And then there was the film. Personally, I consider Finding Nemo a traveler's film. It focused on adventure travel - granted, it was unintentional, unwanted adventure, but still an adventure: the son fish, Nemo, gets fishnapped by a scuba diver, and his dad goes to rescue him. There's all sorts of trials and tribulations, along with some lessons learned about doing for yourself, trusting other people (er, fish), not trusting other people (er, fish), being willing to let go and see what happens, and knowing that things will generally turn out all right.

What's travel, if not a chance to do the things you don't normally do?
After the film we wandered a bit, and then of course we had our night out. The next day, we were tired. No, not tired. Just lazy. 800 rupees a night included HBO, National Geographic channel, and Discovery, so I watched more telly yesterday than I probably did the rest of the year.

Coneheads... Erin Brockavich... Mortal Kombat... all in a row, which is every bit as surreal as it sounds. Claudia and I nightcapped with The Firm.

But I'll spare you my thoughts on how these movies relate to the traveler. I don't want to get into it anyway; there's a cool documentary on that I want to watch.

I also want a Coke.

At home, I never drink soda... unless there's rum in it. In fact, I hardly ever drink anything other than water, beer, tea, and coffee. I haven't gone in for fizzy stuff in a long time... unless, well, there's rum in it. But I don't even party all that much anymore either, so really I just hardly ever drink soda, unless, well, you know.

Here though, I've been drinking soda again. Not all the time, not even one a day. But there was a Coke with dinner last night, and I've sampled the various orange nuclear-waste-in-a-bottle of Fanta and Mirinda. My lips were puckered for an hour after drinking the uber-sweet, lemony-tart Limca. And Thums Up, the national cola of India, well, that just wasn't very tasty, but I'm willing to give it another chance. And yes, I'm a Mazza/ Slice (mango drink) freak second only to Claudia.

Exotic? No. Daring? No, Monarch Rum is daring... no wait, that's stupid, and I'm not a college student anymore. (It was still stupid then, but at least it was cheap.)

Tonight we leave for the exotic and daring: Khajuraho. If you aren't familiar with it, let's just say that it's known for temple carvings that, ahem, leave little to the imagination. Actually, they'll probably do more to fire up your imagination, but anyway... We'll try to keep the next few posts rated PG-13 though, in case you want to show Finding Nemo after ;-)