Books

Liz and I have read so many books this semester, and have been amazed by mentions of Tibet in a lot of them.

A very abbreviated list:

Harry potter 5
Three cups of tea
This is where I leave you

Any books that you'd like to recommend are welcome. Particularly if they can be found on the kindle.

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The porch

Liz and I did not have to go out for dinner yesterday. It was wonderful. Probably because all the produce is fresh. However, I've been trying to load the HP 7 trailer for hours and it's yet to work. Tradeoffs.

We have a balcony that runs the entire length of our apartment. It's shaded by trees and you can just see the cricket stadium on the right (the big red thing).

I had a hard time finding oranges today because they're no longer in season. The bananas are becoming less flavorful. It's also strange to see how small the veggies are here compared to the US. Thinking about things like oranges and bananas going out of season and the size of produce makes us realize how much US suppliers have done in the world of genetically modified foods. My grandfather would say this is a good thing. A lot of hippies here think it's terrible. I think the jury is still out.

Also, we live below a monk, and today Liz and I got his business card. Have I mentioned it's weird here?

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Michelle and Liz do something stupid again

Liz came up with this title. I happen to think cooking dinner is a fabulous idea. Probably because I cut up the vegetables (which we first dunked in boiling water to kill anything on them-welcome to India) and Liz has done the rest of the cooking.

Quote: "I've never made primavera without olive oil." -Liz

I'll let you know later if we had to go out for dinner.

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Apartment life

Liz and I are making dinner. We bought a stove for 1000 rupees today, and a pot and some dishes. The tomatoes smell great. Liz, the voice of reason, decided against a stovetop connected to a gas cylinder for fear that we would blow up the house (plus gas is annoying to get, and comes in big cannisters, and we live down three flights of stairs), so we bought a one burner electric hotplate. I have no idea if you can also get them for 25 dollars in the states, but I bet you can't sell them back at the end of your stay.

I also bought two AAA batteries for 50 rupees, which I know is a better price than at home. I might have gotten ripped off, because I saw them for 9.5 rupees each in the bazaar later. Although I don't have any 50 p coins, so I'm not sure how I would have paid that.

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KKG love

We love mail. The sorority sent Liz the cutest card.

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Meeting the Dalai Lama

Meeting the His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in the words of Julia, was “definitely the coolest thing I’ve done in my entire life.”

I don’t want to rule out the rest of my life yet, but it was absolutely amazing. Words may not do it justice. Also, if you are reading this at a computer with legitimate internet (aka, you are not in India), youtube the song “Oxford Comma” by Vampire Weekend and listen carefully. It is the perfect soundtrack for this post.

Our meeting was scheduled for 1:30, so Liz and I spent the morning making breakfast in our new apartment and running various errands. These errands included picking up our thankas from the shop, where they had been brocaded overnight. For full disclosure, I bought four thankas from this shop, which can best be described as a hut on the side of the road with a lot of paintings in it. I feel all right about this because some are presents and also because I saw him making them, sitting on the ground in his shop with a half-finished canvas in front of him. I came back so much that Liz and I got pretty good deals on our thankas. Then we picked up our chupas from the cleaners and got lunch before we went home to change.

Coming to India means doing away with things like hair dryers, straighteners, and pretty much anything that makes one’s hair manageable, and so we struggled to look presentable for the audience. Then we grabbed our bags of religious objects to be blessed (plus a baseball hat for my brother: Derek, I love you enough to sneak an unapproved item into the bag!) and headed out the door. A monk commented that we looked beautiful in our chupas on the way to the temple.

The area outside the temple entrance was more deserted than usual, and there were more barriers than normal, presumably so no one could drive a car up to His Holiness’s residence (he lives inside the temple complex). We ducked under some major scaffolding to get to security, where we went through a full pat down and submitted our objects to a tray for blessing later. We were left with only our passports and khatas (ceremonial scarves).

Our group, which consisted of 11 students, 2 TAs, 3 teachers, and Ani-la’s mom and her mother’s friend, sat in the waiting room for a while folding our khatas. Eventually, we got called in for the audience. We walked into a long hallway, holding our khatas and bending forward at the waist so as to keep our heads below HHDL’s head. The helper monks placed the scarves over our necks, which left our hands free to shake! The Dalai Lama has a strong grip. He spent a few seconds holding onto my hand and looked right into my eyes.

