Riding High

We arrived in Mysore, India just before Freeman's birthday and have gotten settled in quite comfortably here. We are staying at one of Freeman's best friend's mom's house outside of Mysore. The house was designed by Freeman's friend, Kartik's Aunt and Uncle and has some very cool environmental features. The house refreshes all its gray water for secondary use in flushing the toilets. The house also collects and filters the roof runoff for use as water in all the taps for cooking, hand washing, and etcetera. The hot water is heated using a solar water heater on the roof, which gets piping hot. It's been fun to feel a bit more integrated with the local landscape.

The rains have come to this part of India finally and are causing a fair amount of flooding. The weather is a bit cooler on average during the days and there have been some excellent rain showers in the evenings and sporadically throughout the days. We just picked up a couple bikes for each of us for commuting into town, and so far only got caught in a mild shower once, we've been lucky.

In town we are both keeping ourselves busy. Jo is taking traditional Indian dance classes for and Free is taking private and group yoga lessons. We usually wake up late and spend the rest of the morning reading, then ride 8.5 miles into town for our afternoon lessons. We're on our way back by the evening in time for dinner a bit after 7:30. Add in some more reading and internet puttering and that's a good day.

We've befriended a retired couple around the corner who are voracious readers and have amassed quite a library. We now have a small stack of borrowed literature and environmental non-fiction to keep us busy for a few weeks. On the book front, don't bother reading Dan Brown's newest "The Lost Symbol". A Dr. Bronner's soap bottle is more engrossing and thematically very similar.

We are both feeling very relaxed and enjoying getting to know one place well, as opposed to bouncing around we were doing for a while. We think about home often and hope you all are well.

Cheers,
Jo and Free