Welcome back to This is India! I always have funny/weird stories about India to share with friends or family when I talk to them. This is just meant to be an honest portrayal about my life in India through short anecdotes. I also share here what I’ve been up to online outside Hippie in Heels.

Writing I did Other than Hippie in Heels:

  • an interview for Girls That Go, one of my favorite sites about female travel

This is India (four)

I’ve actually mentioned this in passing when I told you last year how hard it was learning to drive in India, but it’s story worth telling in full.

It was early monsoon last year and Ben, Stein our crazy kiwi friend, and Rishab our BFF in Goa, and I were in the good ol’ omni driving home from a quite boozy dinner.  We were about 3 minutes from home.

Goa is full of speed bumps and as I learned with driving there, you have to slow down a lot before you go over them, as Ben said to me “always shift to 2nd gear to know you’re slowing down enough- the car noises will tell you”. Luckily, that’s the case because the speed bump we were slowing down for wasn’t a speed bump.

It was a python.

AN 8-FOOT PYTHON!

omni, india, expat, driving in india, python

I am so afraid of snakes, I can’t even begin to explain how scared I was. There was actually so much pure shock, I couldn’t even cry. I had only been in Goa about 2 or 3 months at this point and was basically like, “What the fuck, Ben, you didn’t tell me there were pythons in our village!” I didn’t know there were pythons in Goa for that matter.

I had the exact same reaction when I found a big dead scorpion in the pool.

Of course, the boys got out and tried to get the snake to play with it (idiots) but it slithered away into the forest.

Another monsoon has come around and in the last year, we did see a couple more snakes. Some were outside in the wild, some were under our couch, on the walkway, or people’s pets they brought out to dinner and let slither on the table while they ate…

I have been told that in hot April, May, and early June the snakes come out looking for water. These are the months just before monsoon.

this is india four

Lord Shiva had a pet snake, so most Hindus won’t kill a snake, so I’ve been told. They think of them as “cool” and some even think it’s lucky to see pythons. My yoga teacher had a couple fall through cracks in her roof. Friends have told me they’ve seen larger ones fall from trees near Thalassa or on the Mapusa-Anjuna road stretched out, straight chillin’!

This is India!

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