ate daze uh weak (my yin's Himalayan adventures)

so my yin has been gone for eight days so far, and - amazingly - i've managed not to break into the giant block of cheese she left me before leaving. of course my notion of what constitutes a giant block of cheese changed somewhat this morning:

somewhere there's a yak with sore nipples

this monstrosity was spotted either in Kullu or New Delhi, and as the sign implies, it came from a yak. i don't even know what a yak is. maybe it's like a goat?

the yak is beside the point.

the point is that who could possibly need to buy cheese, yak or otherwise, by the kilo? more over, having procured said yak cheese, how does one go about storing it? maybe yak cheese doesn't need to be refrigerated. but wouldn't mice and mongooses eat it? and why isn't 'mongeese' the plural of 'mongoose'?

the mongoose is also beside the point.

the point is that i am obsessed with this block of cheese, and all the other tantalizing bits of information that find their way from my yin's exploits. these, for example, are Indian Converse:

the thing i love about this picture is that you can see other pairs of Converse in the background, and the shoes are basically strung up in the vendor's stall like these prayer flags across the Beas River:

she wrote: "how did they do that?"

my yin, when not documenting her adventures or pondering the finer points of stringing flags across holy rivers, likes to relax by drinking Nescafe with a maniacal grin:

or sipping on chai from hillside Himalayan cafés:

my yin says India is full of dogs

one of my favorites, though, was this one. those are the Himalayas behind her, although i'm uncertain if the view is towards Kashmir or Tibet:

i will post more photos and updates as time and technology allow.
until then, as ever...