A last blog post

This picture is full of interesting characters

But rather than explain any of them, I will ask you all to kindly direct your attention to my good friend Abe Froman, who has recently surfaced on the internets again.

http://abefromangoestochina.blogspot.com/

Some leftover pictures

 I would like you all to meet Coffeetalkcow. Coffeetalkcow likes to stand around the entrance to our favorite coffee place, coffeetalk. While he stands there, he does his best to look extra sad and pathetic in hopes that someone will walk outside and feed him. Occasionally, he works up the courage to actually enter the cafe to steal some coffee, presumably. This never really ends well and he is usually chased out by one of the staff armed with a little spray bottle filled with water.

 This is the face one makes after one had to spend 750 rupees on an admission ticket to the Taj Mahal (Indian citizens never make that face, as they get in for only rs. 50).

 Occasionally we would go hiking. On this particular excursion, a large number of sheep had also decided to go hiking, and the end result was a catastrophic traffic jam.

 The Government of India, it must be said, has been incredibly welcoming and generous to the Tibetan refugee population in a way that many nations might not have been. The Tibetans themselves have been outstanding guests, politely doing roadworks and selling wool sweaters and establishing governments-in-exile and school programs for themselves while going to bed early and generally  not making a fuss about it. Despite this harmonious relationship, the Indian people have definitely learned a lesson when it comes to letting in displaced peoples: anytime any number of Tibetans show up, the first thing they do is cover the place with prayer flags.

The morning of our audience with the Dalai Lama, my host father Lobsang let me borrow his Chupa, the traditional tibetan jedi robe. As you can see in this picture of me with my host mom (ama la), its got a nice little pouch in the front to put extra Khatas or prayer flags, and extra long sleeves for some unknown evolutionary reason. While it did fit pretty well (after 15 minutes of my host mother tying and folding it in the traditional way), I don't think wearing it did very much to conceal my westerner identity. The picture below is of my bedroom, mere moments before I left. the bed on the right is mine, and the one on the left was used by whoever showed up that night (family friends would visit fairly often and I eventually stopped trying to keep track of how they were related or knew each other).

 This is the view of my apartment building from Temple Road. Some interesting details:
The door on the top floor under that mysterious green box is where I took my weekly showers. This was an interesting process in itself, as it was done using two buckets; a large one filled with hot water and a smaller one used to pour the water onto myself. This was always done in the mornings, as sometime around noon the block would usually run out of water, which meant there would always be a rush in the mornings to get water from that room, so I generally felt somewhat guilty for holding up the line long enough to shower properly.
If you look closely at the mountaintops in the top left, you can see the little shrine we hiked to on the golden colored peak. I fell somewhere around the treeline on the way back down and sprained my ankle in a way that ended in me riding a mule back down to town. For the rest of my time in Mcleod, that peak watched over me and laughed. Below is a picture of Joey and myself when we made it to the shrine at the top, happily unaware of what was about to happen.

This is some building or something, had a dead person in it maybe I dunno

last week in India

Monday was an excellent day. I woke up around 7:30, ate some breakfast, found my professor for some last minute paperworks, then went back home and got dressed in my Pala's finest chupa (this took a good 20 minutes). At ten thirty, the Miami group met up outside the main temple and got in line for about an hour until we were escorted through security and up into HHDL's mountaintop fortress. After a little hike up the hill, we stopped outside a building and lined up for a while to play the waiting game. About twenty minutes later, the Dalai Lama walked out with a monk following him with a rainbow colored umbrella. He spoke for about ten minutes and told a few good dalai lama jokes, mentioning his visit to Miami University and talking about the importance of preserving the tibetan language and culture. Then he walked down the line shaking our hands and telling some more adorable Dalai Lama jokes before taking a picture with us and then leaving to go do whatever a reincarnated buddha does. After our group settled down and stopped giggling and swooning, we ate lunch and slowly realized that it was our last week in india, and our last full day in Mcleod. Thereby, we immediately went to work planing our final itinerary with Passang-la:
Tuesday (today, for me): get all our last minute shoppings and goodbyes done before meeting at the temple at 5:30 to catch a taxi to Delhi
Wednesday: Arrive in Delhi around 2 in the morning, let the drivers sleep for a few hours before continuing on to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort  before driving back to our hotel in Delhi.
Thursday: wake up early, wander around Delhi until we need to head to the airport around 6 in the afternoon. As that is obviously not a lot of time to see the whole city, we will have to have a council to decide which spots we would like to see ahead of time and spend the day sprinting from point of interest to point of interest. Our flight leaves at 11:30, and 14 hours later we arrive in New Jersey (im not too sure what day or time it will be).

