Merry how do you find a good and safe homestay? I've looked into it in the past but I just never knew if what I found was right. :}

For short stays I use AirBnB, but that's an obvious one, I guess. For longer stays I always end up at Homestay.com. It's pretty much like AirBnB, only intended for longer stays ^_^
And you're sure it's a homestay, AirBnB also offers hostels and full appartments and everything.
So far I've only got good experiences. I guess checking the reviews is the most important thing to hold on for me, but I think you also get a certain vibe from reading the abouts. Picking the right one is part common sense, part research and part just taking a leap. That goes for every aspect of traveling

Oh, and change of plans, by the way. I seem to be visiting Tel Aviv for a few days at the end of this month. Maybe 2020 is finally gonna be a proper year again

i kind of like to cook? like, i'm ambivalent. it's a challenge, but i like feeling satisfied at the end when i'm sitting down to eat what i've made. and i like trying to cook something i haven't tried before.

i've visited Redmond; that was in Seattle in the US. dad had work there at the time. the other country i've visited was the United Arab Emirates, cause my maternal grandparents live in Abu Dhabi.

i've actually done a sort of homestay before, but it was part of fieldwork for my BA. it was arranged by the college and wasn't through any website; the college has a foundation so i think it was through that. i stayed in a village and so that came with the usual attendant discomforts. no phone signal, for instance. i was especially worried about toilets, because my seniors had had a pretty difficult experience with their fieldwork; some of them had had to make do with holes in the ground. and the problem is fieldwork was a compulsory component of the degree, carried credits.

- the girls had the great luck to find someone to put us up who had a toilet attached to the house instead of an outdoor toilet (of course no commodes) but the boys had no such luck we had running water, too, but the boys had to fetch water.

but the food was amazing, the family who put us up were sweethearts. we walked everywhere (while avoiding cowpats lol). towards the end though my period visited and it had skipped a month so it was BAD and i had to skip out on the fieldwork and stay in the house. i felt super guilty cause i was just laying in bed, eating and taking up the toilet but i suspect hormones were partly responsible for the bad feeligs lol and maybe they didn't think i was a burden. i think them being so nice to me made me guiltier or something stupid like that the lady i was staying with made turmeric milk to help with my cramps, and she let me enter the kitchen even though i was on my period, she thought nothing of it. so all that stuff about more traditions/superstitions in villages isn't necessarily true- we did visit a neighbouring village tho, where the women had to leave the village and stay in the outskirts every time they were menstruating or giving birth. they had to take care of themselves. the shelter they'd built for that didn't even have a roof. i really thought they should have a choice, but we were supposed to only observe, not judge/comment.

okay oops i rambled. happy journey to Tel Aviv, that's awesome! i'm jealous of all the travelling you've been able to do but also, like, #goals and all that

Sure Merry, take your time with the pics :)

Oh wow, Tel Aviv! A friend of mine has been there in November I think, exactly when the rockets took off there. But he said he felt safe. But he also said that it is SUPER expensive and people dress very very nicely there.

I don't know really, what exactly my friends have seen of China, but they never talk about anything else than Beijng xD But I think it's also a different experience if you lived somewhere for a while or just stayed there for a few days.
I heard that Tokyo and Seoul are suppossed to be very interesting though!

The same friends and a few more a planning to go on vacation together, that would be 12 of us :D Let's see how thil will work out

Mynah, omg, I never heard of the women having to leave the village while menstuating, that's horrible! I understand it's a tradition, but with what explanation?
Glad that you had a nice toilet though, that would be thing I would be most afraid of as well xD

they used to stay that menstruating is impure now, in hindsight, they say it was for reasons of hygiene, but i don't see how sending women out of the village is more hygienic.

in most places here, women didn't have to leave but they do have to 'sit aside' for the duration of their period. that meant they stayed in their rooms and didn't move, food was brought to them, and once they were done with their period the things they touched were washed, like bedclothes and so on. but as far as possible they were supposed to avoid touching things if they could.

thanks to all of that there's been plenty of stigma around menstruation. my mom used to sit aside, thankfully i never had to, it's lessened in my generation i think. also depends on the family, not everyone practices it. the woman i was staying with in the village let me enter the kitchen, for example. on the other hand, my cousin, who grew up in the city, had a modern education and is the same generation as me- she wouldn't sit aside, but she used to wash the curtains after she touched them during her period.

i used to imagine that there would be more superstitions and stigma in the village and after my visit i realised, at least, that it's not that simple. and that my family could be more orthodox than someone in the village in some aspects.

I don't see any point in that either


But some cultures are still very traditional...

As a writer I always find the difference in how some families deal with traditions compared to other families very interesting.
As a person though there are somethings I can simply not wrap my head around. :}

As much as it pisses me off, life in India is just very different from Europe. As a matter of fact, just the sentence "i stayed in a village and so that came with the usual attendant discomforts. no phone signal, for instance." set me off immensely, 'cause no phone signal in a village, a usual discomfort? x'D
To be honest, that and the whole-in-the-ground-experience sounds like a great time to me, but I seriously never had to deal with a village without phone signal. No one in our part of Europe does, I'm sure

So yeah. Dealing with women like that is infuriating to me. It sickens me, actually. And it terrifies me. But there's so much going on there that we as Western Europeans cannot understand because we were raised so differently... That's why I think it's rather awesome to get to know someone from such a rich different culture!
If I could, I'd get right on a plane to hear you out, Mynah xD
But seriously, how do you live there as a woman?

I feel like that as well - it's interesting to hear all those things because life outside of the usual European cities is very different, even the life in villages. But, as both the others said, it's also terrifying and disrespectful to treat women worse than men just because of that - because they are women.

I think it hurts me most because I never even wanted to be a woman in the first place, so it feels really, really unfair to be treated differently for being something you never even got the choice to be. It also feels ridiculous, because how even can one half of humanity decide they are better than the other half? How did women never even get a say in it? It just blows my mind, time and time again. I already feel disgusted and inferior about this stupid body. Don't make it worse by acting like I actually chose to be like this. And don't pretend you're better just because you were lucky to be born with a dick. Idiots. And bonus points for somehow brainwashing the entire human race to believe this...