The town of Solan, a handful of kilometers from Dolanji as the crow flies but a 30-minute ride by bus, is nestled in and spread across the Himalayan foothills of southern Himachal Pradesh. Depending on your source, there could be anywhere from 30,000 to 70,000 full-time residents, plus Indian tourists who come here on their way to Shimla to escape the heat.

It is very rare to see a non-Indian face in Solan, which according to stuffwhitepeoplelike.org, makes for a very satisfying experience.

The “Main Bazaar” is crammed with people buying everything imaginable. You quickly learn to push people out of the way and to act indifferently when others do the same to you. I’ve bought everything from a cell phone to bananas to toilet paper in the Main Bazaar, have used the internet at a cafe there, and have looked at movie listings for the local cinema.

I often go with Dondup, the guestmaster, when he makes his weekly trip to get groceries for the guesthouse kitchen. It is a spectacle to see him race from stall to stall, bargaining for cauliflower, potatoes, mushrooms, tomatoes, ginger, sour pink radish, daikon, water filtration cartridges, plastic chairs, white toast bread, condensed milk (for chai tea), eggs, paneer, and eggplant (he gets his onions from a farmer by the monastery). He also eats everyone’s food without asking — the bread seller’s open bag of Cheetos, the vegetable seller’s sugar snap peas — and yet he is always polite enough to offer some to me.

When Dondup stops for a minute to let everyone put together his order, we drink tea at the Chanakya restaurant above the main drag in Solan, which offers excellent views of the shoppers and strollers below. Their chai tea is the best I’ve had yet.