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.