a month of Sundays plus some

That's an approximate amount of life I need to think back on since I've last blogged. Since a month of Sundays is 30 months, give or take, I suppose I'm three months of Sundays in arrears.  My good buddy at A Little Leeway would like us to blog about things we've learned as a blog challenge for April, and boy, have I learned a few things.  Many of them the hard way, as usual, because that's how I do things.  (I can hear my mother's long-suffering sigh from here.)

I learned a lot of things in India.  The first thing I learned is that, yes, there really are cows everywhere.  And I mean everywhere: camped out on city sidewalks, walking with and against traffic, crossing streets willy-nilly, and sticking their noses into shop doors. The second thing I learned (and as this was my first day in India, these were almost literally the first two things I learned) was that one should not approach a cow that is lounging on the sidewalk. Maybe one should not approach any cow, but resting cows can give one a false sense of security.  I wanted John to get a photo of me with the cow.  I had to cross a  street of insane traffic (or as they call it in India, just "a street") and when I got over there, I realized that the lack of sidewalk space put me closer to the cow than I really wanted to be.  But I had just traveled for thirty plus hours and, without so much as getting horizontal for one minute, had headed out for an all-day tour of Jaipur, so I wasn't using the best judgment.  I approached the cow and posed for a photo.  John snapped the photo, but just as he did, the cow lunged for me, making an angry cow sound.  The moment was captured for posterity, which was pretty funny.  What was also funny is that I jumped and turned and ran into a pole.  What was not so funny was that running into this pole was the only thing that kept me from falling into the insane traffic.  This pulled me up short, friends.  Made me stop right there on a street in India and consider how it would've played back home, had I died in a horrible traffic accident on my first day in India.  It also prompted my trip motto (I like to have a trip motto)--"There are a hundred ways to die in India."  I didn't know how very apropo this motto would become in the days ahead (foreshadowing).

If you want a cold, hard fact about India, which I looked up once I had experienced India because, man I really had to know this: India is about one-third the land area of the US, but the population is nearly four times the US.  Just let that sink in, friends.