K so guess its been a while...my bad. We’ve been super busy with class work and weekend trips and maybe sleeping sometimes. But we’ve been so busy I haven’t even meditated or yoga’ed in about 2 weeks. Serious bummer, but I’m certainly not lacking in experiences.
K, catch up time: So our philosophy teacher is the sickest person I’ve ever met. She’s a German nun who will become the first female Geshe next year. People say she speaks Tibetan and English better than German. She also speaks English with an Australian accent, which adds a fun little flavor to our Dharma discussions. We’ve been talking about a lot of stuff that’s pretty much rocked my views on the mind and karma and blah blah but reincarnation still eludes me. In fact, the whole Buddhist philosophy of mind has piqued my interest and I think I’m going to do my research project on how Western neuroscience and the Buddhist view of the mind compare. I want to bring in the effects of meditation on the brain and how one can train and shape the mind through certain meditation practices. Ani-la (our philosophy teacher) is teaching us a meditation technique that involves observing the mind itself, a practice that will certainly be helpful in my attempt to "locate" it in my research. I also want to bring in traditional Tibetan medicine and analyze how health affects the mind. Should keep me busy for a while.
On another note, our philosophy classes are also furthering my disillusions with Buddhism and specifically, Shangri-la, or the perceived mysticism of Buddhism. Unfortunately, Buddhism is revealing itself more and more to me as another religion machine despite its urging to question and criticize its major components rather than accept them on faith. Our questions about reincarnation and karma and other crazies have increasingly been answered with a “be skeptical…but accept it.” Or at least, that’s how it seems to us at the moment. I’ll keep you posted.
So three weekends ago
(wow, has it really been that long since I’ve been on a computer?) a few of us decided to take a little day trip to Kongra Fort for some R and R and maybe get some reading done. I’m still unsure of what Kongra Fort was actually used for but it was a sweet little ruins in the mountains with few tourists and lots of…wildlife. My friend Carrie left her bag unattended for thirty seconds – just enough time for a vicious little monkey to upturn it and mug her. At first we though he was going for the ipod to sell on ebay,
but when he did a nosedive off the cliff with just her banana we wrote him off just another mundane, banana-stealing primate. How typical. The next day a few of us decided to go on a walk behind Sarah campus and stumbled across a waterfall. That's a little view of our favorite mountain range, ya know, the Himalayas, that we saw on our way. And that's Lara taking off her shirt for her first real "shower" in a month!
There is a performance school up the street. Tibetan students from South India audition and travel all the way up to Dharmasala to learn traditional Tibetan instruments, songs, and dances. They enroll in the school because they believe they are doing their part in the Tibetan struggle by keeping their Tibetan traditions alive. Most of them are very committed to the cause. They are much younger than the students here at Sarah, mostly about 15-21 years old. We went up to visit a few weeks ago and they immediately offered us dance lessons in return for English lessons. So now I’m a professional Tibetan dancer AND I’ve learned how to teach English. We’ve also been teaching them other styles of dances. Last week my friend Allie taught them a ballet routine and this week we’re teaching them how to salsaFebrary 25th, 2009
Wendesday – The Longest 24 Hours I’ve Ever Experienced
Josh, Elinor, Becky, and I went to Amritsar on Feb 13th. Amritsar is the holy Sikh city on the boarder of Indian and Pakistan. It’s in Punjab and it’s like a whole other country. It’s more like Delhi in that it’s busy, dirty, and crowded but there are women everywhere and its socially more Western-ish. People are bigger and taller and it’s hotter and SO beautiful. Elinor said it’s like what she pictured India to be like; big white and gold buildings with the sun shinning off the water and tons of colorful people and food everywhere. The weekend was so packed and intense that I’m just gonna go ahead and list it out:
Feb 13th 7:30PM Took a two-hour bus ride from Gaggle (below Sarah) to Pathankot to take an overnight train to Amritsar. Unfortunately, there were too many of us and we had too many big bags and the bus got so overcrowded that there were two guys literally out the door hanging onto the side of the bus. Elinor scored a seat but at the cost of a man intentionally sticking his butt on her face.
