Microsites for bandhani (tie-dye), pottery, Ajrakh (block printing), and ply split weaving are now live at: exhibitions-khamir.org. Through these sites, Khamir’s unique research archive on the craft communities of Kutch is available to people around the world for the first time.

How can smaller nonprofits take advantage of the internet and the prevalence of mobile phones not only to spread their message, but to actually improve their programs?  I came to India this year to see how I could apply my knowledge of nonprofit branding, and UX design to an organization that is far more grassroots, and far less funded, than some of the large NGOs that were my clients in New York.

I’ve always been fascinated by human beings’ predilection for adding ornamentation to our surroundings. What is the impetus for going to the trouble of decorating everything? A love of color, pattern, and decoration is obvious across India, and in Kachchh, where handicrafts have played an important role in culture and livelihoods for millennia, it’s especially hard to miss. 

I’m sitting next to Ranabhai, a leather artisan who has been making traditional Kachchhi shoes for many decades in the village of Hodka, Gujarat.  Ranabhai uses the same rohi (flat stone work surface) as his great-great-grandfather. Yet he’s lived through quite a few changes to his craft. 

“It’s always refreshing to go to the field,” one of my new colleagues at Khamir remarked to me recently. We’ve been visiting “the field” all week, interviewing leather artisans all over the region of Kutch. Clusters of artisans live in tiny villages in the middle of the desert, making intricate handicrafts with leather and embroidery.

Parmigiano reggiano is really hard to make! The cows are milked twice a day, milk brought into vats, cheese curds are strained into linen cheesecloths, drip-dried, their linen “diapers” changed twice a day, bathed in salt water, heated in a sauna, and brought into a warehouse of thousands of cheeses where they are aged for years. This is all carefully regulated by a consortium, lest anyone be cheated out of the true, artisanal cheese experience.

Our first Airbnb hosts in Bologna were from Ferrara. They left us some traditional Ferraran bread, little twists in the shape of a butterfly. It wasn’t an auspicious introduction - they were dry and tasteless like ashes in our mouths (as were most Italian bread we’ve come across).  But Ted, his mom Daniella and I decided to make a day trip to Ferrara to see if the town had anything else to offer.

I had been grumpy about being the first pickup in my 8 person tour of the Amalfi Coast, but when I realized it gave me the front seat next to the driver, I realized it was worth it.  With blind turns, a drop to the sea on one side, and cliffs on the other, I was glad that I wasn’t the one driving. The other drivers weren't very reassuring either: my driver kept shouting, "They have a the brain of the mouse!"

Any sightseeing fatigue I may have had when we arrived in Bologna was short-lived. The high speed Italian trains really are fast.  Going 200 mph, I arrived in Napoli just a few hours after leaving Bologna in the early morning.  I’d arranged for a car to take me to the sights, and so I was driven around by Pino, a philosophy major who works for his wife.

After a few days in boiling hot and deserted Bologna, we decided to head to the hills for my mom's last few days in Italy. The most convenient place with available accommodations was Como, the town at the south end of Lake Como. The Airbnb had a strange college-themed decor that really offended Ambika, but what bothered me were the low ceilings that I kept whacking with my head. 

Italian police look like stripper cops. They wear skin-tight synthetic shirts with the sleeves rolled up, carry oversized guns and waggle their hips. I heard one singing Shakira with a priest. 

Ted, his parents and I stayed in the Italian Alps for a week in a tiny town called Cassana.  The entire area felt like a summer camp for Italians, full of playgrounds and apple orchards and ski stuff. The roads were terrifying narrow, cliff-edged nightmares, but the weather was refreshingly cool and the dairy products were top-notch

Ted and I were excited to have a week to ourselves in and around Rome to catch up on some sleep and get some work done (in Ted’s case) after our weeks of wandering.  August, as we might have expected, isn’t the best time to visit - it’s packed with tourists and baking hot. Nevertheless, we found ourselves a lovely Airbnb on a quiet twisty street in Trastevere.  Across the street was a public drinking fountain that burbled like a waterfall all night

Before we'd recovered from our nightbus across Macedonia, Ivo whisked us away to his aunt's lovely apartment in a leafy neighborhood, then to his favorite restaurant, Don Tomato. All Bulgarian food contains cheese, and cheese comes in two types: cheese (a dense sort of feta), or yellow cheese. We ate salad with cheese and french fries with cheese and cheese pizza with corn, plus a large beer each, and felt human again. We spent the day strolling the city. Sofia turns out to be a beautiful town of parks and elegant churches and statues of Bulgarian writers and revolutionaries. 

It turns out that getting from Albania to Bulgaria is harder than you'd think. Our friend Ivo had invited us to visit him while he spent July in his homeland. We balked at the price of the flight through Istanbul, so after poking our heads into every travel agency in Albania we found a bus for cheaper. When we arrived at the bus stop in Tirana, Ardit saw the tiny vehicle parked there and said "God, I hope that's not your bus!" It was, and it was jammed full of 20 excited Albanian lady Jehovah's Witnesses on their way to a convention.

We spent the last ten days in Shqipria (Albania in Albanian) with our friends Ardit and Nick.  Both are dear friends of mine from high school.  Ardit moved to the US in fourth grade, and in 10 years of friendship I’ve heard many stories of life growing up in his hometown Hoxharë.  When he told me his brother Klevis was getting married in Albania around the same time we'd be heading to India, I wrangled an invitation faster than you can say Shqipria. 

We’ve spent the last 4 days in sunny, fruit-filled Corfu, off the northeast corner of Greece.  We stayed in an apartment in the north of the island, in Acharavi, which was idyllic other than a wicked ATM that ate Ted’s credit card.  The friendly Greeks behind him in line for their daily cash ration of 60 euros offered conflicting advice: "Call the police!" "Go to Corfu Town!" "Revolt!" One old lady helpfully whacked the ATM with her cane.  We arrived on the day of the EU bailout referendum.  Other than a chatty No-voting shopkeep (“I want to live!”) and some fireworks when the results were announced (Corfu voted 71% No) we noticed no excitement whatsoever about the vote; everyone seems tired of the subject

At the end of our noisy redeye from JFK (Ambika: asleep; Ted: squirming), the pilot announced the weather in Bergen: "Amazing! We have 27 degrees and sun." We bought bus tickets from an incomprehensible Norwegian bus ticket machine (smarter than us, but willfully unhelpful) and went to town. The sky was cloudless, the fjords sparkling, all the people coifed and gorgeous. (Ambika: Blonde! Blonde! Another Blonde!)