once a train has started running late, it’s only going to get later.

Sarah: I keep trying to figure out how to begin.

We’ve been in India for three weeks now, and already I feel like I have a book’s worth of images to relate, and many years’ worth of fodder for discussion and questioning and study. This is a country with an incredibly rich and diverse history and culture, and it’s also a country with a lot of problems, all of which feel complex and daunting and interrelated.

Patrick: We've had a slow start in India. With the excuse that we were recuperating from jetlag and a hectic and emotional holiday in the USA, we spent three nights in Delhi without really straying a block away from our guesthouse. We'll be back in that enormous city later to be tourists, but our first visit was purely a stage on or way out into the rest of India. Now we're in Chandigarh, a spread-out, concrete city planned to a T by modernist architect Le Corbusier in 1955. We've also been taking it slow here. Sarah's still in the dumps about her grandmother, who died while we were in the US with her family, and she's also teetering next to some kind of cold or flu, so we've been watching a lot of TV, and we've not gotten out much.

Despite our reclusiveness over the past several days, we've had some great luck meeting people.