My Mornings, but not in any sort of order

Since we moved up to Mcleod, my class schedule has mostly remained the same with the exception of two classes that are now entirely finished, as my professor had to head back to Miami early to make sure the Dalai Lama visit goes smoothly. As a result, I now have my afternoons entirely free. My day begins when I wake up around seven and have breakfast with my host family.

    

This is the view from temple road as I walk to IBD, where all our classes are held. As views go, it is much, much nicer than anything Ohio has to offer.

 My favorite breakfast here, something described only as Tibetan Pancakes. They taste more like Crepes, but are thicker and larger than actual pancakes. Tibetan pancakes go great with peanut butter and "various Fruits" (swedish fish?) jelly, and some milk tea. Milk tea goes with pretty much everything here, and is preferable in every way to traditional tibetan butter tea.

          

 After Chinese we usually have about an hour before our next class, so we occasionally go for a walk round the Kora, which is a long trail around the Dalai Lama's temple and residence. There is a small temple half way round with plenty of prayer wheels, and the whole area is pretty well covered in prayer flags, and is usually pretty filled with monks trying to squeeze in some more good karma or something equally buddhist sounding. While they do little for anyones karma, the Kora is also home to a good amount of mongeese.

 This is the view again from Temple road of IBD, the white building, and the Dalai Lama's temple, the yellow building behind it. The Institute of Buddhist Dialectics is home to a good amount of monks, and we use their library for our classes.

 STAIRS DOG! Mcleod has several billion stray dogs, and Stairsdog is without a doubt the best among them. He lives on the stairs outside my home, and spends the day following the sun around the balcony.

My building is practically in the center of town, which means I dont have to climb several hundred vertical feet to get to class like some of my classmates do. We live above Norling cafe, which serves the best MoMos in Mcleod. My door is directly above the rainbow colored umbrella.
Next time: My Afternoons! As a sneak peek, I will mention that I have been volunteering with english conversation classes with an organization which helps rehabilitate former Tibetan political prisoners. As a result, I now only speak in short sentences which would be easily understood by nonenglish speakers.

Forts n' Picnics

This is the view from Kangra Fort's Terror Balcony. The fort is surrounded on three sides by cliff and river with pretty nice views from the top, which is about a half hour spiraling hike up from the main gate and is best reached atop trusty Shadowfax, chief of the Mearas. You can read more about Kangra fort here and here.

The main road from Guggel to the Sarah campus has a number of beautiful vistas, along with many cows and angry bus drivers.

Tibetans Love Prayer Flags. Some rinpoche or another is buried here and it has become a popular place for weekend hikes up from mcleod.

We stopped for some tea while on our hike here, on one of the peaks above Mcleod on the way to TCV. While I still do not really enjoy tea all that much, the mountains made up for it.

Standing on the rock to the right is Passang-la, our program coordinator and president (or something equally important) of Sarah. He has coordinated all our guest speakers (including Tenzin Tsundue), arranged all of our weekend trips and hikes, and generally seems to know everything. Standing in the left side of the pictures are our stray bodyguard dogs, who followed us from the tea shop all the way to TCV, protecting us from monkeys and whatever else hides in the mountains. They are Very Good (proto)Dogs.

Lunchtime in the Baby House!

This is the Guys dorm at Sarah, behind the main basketball court. For those of you who did not catch ESPN last thursday, the visiting Miami team beat the Sarah Third Years 53-47, although there has been a rematch scheduled which promises to include more monks.

Our last few days at Sarah corresponded with the week long campus picnic in honor of the founder of the college. The students didn't have class and instead were expected to spend all day playing a number of games, like the one above. The object here is to use a small hook on the end of a string on the bamboo poles to catch the top of the soda, and if you can reel it in without dropping it you win the soda instead of losing ten rupees. I lost ten Rupees. I lost thirty more rupees on some card based betting game that I still cannot comprehend before going back to ping pong.