Once everyone had progressed through the line, we moved into a room with couches and armchairs and listened to HHDL talk. Two translators assisted him, and the group got the chance to ask three questions. He spoke for a long while about all the topics: we asked two questions on Buddhist philosophy and one on compassion in everyday life. Stephen asked about the relationship between karma and the laws of nature, Ed and Kylie asked how to apply compassion to people we meet in India and at home, and Nellie asked a question about a specific quote that is supposed to contain the entire Dharma in four lines. HHDL asked if she spoke Tibetan so he could answer in Tibetan instead of English. Thank goodness for the translators.

The Dalai Lama laughs a lot, and smiles a ton, and does not fail to make eye contact with each person in the room. Being in his presence really did make me tear up, although I’m not sure why. You can just tell that you’re in the room with someone special when he sits and thinks. He spoke well in English and listened intently to all the questions and answered carefully and thoughtfully. His answers showed his intelligence, but also his warmth and his humanness, which is something weird to say about a person that Tibetans consider a god. He makes you feel like he really cares about people, and animals, and worries about their well-being, which is a lot more than other people who supposedly care about people’s well-being, i.e. politicians or humanitarians or decision-makers or whomever. The world would probably be a better place if more people cared about people rather than other things.

The time flew by, except for the part where the room was really hot. HHDL got up from his chair in the middle of speaking and tried to turn on the air conditioning unit (it took him a while). He looked absolutely hilarious holding the remote with his lips pursed, and you could tell that the translators (both men in their 30s or 40s) just wanted to rip it out of his hands and turn it on for him, but couldn’t because that would mess up protocol.

Afterwards we took photos on some stairs outside, which I will post once I get them from Hong Kong, and then HHDL blessed all the things we brought by touching his forehead to the tray.

Overall, I would concur with Julia’s statement that meeting HHDL is definitely a life highlight.

Triund: View from the Top

Hong Kong took really great photos at the top of the mountain.

That is the view from the top of McLeod Ganj, where we normally stay. If you can see big white tent-like things, that is the temple.

Anna, Me, Stephen, Liz, Hong Kong, and Claudia

Home sweet apartment

Liz is busy writing her philosophy paper, and I am waiting to look at mine for the third time (philosophy papers are impossible. People shouldn't major in philosophy, but not because it's impractical. You shouldn't major in philosophy because it's hard).

Anyway, this is our bedroom. My bed is on the left, and Liz's is on the right. Our respective thankas are hanging above out beds, complete with the katas we wore when we met HHDL. Liz bought a medicine Buddha, while I just got a Shakyamuni Buddha (the historical Buddha). This will probably be what our rooms look like next year.

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We met HHDL

Amazingly powerful experience. Brought tears to my eyes. I shook the Dalai Lama's hand. Details to come. I'm still processing.

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Spring Break: The End

In case you ever wondered what the inside of rickshaw looks like, it's pretty much a go kart. With wires everywhere. Yes, this is how you get around in the cities.

Our rickshaw driver, Hari, took us around to all the temples, to dinner, and then to random places like this temple built in honor of Japanese Buddhists. We are not sure why, but it was something to see, and when you start your day at 6 in the morning, sometimes you run out of activities by noon and just let your rickshaw driver take you somewhere for 100 extra rupees.

That's Liz and Hari in front of the rickshaw. We met his son, named Shiva, listened to Hari sing and dance while driving (very difficult not to laugh), heard about the economics of being a rickshaw driver (he rents the rickshaw for 150 rupees per day, and has five children, a wife, and lots of school and food expenses) and paid him enough to put one of his daughters through school for a month. As he was driving us to the airport on our final morning, he started crying and said, "I wake up tomorrow and no more Madam and Madam!" I found it difficult to hold it together at this point.

He also drove us to a yogini temple. There are only four yogini temples in all of India. This was an elephant headed tantric goddess, but her face got destroyed in one of the many Muslim wars.

This is the yogini temple. The inside has 64 unique tantric goddesses, and the caretaker of the temple described each one to us. Then two priests blessed us and gave us flowers and red ribbons to wear, and of course everyone wanted money at the end. They even charged us for parking our rickshaw under a tree!