So then, this is my last blog post from India, although once I get back ill post an offensive amount of pictures and explain all the things I didnt think to earlier, including the work we were doing here and life in a refugee community in general.

proof

I figured noone would believe me unless I posted pictures...

 Welcome to the friendly confines of sherabling monastery, where field-enflattening technology is still a few lightyears behind, say, old trafford. This is not a problem if you are a spry young monk who spends most of your time practicing martial arts and general ninja-foolery, but if you happen to be an extremely out of shape westerner with a very sore right ankle, it gets a bit tricky.

It got a bit dark, but here should be all the proof you need: unnumbered Neville (pink shirt, third from Right), picked up a loose ball at the 18 yard mark and controlled with his chest to fire a shot off his right foot towards the top left corner of the net, an attempt stopped by a well timed punch from the monk-keeper to push it over the crossbar. The crowd may have reacted in some way, but probably not as they were all monks and couldn't be bothered with something so impermanent as soccer.

India you magnificent bastard, you finally got me.

This weekend marked the last of our groups adventures outside of McLeod (except for a possible trip to Amritsar, if we can get our act together and all our work done in time). Most found this a bit terrifying, as it means that we only have a couple weeks left in India before we have to return that that miserable armpit of america, ohio. On the bright side, however, we got out of class early on Friday to take a taxi to sherabling monastery,  which everyone was very excited to see as it is generally acknowledged to be a beautiful example of Tibetan monastery-manship, and it was pretty much guaranteed to be one of the highlights of the trip according to Passang la.
India; however, had other plans.
This wonderful country has something of a reputation to keep up when it comes to  tourist horror stories, I have noticed. This can be explained by something our professor would bring up at least once a week last semester: we would all, at some point or another, become extremely ill. Up till this weekend, I was pretty proud of myself as I had managed to keep myself fairly healthy beyond a minor cold that lasted a couple days last month and a sprained and shockingly swollen ankle (that was probably worth a blog post in itself, but I’ll just show you all the x-rays when I get back [yup, it called for x-rays]). Seeing that my own stomach was impervious to everything it could throw at it (mostly sketchy street dahl and samosas), India turned to my only weakness: my stupid Ohioan classmates. On Tuesday, one girl in the group missed classes because she felt sick, but we ignored her ‘cause she’s a girl and it was prolly just cooties. Come Wednesday, another girl had fallen ill, but again we didn’t worry too much about it cause we had better stuff to do, like watch monkeys fight dogs.  On Thursday, yet another gross and slimy girl got sick, and spent what happened to be her birthday with what is referred to among the locals as the “loose motion”. At this point we became a bit worried, although most of us took some comfort in knowing that the bug seemed only to be targeting the girls. Sadly, with only hours left before we were supposed to leave on Friday, Brad became violently ill while walking home from lunch and had to stay home, along with two of the aforementioned girls.
After another terrifying taxi ride through the mountains and rather uneventful night in the guesthouse at the monastery, we had a great day on Saturday touring the monastery and watching a traditional dance and less traditional karate performance. That afternoon, I played soccer with a group of monks of all ages on a rocky and deeply rutted  pitch with goals craftily constructed with bamboo; I should have known that life couldn’t truly be this perfect. Dinner consisted of some of the best food I’ve had yet, and we went to bed happy.
By six thirty the following morning, I was thoroughly drained of all sorts of bodily fluids, well acquainted with the thankfully western style toilet, and haunted by visions of the previous nights feast and its desperate attempts to escape my stomach. That Sunday was spent carefully sharing the bathroom with the guy I had shared the room and the virus with, and together we shattered the  “most toilet paper gone through in one day” record before loading up on Dramamine for the ride home.
You win this round, India.

