Falling in love with paradise.

Goa, I will begin by saying, is an absolute paradise.

This past weekend is definitely in the running for "best weekend ever." I will start by admitting that we had very, very few plans when we boarded our bus to Goa on Friday evening. We knew that the five of us had an appetite for Indian adventure and an urge to meet people and see everything we could. But we didn't have a plan. I'll admit--I'm a planner. I love to plan things, I love to know when we're going, where we're going, what we're doing when we're there. But I came to India to learn things, so last week I made a conscious effort to not worry at all about what or where we were going exactly. I am still in shock at how well things have turned out and simultaneously, how wonderful things worked out when we simply chose to trust Indians.

We left Pune around 8 pm on an air-conditioned bus that we almost couldn't find. After much running and rushing to make sure we made it on time, we were off on the coldest bus ride of my entire life. I only slept a few hours and was comforted only by the fact that I saw my friend Logan wasn't sleeping next to me either. She and I bonded over this fact the next morning when we got into a thoroughly deserted 6 am Goa. I looked around when we arrived and was absolutely sure that we would never figure out where we were going. All we had was the name of a beach town where some other Americans we met had already booked a hotel. Two minutes of looking around found us in a taxi, negotiating a price to take us to look at a few guest houses. Twenty minutes later and we had two rooms at an inexpensive guest house a minute's walk from the beach and... five motorized scooters.

This was perhaps one of the best decisions I've ever made. I was incredibly nervous about driving the scooter, but ten minutes on the back roads and we were all experts. We just reminded each other every time we got on one--"Remember to drive on the left." (As a side note, there was very little traffic in Goa. I would not have felt comfortable driving with a lot of other cars around, but almost no one was on the roads because we are still technically in the rainy off-season.) That first morning we put in several hours before noon of scootering around the small beach town we stayed in, making it up to a fort that was resting right on the ocean as we waved hello to Africa and the Middle East across the Arabian Sea. We saw a huge, old lighthouse as part of our tour and then we were off to the beach.

The first few hours on the beach were awkward, all 11 of us Americans (5 of us from ACM, 6 from another group studying here in Pune) acting thoroughly American by wearing bikinis and sunbathing. We were getting a lot of stares and even more people harassing us about buying things, so we decided to walk down the beach about 10 minutes away from the crowd. There, we found a deserted beach and the friendliest beach shack selling fresh seafood and pina coladas. We sat around all day in the shade of that shack, getting to know the proprietors and just basking in the glorious-ness that was our experience there. In the evenings we would scooter around to a bunch of different restaurants to find food. The next day? Repeat.

The weekend was wonderfully refreshing and made me fall in love with India all over again. We met some of the nicest people, all were so willing to help us out. It was great, too, because there were so few tourists since it is still the very tail end of the rainy season.

I'll write again once more this week with an updated itinerary of where we'll be in the next few weeks!