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.