I Almost Forgot The Monkeys

Stepped outside my apartment one day to find a monkey battle had just ended. I think my block is a viciously disputed border between two monkey factions, as they are pretty much constantly fighting up in those wires. For the record, I counted sixteen monkeys in this picture.

some more pictures (trekking to Triund)

 two weekends ago we went on a day long hike up to Triund, where we would spend the night. The scenery on the way up forced us to look particularly Fellowship-y.

 At the top, we found mountains. Beyond mountains there are mountains. This is where we made camp for the night, and started a bonfire to roast our smores upon.

 While sitting at camp, we noticed a nice lookin' shrine at the top of our peak, which was about a two hour hike from our campsite with no trail. Four of the more manly members of the Miami group decided to go for it, and found at the top this thing. I think you will all agree that it is a nice thing. On the way down I slipped and fell, but its all healed now so no worries.

 This is the view of our campsite down on the ridge from the summit.

A week later at lake pema, we found a secret cave.

Diwali

This Friday was Diwali, the happiest day of the year across India and the world, really. Actually, it might have been all of last week, I’m not entirely sure; the point is, Diwali is a festival of lights celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains alike, which translates into neighborhood kids throwing firecrackers at my window until three in the morning. It probably has greater meaning to most people (especially hindijainsikhs), but as far as I am concerned, it is a miserable holiday and should be burned to the ground. Please, let me explain my bitterness:
Monday night, I was innocently walking to my house with a fellow student （同学） of mine, Sam. Sam and I were contently digesting some ten rupee Samosas purchased from our favorite dhaba on Bhagsu road. Samosas are the most wonderful creations in existence here; for ten rupees (15 if you go to that jerk on temple road) you get a beautifully flaky and crusty samosa filled with the most mind-blowingly delicious potatoes n’ things I don’t want to identify, all covered in three different sauces. A couple of these or the Veg Plate will generally make an extremely satisfying lunch for about 80 cents. The dhaba itself is essentially a kitchen open to the street with a bench lining the back wall for the guests to sit on, and I might take a picture some time if I can manage to gain the cooks trust long enough to steal his food-smithing secrets. Anyway, we were walking down market road towards my house at around 4 in the afternoon or so. Just as we passed Man-In-the-Box, we were stopped by a loud explosion coming from only ten or fifteen feet in front of us. Alas, I’m getting ahead of myself; its about time I explained Man-in-the-Box (MITB). MITB has been an integral part of the McLeod community for several decades, I believe. He sits in his box all day and mutters things, maybe in a language but I’m not entirely sure, getting out only to vomit or defecate on the street in front of his box. The people of McLeod feed him and generally clean up after him, and he has become something of a landmark in the town. Just as we approached MITB, and as we were entirely distracted by his good natured mutterings, the shock of the explosion left us entirely dumbfounded for several long moments, even as the locals kept walking as if nothing had happened. We assumed terrorists or aliens, yet this was nothing more than a cruel awakening to the horror that is Diwali in McLeod. Happily, that was all that happened that day and we went on our way dismissing the event as inexplicable India. Sadly, that was just the beginning: over the next week the blasts became more and more frequent, and by Wednesday it was impossible to walk home from class without avoiding death by mere inches at least three or four times. By that night, we thought we had become numb to the constant blasts, even as firecrackers were thrown into the café we were eating in we barely noticed. This continued until all hell broke out on Friday (rather, Thursday morning around 2 when some kids figured out how to best throw the firecrackers so that they would explode right outside my window). That day we had planned to catch some jeeps around six thirty to head back down to Sara for the night to catch up with our ex-roommates. Throughout the day, the explosions had been steadily building in frequency and intensity, until we could barely think for the constant noise echoing down the streets and up from the valley below us. Still, we bravely went to class, got lunch at our dhaba, and otherwise went about our lives until six, when the last of us got out of our English lessons. Together, we walked down to the taxi stand only to find that it was too late, as all the drivers had gone home to celebrate. Frustrated, we walked back up to the main square where there are usually taxi drivers desperate for some business. To our horror, we found out that the usually mess of traffic and bored taxi drivers had been entirely replaced with fireworks. Even more upsetting was the fact that Diwali fireworks are not the fun, pretty things you’ll find on the 4th of july; instead, they are essentially flashbang grenades with some fun sparks thrown in. We found a bench to sit on and eat samosas (because you might as well when they are ten rupees), and slowly sank into depression, not even noticing the chaos around us. Luckily, two cabs happened to choose that moment to drive by and happily brought us to Sara, where we celebrated in a much more civilized manner (three dollar handles of whiskey).
The next day we took a 4 hour drive to tso pema, a lake of great religious significance shared across pretty much all of the local religions, and toured the lake and the cave where guru rinpoche spent some amount of time thinking about things. All in all it was fairly uneventful and probably not worth the nauseating drive through the mountains.

