April 8th, 2011-

Brenna and I snagged an overnight “sleeper” train from Haridwar to Amritsar (in the Punjab, near the Pakistan border). Cost: $5. Experience: not as nasty as I thought it could be. Almost pleasant.

Brenna taught some young’uns to play SET. And an old guy who just couldn’t quite get it.

We arrived bright and early at 7am and bee-lined it The Golden Temple, the holiest of holy places for people of the Sikh religion. It was pretty sweet ass.

Even in our dirty, sleep-deprived state, the temple left us awe-struck.

And we left the locals awe-struck, apparently. Five different groups asked us for photographs—mostly young men who approached with a big smile and “Hello! How are you?” in decent English.

We spent the rest of the day napping in a noisy hotel room. Brenna was sick with a cold, so I went out looking for wi-fi, unsuccessfully. What I did find was a nice guy, around age 30, named “Raj” who chatted me up in his internet cafe. He told me first that he worked for Microsoft, and later that he actually worked at a call center for Virgin Broadband in Delhi. Very nice guy. He asked to become my Facebook friend. That’s the new international hand-shake, it seems. I agreed.