9:30PM Arrive in Pathankot.
The next train as at “11:15PM” but in India you have to add 3 hours to everything. We decided to grab some tea at the only shop still open. We received some quality Indian hospitality by the assistant manager of the shop who told us he was starting his Indian pop star career. He was going on tour the next day and did a little song and dance for us…he was actually pretty legit. He offered to take us down to Rajistan with him the next day and give us VIP seats at his concert, but we told him we had to take a rain check. 11PM We show up at the train station to wait (and wait and wait) for the train. We meet two really awesome English people, Joel and Nina, who were taking the year off from med school at Sheffield University to travel around the world. They said they had missed the earlier train to Amritsar and had been waiting for hours because the trains came whenever they felt like it. We hung out with them for the next few hours and shared a sleeper car with them when the train finally came at around 12:50AM.Feb 14th (Valentine’s Day!)
12:50AM So…its raining like crazy and the sleeper car may as well be flooded. We all curl up on the bunks for a freezing cold, very wet nap. Elinor is so cold I literally sleep on top of her.
3:30AM Arrive in Amritsar groggy and cold. The six of us shared a auto rickshaw to the Golden Templed and parted ways – Joel and Nina went to find a room and we went straight to the Temple to watch the sunrise. We checked in our shoes,
trudged through feet washing water, and stopped short when at our first glance at the Golden Temple…it was stunning and took us completely by surprise. We got there just in time to watch the Book Awakening ceremony. In the Sikh tradition, they worship the Book of the Gurus, a compilation of the major teachings of their gurus. The Book lives inside the temple and someone is always chanting from it while it is awake – which is from 4AM to 10PM everyday. The Awakening ceremony involves a lot of pomp and circumstance with chanting, horns, drums, and a huge procession over the water and into the temple. After the ceremony we decided to go find a room to drop our stuff off and come back in time for the sunrise.5:30AM As Westerners, we had trouble finding a room. The Golden Temple is the pilgrimage destination for Sikhs and the hostels around the area are meant as free lodging for pilgrims. Obviously, we weren’t pilgrims and so were continually turned down. We finally found a room at Guru Dwala, the oldest and most popular of the pilgrimage hostels. We slipped the attendant a few rupees and he gave the four of us a private room – otherwise we would be three white girls and a huge white guy sleeping in the over packed courtyard with two hundred plus people – not the safest idea. There was a dirty sleeping dred locked man curled up in front of the door to our room and the attendant pulled him on his mattress pad out of the way, the sleeping guy didn’t even notice. It was a really great tiny, dirty, little room with a cabinet, three beds (which we pushed together, better for cuddling!), and light bulb that didn’t turn off. We soon fell in love with our accommodations and honestly
considered it home. 6:30AM We return to the temple to watch the sunrise bundled up in all our blankets. We are in a significantly better mood sans backpacks and sleepingbags and set up shop at the edge of the pool. It was so peaceful and beautiful and we could see the sun and the moon opposite each other over the Temple. The Golden 
Temple grew brighter and brighter and the fish came right up to our feet to watch us watch them. Every Sikh must always have the “5 K’s” on their person at all time. I don’t know what the proper K name is for them but they have to have a dagger or knife, a specific bracelet, a turban, some special underpants, and 
something else that I’m forgetting right now. While we were sitting at the Temple, Sikh men were taking their ritual baths with their huge swords and people who were up early enough were circumambulating the pool. The Temple attendants were very holy men with huge beards carrying spears. We desperately 
wanted pictures of these attendants so Becky posed for a picture in front of one so we could pretend we were taking a picture of her… 
7:15AM Parantas for breafast!!! It’s our favorite Punjabi food and we pretty much stuffed our face with them whenever we saw them on the street. I wanted to buy them in bulk and store them in my pockets and bathe in them, but I resisted. They are spicy crepe-like things filled with potato or cheese or cauliflower that is drowned in butter and spicy chic pea dal. It’s the most wonderful experience for the mouth. By this time we are so tired that we aren’t tired anymore and decide to walk around the city. We randomly ran into the Jallianwala Bagh memorial where the British famously massacred a peaceful Indian protest in 1919. It was really exciting to find it because we all remembered learning about it in school and never expected to find ourselves standing in front of it. It was a beautiful memorial with gardens and grassy areas. Interestingly, it wasn’t a solemn and distant memorial like what one would find in the West. It looked like a nice place to hang out in the sun and bring you kids to fly kites.