My Mornings, but not in any sort of order

Since we moved up to Mcleod, my class schedule has mostly remained the same with the exception of two classes that are now entirely finished, as my professor had to head back to Miami early to make sure the Dalai Lama visit goes smoothly. As a result, I now have my afternoons entirely free. My day begins when I wake up around seven and have breakfast with my host family.

    

This is the view from temple road as I walk to IBD, where all our classes are held. As views go, it is much, much nicer than anything Ohio has to offer.

 My favorite breakfast here, something described only as Tibetan Pancakes. They taste more like Crepes, but are thicker and larger than actual pancakes. Tibetan pancakes go great with peanut butter and "various Fruits" (swedish fish?) jelly, and some milk tea. Milk tea goes with pretty much everything here, and is preferable in every way to traditional tibetan butter tea.

          

 After Chinese we usually have about an hour before our next class, so we occasionally go for a walk round the Kora, which is a long trail around the Dalai Lama's temple and residence. There is a small temple half way round with plenty of prayer wheels, and the whole area is pretty well covered in prayer flags, and is usually pretty filled with monks trying to squeeze in some more good karma or something equally buddhist sounding. While they do little for anyones karma, the Kora is also home to a good amount of mongeese.

 This is the view again from Temple road of IBD, the white building, and the Dalai Lama's temple, the yellow building behind it. The Institute of Buddhist Dialectics is home to a good amount of monks, and we use their library for our classes.

 STAIRS DOG! Mcleod has several billion stray dogs, and Stairsdog is without a doubt the best among them. He lives on the stairs outside my home, and spends the day following the sun around the balcony.

My building is practically in the center of town, which means I dont have to climb several hundred vertical feet to get to class like some of my classmates do. We live above Norling cafe, which serves the best MoMos in Mcleod. My door is directly above the rainbow colored umbrella.
Next time: My Afternoons! As a sneak peek, I will mention that I have been volunteering with english conversation classes with an organization which helps rehabilitate former Tibetan political prisoners. As a result, I now only speak in short sentences which would be easily understood by nonenglish speakers.

Forts n' Picnics

This is the view from Kangra Fort's Terror Balcony. The fort is surrounded on three sides by cliff and river with pretty nice views from the top, which is about a half hour spiraling hike up from the main gate and is best reached atop trusty Shadowfax, chief of the Mearas. You can read more about Kangra fort here and here.

The main road from Guggel to the Sarah campus has a number of beautiful vistas, along with many cows and angry bus drivers.

Tibetans Love Prayer Flags. Some rinpoche or another is buried here and it has become a popular place for weekend hikes up from mcleod.

We stopped for some tea while on our hike here, on one of the peaks above Mcleod on the way to TCV. While I still do not really enjoy tea all that much, the mountains made up for it.

Standing on the rock to the right is Passang-la, our program coordinator and president (or something equally important) of Sarah. He has coordinated all our guest speakers (including Tenzin Tsundue), arranged all of our weekend trips and hikes, and generally seems to know everything. Standing in the left side of the pictures are our stray bodyguard dogs, who followed us from the tea shop all the way to TCV, protecting us from monkeys and whatever else hides in the mountains. They are Very Good (proto)Dogs.

Lunchtime in the Baby House!

This is the Guys dorm at Sarah, behind the main basketball court. For those of you who did not catch ESPN last thursday, the visiting Miami team beat the Sarah Third Years 53-47, although there has been a rematch scheduled which promises to include more monks.

Our last few days at Sarah corresponded with the week long campus picnic in honor of the founder of the college. The students didn't have class and instead were expected to spend all day playing a number of games, like the one above. The object here is to use a small hook on the end of a string on the bamboo poles to catch the top of the soda, and if you can reel it in without dropping it you win the soda instead of losing ten rupees. I lost ten Rupees. I lost thirty more rupees on some card based betting game that I still cannot comprehend before going back to ping pong.

