There have been lightening storms for the last two afternoons. Yesterday I was reading in my room when Vimla beckoned me out to the living room. "Anjali...come here." We looked out the front door together and saw what looked like rock salt collecting on the ground. It was hail! We listened to the pounding on the corrugated metal roof and watched the purple streaks of lightening and smiled at each other.

Unfortunately, the bad weather drives critters into the house. My stepdad caught three giant spiders the first night it rained. (Well, giant to me, which means anything bigger than a silver dollar. That is not giant to everyone else; that's just normal.) And last night there was a mouse in my sister's room. She seemed completely nonplussed. "Oh yeah, I noticed the droppings a couple days ago." Um, shouldn't you do something to get rid of it? "Eh," she shrugs. She also doesn't care about the giant (to me) spider residing in her bathroom. But I do!

Luckily, there haven't been any scorpions yet. YET.

I went to the town bazaar a couple days ago, which is a marketplace perched on the edge of the mountain. I was almost smashed by a car when I leaned over to pick up a shoe I had accidentally knocked to the ground. But after being here for a week, these brushes with death seem commonplace. You almost die but then you don't die, so you go on feeling like you aren't going to die.

At the bazaar, the funniest thing to see are these coolies, both young and old, pushing around babies in strollers. Apparently people hire the coolies to push their kids around while they shop. It's strange to see ancient, ragged men pushing around babies in strollers decorated with Disney characters. When the kids get older, they graduate to ponies led by the coolies.

The power just went out. This happens approximately twenty times a day.

In a week, my family and I will be traveling to Delhi to shop, then to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, then to Kashmir to live on a houseboat for a week. So many more brushes with death to look forward to!