More spring break photos

This is the shack, I mean, post office, from which Liz and I mailed almost 40 postcards. If you didn't receive one, it's because the Indian "postal system" lost it. We had to wind through a really residential neighborhood very far from the main road to find this building, and once we got inside the man behind the desk had to call someone to find out how much it cost to mail a postcard to America.

Like good Indian tourists, Liz and I went to the zoo. We were the only white people there. They kept it surprisingly clean, and the animals looked well cared for. We did fun things like go on a tiger safari. There were bars on the windows of the bus, except for the driver's window, which was just open. Did I mention that safety in India is not paramount? The white tigers were the coolest thing we saw. The photo doesn't show it that well, but they have very clear blue eyes.

We also went to see huge Jain meditation caves. They're built like dorms right next to each other and are so short that even I couldn't stand up inside them. This one was shaped like a tiger.

This was the view from one hill with meditation caves to the other hill with meditation caves. They're below that temple. On our way up we ran into yogis on retreat. You'd think they'd pick somewhere that's not a tourist destination.

Krishna, his sister, and his brother, otherwise known as Lord Jaggurnauth, rule BBS. Also they're kind of cute.

Spring Break Temples

Bubeneshwar is famous for having a high concentration of temples. Hindu temples are really cool in that they have multiple parts: the tall part in back is the "god house" where the god of the temple resides, and the front room is for the audience who comes to pray. Some temples have three front rooms for more specific purposes, but that's the basic idea.

We started early every day to avoid the heat, and got there as the priest was setting up the altar. He stopped laying flowers out to bless us, and had us recite the main prayer of the temple after him in Hindi. That was a difficult task. It's hard to see in the photo, but the stone in the middle is actually made of two pieces (split down the middle). The stone represents the god, and the temple we were in at the time was built in honor of Shiva (the male god) and Pavarti (his wife), so the stone was split in two to show their unity. It was the only temple in BBS with a split stone.

The temples had lost of really cool carvings. This is a skeleton tantric goddess.

Clearly there were a lot of other carvings as well.

Spring Break: Camels!

We're backing up to spring break again because I love it when the internet works.

I rode a camel up and down the beach. Liz did too. We ran/walked to keep up with the camel and her trainer, and found out that she (the camel) was four years old and had come from Rajasthan (another Indian state that has a lot of desert). Riding a camel is uncomfortable because you rock back and forth all the time. You can see the Bay of Bengal in the background. Not a big deal. Also not a big deal? This cost 100 Rs., or approximately $2.50.

Camels are crazy.

Sunrise on the beach. The fishermen all put their boats in the water at this time to go catch fish that you can then eat for dinner.

This is Liz on the roof o our hotel in Puri. Our room has really gorgeous views of the water.

Lady bird

Lady bird's butt! This one is weird because it has a lot of black. Quote of the day: "you know, they're not all ladies." - Stephen

This pretty much describes the kind of day we had. My feet hurt. I promise that I will put up pictures of the new apartment after we finish breaking it in at Anna's birthday party tonight.

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Triund: the top

After you hike straight uphill for approximately four hours, you reach a grassy area at 2875 meters with clear views of the quote unquote foothills of the Himalayas. There you can collapse and have lunch of crackers and cheese and peanut butter and bananas. And nap. And play with the dogs that followed you the whole way up the mountain.

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Triund: the middle

Liz, Anna, Claudia, Hong Kong, Stephen and I went on a really long hike today and got a little silly along the way. We also sang Disney songs on the way back down. This was probably due to the fact that we started hiking at 630 am and got home at 5 pm.

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Monsoon

Normally you can see all the way to the lake out of our hotel windows, but we were literally inside the cloud.

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Kareri lodge

This is the main part of our hotel (aka the beds) as I was packing to leave. The tables were at the foot of the bed.

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More spider

Liz tried to take a photo of me getting the spider out of the window, but she screamed and the camera slipped. The upshot is you get to see the enormous amount of books we hoarded in our hotel for the past two weeks.

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Spider

Remember that story I wrote about with a big spider? This was how big it really was: the size of a hand. We think it had fangs.