Trips to Mcleod and TCV

Note: for whatever reason, i cant post any pictures at the moment, but as soon as I can this post will be a lot more spectacular.
A Teaching! The Dalai lama had a teaching our first week of classes, so we took that Wednesday off to go see him speak. Mcleod is generally a laid back backpacker hippie hangout, but on Teaching days the entire town is packed with people from all around who have come to hear his holiness speak. We took a taxi up from Sarah and managed to wade through throngs of monks, Tibetans in exile, and fairly confused and lost looking white people to get to the main temple, where we had a small patch of floor reserved for us. We had brought small cushions to sit on, but I became very concerned when I caught a bit of a conversation between a nun and an Australian girl- the monk asked if the aussie needed a cushion, and the girl pointedly responded “I’ll be fine; I’m not an American”. Twenty minutes later, when my legs had cramped up and I could no longer feel my butt, I understood entirely. Two hours after that, we got a small break for lunch, which I used to bend my spine back into shape before going back for the concluding 2 hours; the moral here is that americans are weak in the eyes of dedicated buddhists and australians. The teaching itself was pretty interesting, even if the majority went well over my head due to lack of training in Buddhist Philosophy. While I may still be lost in the idea of that which is impermanent, I did come to the conclusion that the Dalai Lama is possibly the best human being in the world, in large part due to his completely bewildering yet infectious sense of humor. Or maybe his eyebrows. The teaching was in English, but at some point he reverted back to Tibetan. The only piece of electronics allowed into the temple are radios for picking up the simultaneous Tibetan- English translations, which was hard enough to understand that we were thoroughly lost by the time the teaching ended.

Hiking! Yesterday (Saturday), Passang-la took us up above Mcleod for some trekking. We have planned a bunch of small day hikes to get us prepared for a final weekend trip up to a glacier in the mountains, as there are certain key skills you need to pick up before truly being ready for such an excursion. The most important of these skills is monkey defense. Should you come across a troop of monkeys, you need to be sure to avert your eyes and not show any teeth, as this will provoke an attack.. Also, immediately find some good sized rocks to throw in case they come at you. I found out yesterday that this has already become second nature, as a friend and I were walking down to the river and found ourselves surrounded by monkeys- without any hesitation we both filled our hands with rocks and kept walking as we had been. Today; however, there were no monkeys. Instead, our little group seemed to accumulate stray dogs (I believe they could tell that we were foreigners and thereby needed protections, as they spaced themselves out among us and made sure noone fell behind). We walked around one of the peaks above dharamsala visiting several noteworthy stupas on our way to the Tibetan Children’s Village. While the views were pretty spectacular, the village itself was incredible. The village is home to hundreds of children whose parents either haven’t managed to escape Tibet yet or did not make it. We started with the appropriately named baby house:
Before moving to some of the other houses where the kids live once they turn 6. The houses are split into three rooms, one for girls and one for boys with a common area in the middle. The bedrooms are lined with bunks (most of which need to be shared) and were astonishingly tidy:

This also happened to be the same house were Passang-la himself grew up. As it was a Saturday, all the kids were outside doing their laundry, and most were more than happy to shout "HELLO! HOW ARE YOU!" as we walked past.

a third blog post

some thoughts
Traffic in Delhi! A terrifying place to be. There does seem to be some sort of system, but your first mistake is to assume that signs or traffic lines mean anything. The number of lanes of any given street is instead decided by the number of vehicles that can fit shoulder to shoulder, and as this changes fairly frequently, a street becomes a terrifying game of tetris with cars sandwiched between busses, auto rickshaws, pedal rickshaws, and pedestrians. And monkeys. Once we got out into the country, we noticed an entirely new set of rules. First, any time you decide to overtake a bus or 18 wheeler, you must signal your intentions by honking for a while. This is the most exciting bit, as each car seems to have a very distinctive honk, and our bus seemed to have a variety of different tunes and pitches, depending on the situation. Once you have tested your horn for a while, you can move on to rapidly flashing your high beams; once you have sufficiently blinded everyone in front of you, it is safe to wildly veer into the other lane (not that lanes exist) and pass. Also, honk any time you go round a corner, see another car, see any pedestrians, change gears, change the radio station, or notice a motorcycle. Cows are not to be honked at.

