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.