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How to rent an apartment in India

Wander around a while. Look for signs that say room for rent. Call mobile numbers written on signs. Speak broken English to whomever answers the phone, telling him that you'd like to come by at 2 to see the apartment. Go to the apartment. Wave to the landlord. Have him unlock the door, then follow him downstairs to a huge, brand new three room apartment including bathroom with Western style toilet, hot water, kitchen counter, kitchen table and chairs, beds, dresser, and porch with screen doors (screens are unheard of here). Inspect everything. Ask if you can rent a stove. Misunderstand the answer: you hear no stove, but actually you can have a stove, but the landlord has none for rent (this was a make or break point). Ask the price. Wait for landlord to get all the keys and give them to you. The end.

Renting an apartment consists of getting the keys. The landlord doesn't know our passport numbers, doesn't have a deposit from us, doesn't have our cell phone numbers, and doesn't even know our names. Eventually, we'll pay him a month's worth of rent and give him our passport information, but right now, Nellie, Liz, and I live in an apartment overlooking the valley!

(Ok, really we move in tomorrow, but we put some stuff in and have keys. Also, apartment hunting in India is a lot more difficult than I made it sound because it's hard to understand people on the phone and absolutely no one understands the concept of a reservation.)

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Nothing happens when you scream loudly in your hotel room

Anna, Liz and I just had dinner and complained about today: we had an exam in Tibetan, all the trains in India are full, it's almost impossible to exercise, etc. We decided to make the night better by going back to our room and eating girl scout cookies while watching Friday Night Lights.

As Liz got out the girl scout cookies, I glanced to the wall and casually noticed that a spider the size of my hand was crawling above the window.

"Um, Guys, um, you guys..." voice rising. Liz freaked, Anna screamed, and we all sprinted away from the spider.

Amazingly, no one came to our rescue, so I grabbed a pole and a box and Liz grabbed a camera and we schemed to get the spider out of the room.

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Slug

After the rain every day we find the biggest slugs ever. This one was crawling on the wall of our hotel. The outside wall, thank goodness. They are thicker than my thumb and about three inches long, and are one of the weirdest creatures I've seen here.

I also feel like a slug. After finishing our papers (and before, and during) Liz and I have been watching a lot of Friday Night Lights. We also watched Harry Potter 5 and are preparing to watch Harry 6 and Clueless. Given that it was my first real academic paper since December, I'm happy with how it turned out.

Huge thanks to Sam, who is feeding our movie watching addiction and also made chana masala with Julia and invited us over to dinner the other night.

If we didn't have so many movies we would read more. Oh, wait, Liz and I have 26 books in the room. Study abroad fail.

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Terrible things that only happen when you study abroad

Amoebas (thankfully Liz and Anna took one for the team on this one. By the team I mean myself.)

Registration at odd hours- 430 am reg time, anyone? Thankfully the registrar does it for you when you're off campus.

The monsoon rains come under the door of your hotel room so it smells like wet dog all the time. Water also comes through the gap between your windows and splashes on the table with a ton of books on it. On the upside, the rain forces you to do your paper...

...until It knocks out the power for 16 hours in the entire town, and your laptop doesn't hold a significant amount of charge so you can't write anything. And by the time the sun goes down you can't see your sources to quote them. Perhaps one of the most logistically difficult paper writing experiences I've ever had.

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Monsoon

One minute we could see the entire valley from our window, and the next minute we had water coming through the window, and under the door, and we couldn't see through the mist. The cloud moved up the mountain and engulfed our hotel in rain.

Also, I left my pants outside to dry. Not anymore!

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Happiness

...comes In the form of burritos, chips and salsa, and harry potter.

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Bugs!

Britain found a really cool looking bug on her cell phone, so we took a photo of it. India is crazy.

Liz has an amoeba. Which is close enough to a bug for government work, especially here. Her doctor's fees cost 50 rupees, and the medicine was free. Can someone explain the healthcare system here to me?

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The view

Liz is sick (a common theme on this trip), so we've spent the day mostly in our room reading and chatting. I also did laundry. I've given up actually scrubbing anything and just soak it in a bucket with soap and then hang it out to dry. This may not count as actually doing your laundry but I'm fed up with scrubbing and I never feel like I can get anything clean anyway. Plus I'm sick of most of the clothes I brought and am unconcerned with how this treatment may damage them.

This is the view from our window. You can see the temple complex on the left and the whole valley below. On clear days you can see the sand on the shores of the lake, which is about an hour's drive away. Mom, get excited: I like the management here, so I think I'm going to book us a room. They are two very kind men who bring water to our room when we ask and genuinely want to know about our days.