Kangra Fort! Our first weekend at Sara we took a daytrip to an old fort that Brad, one of the students from Miami, had visited several times in his previous trips to Dharamsala. The fort itself was in various stages of deterioration, but the scenery surrounding it was still pretty astounding, and the very top of the fortress had a pretty convincing white tree of Gondor.

Various Campus Goings-on: The other day I woke up to a huge commotion down the hallway. Some back story: the campus is the home to a pack of dogs with their own strict hierarchical society that has decided to live in peace alongside its human neighbors. The dogs watch over us and escort the girls to and from their dorms at night, which the girls are very thankful for as the monkeys of Sara see the girls as easier targets for general harassment than the guys. Now back to the other morning. Hearing this commotion, I assumed bootsy (the dog alpha male) was laying down the law among the other males as he will do at least once a day. I could not have been more wrong. As I found out, the monkeys had staged an invasion of the mens dorm, and had infiltrated the southwest wing and were moving along the second floor towards the north. The Dogs had alerted the humans to the danger, and the hallway was filled with monks waving brooms and smacking the wall with their hands and shouting to try and scare the monkeys away. As the monkeys neared my room the monks had started pelting them with pebbles, and finally the vermin were forced to retreat into the jungle.

Trip to Guggel! I have absolutely no idea how Gaggle is spelled or pronounced, but it is the closest town to the Sara campus, about a half hour walk from our dorms. The town isn’t the half Tibetan half Indian mix of Dharamsala or Mcleod Ganj, and is instead our source of actual rural Indian culture. It should go without saying that all this really means is that Gagul is our source for Lassis. Having a real lassi in India is a truly wonderful experience, but you have to be careful; the common tourist may be surprised to find large chunks of yogurt cake mixed in with the liquid (Yogurt cake probably isn’t a real term, but it’s the best I could do to define whatever was floating around in my cup). It should also be noted that our fine Lassi-smith was a vendor who mostly sold nuts in a dark alley a block from the main street of Google.

Things I would have told you all about, had I been able to find the internet

Hello!
To those of you who may be thinking that this post is a good two weeks late, I would like to inform you that I tried with all my might to post earlier but Pasang-la, for all his knowledge of buddhist dialectics, can only do so much with the extremely fickle internet situation. Hopefully, by the end of this post, that last sentence will make sense.
 To business! The Miami Universty tibetan studies group arrived in Delhi somewhere around 18 days ago (I would be more precise, but I found it easier to just stop keeping track of time). Our hostel was in an area of town with a huge number of tibetan refugees who need to stop in Delhi for official documentaion before continuing on to Dharamsala. You may be able to notice some tell tale signs of tibetans in this picture, taken from the roof of the hostel:

During our one day in Delhi we wandered around the neighborhood for a while, got our first taste of Thukpa, some mo-mos, and eventually went on an extended and rather pointless shopping trip. It had initially been the plan to stay in Delhi for a week, but for whatever reason this did not happen. Instead, around six that night we caught a bus to Dharamasala- a 12 hour drive that would end  in some of the most terrifying mountain roads ever concieved. Fortunately, our bus was decorated with a sense of humor that put me right at ease:

Some time around 6 in the morning we arrived at Sarah College and met our roommates. My roommate is Tenzin Chophel, a twenty one year old monk from a small village in Kam. Tenzin knows just enough english to make all of my time spent in my room an adventure, starting at 6 in the morning when he begins his chants.

This is the view from the roof of my dorm. surely there is good skiing to be found here, although no mofongo. Since our arrival in Dharamsala we have spent most of our time reading, playing ping pong against monks, playing basketball against monks, or going up to Mcleod Ganj with monks. We also visited Kangra Fort and went to a teaching by His Holiness, but I will save those adventures for the next time I find some internet, as it is almost dinner time.

Setting Sail on the good ship Mofongo

Unfortunately, my home in Fajardo was lost to the unstoppable wave of our new Iguana overlords during an extended beach outing. Fearing for my life, I have found it prudent to escape Puerto Rico while I still can, and for this reason I have accepted an invitation from the Tibetan Kashag to bring my celebrated Mofongocraft to the town of Dharamsala, India. Fear not, Puerto Rico, for I will be back once I have spread the gift of Mofongo to the unmofongoed masses.