9:30AM Eventually we left Jallianwala Bagh and wandered around some more. It became increasingly apparent that we were the only white people in Amritsar as people blatently stared at us and wished us a Happy Valentine’s Day from windows three stories up. A man approached me and asked where I was from. I told him USA and he said he would love it if we came into his all-girls’ school to meet his students and have tea. We accepted and were immediately bombarded by girls who wanted “snaps” and our autographs and to shake our hands and wish us Happy Valentine’s Day (picture at right is me signing a girl's hand).
It 
was the most bizarre experience and we’ve never felt more loved on V-day. We check our watches 
thinking it’s dinner time, but its only 11 in the morning, so we go back to our humble abode and pass out. 1:30PM Wake up and return to the Temple for some relaxing introspection in the shade overlooking the pool. Seriously consider taking a swim, its 900 degrees. We decide that no pilgrimage to Amritsar is complete without taking a traditional communal lunch. Sikh temples always provide free meals and accommodations for travelers. It was some of the best food we’ve had on the trip yet. It was really amazing how efficient the lunches are. Hundreds of people file in, sit in neat rows on the floor, and people run by spilling dal and chipati (bread) into bowls (see picture to the right. Guy with bucket has dal, Becky and Elinor tucking in). Everyone eats 
quickly, leaves, and the next few hundred people file in and they do it all over again. On our way out we were stopped by a man offering tea. Its our 6th cup of tea of the day and a few minutes into it we find out that the group of men we are drinking tea with are very important and one is the mayor of Amritsar or something... Elinor lets it slip that she's single and Josh was just our classmate and she was instatnly swarmed with men...as was Josh. They really loved Josh and his tallness and blondness in this state. Eventually we were asked to leave because we were creating a scene and a traffic jam. As we left the building we were again swarmed with handshakes and "snaps" and happy valentine's day wishes and "this is my mother, and this is my sister, and this is my cousin-brother he is singer..."5PM Rickshaw to Durgiand...we think it was some kind of Hindi slash Sikh temple thing. Shindi temple? Anyway, it was awesome and they gave us straight up sugar clumps as offerings.
7:15 PM "Hey guys, what time do you think it is?" -Stacey
"9:30"-Elinor
"7:15!" -Stacey
"No way..." -Elinor
Ate some sketchy street chowmien for dinner #1. Didn't get sick. Sweet!
7:50 PM Went to "The Brother's" for dinner #2. GREAT food. Had the equivalent of 3 meals for about six bucks. Walked aroudn some more, found a dried fruit stand and loaded up for the roommates.
11PM Pass out.
Feb 15th
7:15AM "Wake up" and blink drearilly, strange guys sitting otuside our door watching us walk in and out to brush our teeth. They were the only guys in the courtyard...they really didnt have to be sitting right in front of our door.
8:20AM B-fast at same parantas place.
9:30AM Train to Pathankot. Just made it! About an hour into the ride we had a particularly long stop in front of a sugarcane field. Some young Sikh men got off and started to play sword fight with the sugarcane. They broght a bunch of stalks back onto the train and showed us how to chew them. We were sticky for the rest of the ride.
4PM Got back to Sarah in one piece dirty, travel worn, and sooo happy to be back. It was amazing how much we found we'd missed campus. Reveled in a bucket shower happily. Everyone was jealous of our adventures. We're pretty much the coolest people we know. End scene.
No comments:
Post a Comment