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2003-06-05 to 06-09 - Mandi (Day 51-55)

This week I took a vacation from the vacation. The week was spent enjoying the heat of Mandi which was a pleasant change if just for the aspect of change from the chill of the high mountains, reading and doing some web work but for the photography site, not this travel one. The Raj Mahal (King's Palace) set the stage for lazing a bit with the dark timeless rooms and open grounds where time just seems to slip away. One gets strange reasons for doing things while traveling and one of my reasons for sticking around Mandi was the hotel's Baked Macaroni, which is probably a little silly, but it was just so good, I literally did not want to leave - so I didn't. In six days, I finished eight of the casseroles and probably put on a pound or two, which won't hurt anything.

Peter Maverick continued to be a very entertaining conversational companion and it was easy to image that this was how life passed by 100 years ago, sitting in the grounds of the king's palace drinking high tea and telling stories of other lands. Peter having spent several years in India was full of stories to tell.

Other then that there is little I have to offer this journal for this week of travel - it passed by in a flash with time disappearing into two novels and HBO, which after a month without TV was very welcome - even though Indian HBO, like much of Asia, has commercials every 15 minutes which thoroughly ruins a movie. Too make it worse; HBO seems to only have two or three companies willing to pay for spots so it is the same commercials over and over and over again. Its so bad I've memorized a couple of Hindi comercials I don't understand but can recite the tag lines!

The only other thing worth noting is that the guys at the local internet café were being so cool to me; I thought I would try to return a favor and offer them some of the video files I brought along. With 30gig's on tap, the poor hard-drive seems to have burned itself out trying to copy the files for the café guys becoming my first major broken item on the trip and losing all my movies which is a major loss. The good news is they have a copy some of the movies, the bad is that I have lost the mobile hard drive, which was backup for the trip photos, which does addind more risk into the trip.

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