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.