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