The rough plan for India:
- Finish testing next Monday. Spend Tuesday punching in grades and handing in the last of my paperwork, and pick up my ticket and passport, which should be ready by then.
- Leave Korea on the night of the 18th of December.
- Arrive at some crazy-ass time like 5am on the 19th of December. Meet up with Ritu. Thank my lucky stars.
- Hang out Ritu and prowl about Delhi for a week.
- Blunder south to Agra, and Fatepur Sikra for a few days.
- Shoot north to Dharamsala and settle in for a wonderful winter. Write my novel; probably volunteer some of my time into teaching English to Tibetan refugees; get to know the place some; read these books I’ve been wanting to read for years. Think. Learn to better appreciate this person I’ll be living alone on the mountainside with for the time being, myself. Repair the fence if the cows bust through. Be careful of the monkeys. Water the garden each day. Perhaps sign up for an appointment to meet the Dalai Lama. And then come back out of the mountains, come to Delhi and catch my flight back, perhaps stopping in a couple of places (mentioned to me by Ritu) on the way south.
- A stopover in Bangkok, do some light shopping and enjoy the warm weather, bask in having finished my first real novel.
- Return into Korea, midwinter Korea, on the 20th of February. Bask a little more, do some recording in the studio, and get to work on tidying my novel up. Give it to people for feedback, and then start mailing it out to publishers. And back to the business of teaching, and of paying off my student loans.
It’s finally kind of hit me that I am actually doing this. This is actually happening. Can you believe it? Ha, I guess now it’s my sister Annie’s turn to be envious of me… as I was of her so many times in the past during her travels. Heh.
It’ll be tough not to see my family for another year. I miss them. But I know this will be amazingly good for me, this trip, and when they see me, finally, probably next Christmas, I’ll be a different person than they remembered, in a good way. But a trip home is definitely my next big trip.
Oh my. It’s really past my bedtime. I still need to get through the next week of testing, so I’d better shut the trap (or whatever the metaphor would be for typing too much, instead of talking too much) and get some sleep.