Where most of the country is, well, hot - from the bone-baking dry heat of the desert to the flesh-melting humidity of Kerala in the south - Kashmir is cool: so cool, in fact, that in the winter, the temperatures can sink to sub-zero.
Friendship is one of our most treasured relationships, but it isn't codified and celebrated; it's never going to give you a party.
You see a virus very differently when it's caught and suspended on a slab of glass than when you're observing how it's ravaged a fellow human being.
The first thing I do whenever I go to Thailand is seek out the closest restaurant or stall selling mango-and-sticky rice: it's a little hillock of glutinous rice drenched in lashings of coconut milk and served with fresh mango.
The speed limit on most of Maui's highways is forty miles per hour, but my mother never went above thirty.
I love how Vietnamese cuisine always tastes like flowers, and how they had the ingenious idea of pairing that floral flavor with seafood: such a combination shouldn't work as well as it does.