Our actual room is strewn with my clothing and souvenirs. Liz is much cleaner than I am. I will eventually clean up so we can put up an altar under my Buddha thanka (painting which is also a meditational aid). Perhaps now that I've said I'll take a photo of it I'll actually clean.

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Happy Birthday Anna!

Tax day is also Anna's birthday, so the entire program plus Sam went out to dinner at a restaurant called drumstick. This is an appropriate name since they have a drum kit and guitars that the boys played after dinner.

The food was really good, except for the pineapple fried rice. I guess it's not yet pineapple season in the mountains. Nor is it mango season, because they're still 120 rupees per kilo every time we ask the fruit man.

Anyway, Anna got chocolate tea for her birthday drink. We weren't exactly sure what it was, because it had tea leaves in it but smelled like chocolate. Thoughts?

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Baaaaaaaack

The internet cut out for a while, and then we came back from spring break and moved into hotels (which was actually the same as spring break, given that I've been living with Liz for about a month now). That, combined with the fact that I suddenly have a ton of work that takes almost no intellectual capacity, made me angry. Tibetan class today involved fortune telling by picking cards that depicted different parts of the Buddha's life. Also, it was raining.

Sadly, the combination of these things make me feel like I have less interesting things to write about, but I'm getting back in the game because maybe blogging is what I've been missing. So hopefully the return of the blog will coincide with the return of fun activities. On the way to lunch Nellie, Liz and I saw the smallest puppy ever with a cute Indian child. Clearly on the upswing.

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Predicament

My laundry (two buckets' worth) is soaking in the bathroom. I want to rinse it out and hang it up to dry so it will be clean tomorrow (not that it matters, since I have way too much clothing). However, it is freezing and if I rinse the soap out of my clothes my hands will almost assuredly go numb. So I am going to let my laundry soak a little longer.

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Puri Photos

Julia, Liz, Nellie, and me on the shores of Puri.

Julia and I put our feet in the Bay of Bengal. Liz and Nellie didn't join because they didn't have sandals, and because some Indians use parts of the beach as a toilet (not the part we were on). The fishermen double as life guards and wear ridiculous hats.

I ate a whole fish for dinner two nights in a row. It had probably been caught that day. As you can see, it was completely covered with peppers, tomatoes, and whole cloves of garlic (I kid you not). Did I mention it was delicious?

The four of us went to the Sun Temple in Konark. This photo doesn't do justice to how big it is. It's huge, and no longer a living temple (i.e. no one prays there). Instead, it's an archeological site, and has a ton of amazingly intricate carvings, including tantric carvings. Also, it was really sunny and hot (major plus. I am wearing a jacket again in McLeod. Le sigh.)

Spring Break in Photos: Delhi and Agra

Humayun's Tomb at sunrise. Liz and I went here after our overnight bus ride. This is a photo tour of our whirlwind 30 hours in Delhi and Agra, which included not having train tickets back from Agra to Delhi and carrying our bags everywhere.

I really enjoy self timed photos. We are on top of part of a tomb. There were Indians exercising in the park, which is the only time I've seen people exercising over here. The complex has 160 people entombed.

Then we went to the Lotus Temple, which is a Bahai'i temple that is silent inside and gorgeous. It has no decorations, just ros and rows of pews and high ceilings. It reminded me of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York.

Then we went to the house where Gandhi lived his last 144 days, and stood on the spot where he was shot.

Cliche Taj Mahal photo. Which is also fabulous. The Taj Mahal is gigantic and gorgeous and brilliantly white and you should check out the story behind it if you don't already know it.

Spring break

My internet phone decided not to work for the first part of our travels, while Julia, Nellie, Liz and I were in Puri. It was kind of nice to read our books, eat a lot, and not do too much else, so I'm on blog break until the end of holiday, as they call it here. I leave you with the fishing village at sunrise.

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Happy birthday part 2

Elizabeth and I had meat for dinner in an air conditioned restaurant with silverware and waiters and modern chairs. We both had forgotten how to sit up straight and put napkins on our laps and eat with forks. We also felt underdressed. What does this tell you about our normal lifestyle?

All that food was less than 15 dollars. Thanks mom!

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