THE FOLLOWING WAS WRITTEN ON WEDNESDAY THE 8th............

Ola! Hello all, hope you are doing fine back home. I am still sweating away in India - it is quite hot, well above 30 degrees at least, but the humidity is also above 80 and cold showers are very very nice - except that the effect of these fades within 5 minutes after leaving the shower. Ant even though microfiber towels are quite handy and compact and suck water up quite nicely, I still don't feel properly dry after using it.

So what has happened since I last wrote - bom bom? Well as I think I mentioned we went to the beach on Saturday and just relaxed and bathed in the sea - the water level is quite low so you can walk out pretty far and enjoy yourself. However the current is really REALLY strong, it equals, if not surpasses, the current at the Danish west coast so we have to be careful and we can fell the pull in the legs when we walk back to the beach. The fact that India is a patriarchal system is quite clear when ever walking around Colva - for every 100-1000 men you will see a single woman. And the only women you will see are some shopkeepers and the salespersons at the beach. Otherwise it is just men men men. And in India they have a different view upon caressing in public, or maybe caressing is the wrong word - more like showing emotions, not just towards your husband or wife but also between friends. It is strongly frowned upon, if not forbidden, for women to show any emotions in public including holding hands with their husband but in contrast all the men are very very close. It is not unusual to see two men hold hands or have their hands on each others shoulders - quite hmm different from what we are used to from back home. Well all this leads me to their attitude towards foreign women - they have absolutely no inhibitions and they are sometimes quite rude. Here is an example. At the beach on Saturday we found a quiet spot without Indian men and without saleswomen. However, some men were still walking along the beach and at one point where all us girls were lying around in our bikinis a man came walking along filming us with his mobile!!!! And without respect or anything we walked up to us, stood 2m from us and filmed for like 2 minutes. We yelled at him, gave him the finger, told him to go away in both English, Danish and Hindi but nothing worked. We even covered ourselves up a bit but that didn't dispirit him. He probably only stopped because he ran out of space on the mobile. And after walking for about 100 m he stopped and watched the entire film again. Creep!

Oh and it is also quite funny just watching Indian men walk - I am sorry for the language but honestly they walk like a bunch of f*****s! (De gaar virkelig svanset!!!) Amazing how they all master this fruity swaggering….

Another thing one will quickly discover about India is their traffic rules - or rather the lack of them. The traffic is quite chaotic meaning that nobody really holds back for anybody. The weirdest thing is their system in round-abouts. In Denmark the cars from the joining streets hold back for the cars already in the round about but here it seems to work the opposite way because when going around in one the cars or scooters or motoecycles from the joining streets will just enter in front of you. Which can sometimes cause somewhat of a pile-up or queue in the round abouts. Funny. Which means that we struggle around on our bicycles we have to keep our eyes very much open especially since THEY DRIVE IN THE WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD. Seriously, I thought it was only in Britain and Australia they did that. But well they do it in India too. And also they honk at pretty much what ever they can - serving not only as a warning of 'watch out I am coming around this sharp turn with at least 70 km/hour and I am driving in the middle of the road' or 'watch out I am now crossing the street even though I have no right' but also serves as a sort of greeting - so they honk all the time and we have picked up the habit of also ringing the bells on our bicycles like madmenJ.

On saturday night we went out to a quite nice restaurant for dinner and even though it was nice and we had a big main course and dessert we still only paid like 30kr pr person including soda and water. Afterwards the rain showers began. I think we probably got about 30-40 mm rain saturday evening within 2 hours and this continued through most of Sunday. This amount of rain causes the power to go several times a day so we now have adopted the habit of walking around with a flash light in the evening also when going to the bathroom 'cause it gets quite dark already at 6:30. (And also because Jens thinks it is SOOO funny turning of the lights when one of the girls is in the bathroom….!) On Sunday we went to see a spice plantation about an hours drive from Colva near a city called Ponda. This was quite nice (except for the thunder storm) and it was funny actually seeing where the spices come from - a banana palm tree, a pineapple buch/root, vanilla (which is actually a parasite), cinnamon, cardamom, betel nut trees, cashew nuts - now we know why cashew nuts are so f***ing expensive back home - a single cashew tree only provides 2-300 nuts in a season!!!! Wauw - and we had all eaten a big bag containing at least that number of nuts in a couple of days. Hmm…

Tuesday we went to see a couple of catholic churches in old Goa - one contains the body of the Portuguese missionary St. Francis Xavier, now the patron of Goa. People in Goa believe themselves to be so privileged due to the protection of this saints and the Roman Catholics (who are quite abundant in Goa) actually believes that there are several miracles associated with his body. By the way he died in 1500-something. Here is an example: earlier his body was put on display every tem years and at this point people would w\make almost a pilgrimage trip to the church in order to kiss his big toe. The body is sort of mummified and looks still like a real person (almost). So one lady decided to test if he really was dead and BIT his big toe (gross!!!!!!) and then, according to the story, the toe started bleeding!!! Yuck - but more amazingly they actually believe it. Don't know what frightens me the most…

Today (Wednesday) we went to see a school and a few daycare centres in Margao which are all run by Idex (Indian Development Exchange Program who is the local partner for MS) at a place called Monte Hill. This area is not really slum but is heavily populated - aprox. 500 homes housing approx. 10000 people! This means that in average 20 people share a home! Oh my god. The children in the school were very excited to see us and we caused quite a commotion. The LOVE cameras and they loved being photographed. After taking a picture, however, stand ready to be overrun by a horde of eager children who all wants to see the picture of them at the same time. And I made the mistake of letting a boy take a picture with my camera which caused all the other children to flock around me begging to do the same while I desperately tried to hang to my camera to save it. He he. Actually I got some pretty nice shots this way!

Well, enough for now- other people need to use the computer. Hope you are all doing well! Hugs from Mette