Our first step toward Bollywood stardom!

First the long awaited answer to the poll.

The only t-shirt we haven't seen is "I heart ass." I'm still losing sleep over the memory of the old woman wearing the "I'd rather be masturbating" shirt in Kenya. The one about bird flu, I found quite hysterical, and I think the guy wearing it actually understood English :-)

Dan and I left Amma's Ashram after they yelled at him for slicing onions too thickly. Literally. For a volunteer job. When she said "If you couldn't slice them 'thin' you should have let me know and I would have found someone else to do it." Dan's response was "we're out of this loony bin."

I must say, we met tons of interesting people at the Ashram. For example:

1) The couple in their later 50s from Seattle who recently put their house on the market, picked up and moved to the Ashram sight unseen (they had never even been to India before.) They'd been there are few days and were having second doubts due to the humidity and chaos.

2) The french woman who'd lived at the Ashram for several years who explained that sometimes if you sit on the stage with Amma, you can actually kiss her feet! This was supposed to make everyone gasp with glee.

3) The woman from New Mexico who traveled 72 hours to get to the Ashram, was so tired and hungry that she was literally weeping on Dan's shoulder, but decided that no, before going to sleep or having food, she was going to wait in line to see Amma. P.S. The next day we saw her about 5pm (she'd been asleep for about 17 hours). Dan started telling her where to get dinner and she said "isn't it early in the morning?"


Needless to say, we are now in the beautiful town of Alleppey. The heart of the backwaters.

Yesterday, we went to the tourist information office to get some info about hiring a houseboat. It's the thing to do here, but it aint cheap. One day is a minimum of $100 for 2 people. That might not sound like a lot, but at the crazy ashram all food and lodging was abut $10/day.


As we were discussing options, a guy came in and said "do you want to go on a houseboat for free?" Free?!?!?!?! Our frugal ears perked up. Of course we were interested! But what was the catch? Well.....they had a brand new luxury house boat and needed some white people to be in the photos for the brochure and website......finally being white and fabulously good looking has paid off!!!!


So we cruised around for about 7 hours, posing in the various rooms, gazing serenly at the fishermen and the birds with a 5 person camera crew snapping away, pretending to eat and watch the flat screen tv. Actually eating food made by the top chef they have. The boat we were on is going to rent for about $400/night in the high season...that's about double the price of the Hilton in Delhi. It was an odd and fabulous experience. Dan and I are planning to enter the next round of America's Top Model.

The owner of the boat is supposed to send us a few of the professional shots and we'll post them ASAP.