i'm warning you, this post has some kind of gross details...

well, it finally happened.
after 3 months of thinking that i was invincible, i became violently ill on sunday night. and i mean violently ill. i spent two hours going back and forth between my room and the bathroom, and after there was literally NOTHING left in my system, i passed out on the way back to my room. luckily jojo was around to bring me water and tylenol at 3am. the next morning, she mentioned to my pal namgyal that i was sick, and the next thing i knew, i had 4 tibetans in my room, standing around petting my head, saying, "nying je, nying je" (which basically menas 'what a pitty' in tibetan). my friend kalsang brought me bananas, and forced me to eat some. then my friend pema brought me some noodles and forced me to eat some more. i couldn't keep any food down, but pema didn't care. when i stopped feeding myself, she picked up a spoon and force-fed me. i kept saying, "pema, really, i can't eat any more. i'm going to vomit." and she replied with, "good! then go and vomit, and when you come back, eat some more!" throughout the next 2 days, pema kept coming into my room, forcing me to eat (which inevitably led to me getting sick again), and kalsang always happened to come into the room when i was sleeping. apparently we had some amusing conversations, but i can't remember any of them.
luckily i had the doctor give me some antibiotics before i left the u.s., so i'm taking those and they seem to have done the trick.

but being sick in india is no fun.

i won't go into details, but this weekend i had one of the most bizarre conversations that i have ever had in my life. it was a result of one of my friends in the hostel getting her hands on an issue of 'cosmopolitan' magazine, without ever having taken a basic middle school-level sex ed class.


today was a good day... i spent this morning with kinley, a research student here who's teaching me tibetan. he's studying western idealism, and today i tried to explain the difference between descartes, berkeley, and kant. then we watched 'sky captain and the world of tomorrow.' it's a pretty weird movie, but what makes it even weirder is that one of the scenes takes place in nepal, where three of the characters are naked, two other characters are monks, and all of them are speaking tibetan.

exams

exams are coming up and everybody here is FREAKING OUT. it's pretty much exactly like smith during exam time. they give out extra food in the evening, and people stay up all night long studying. apparently the director changed the format of the exams this year... he wants to make them more like western-style exams. the students are not happy about this change at all.

in other news, i love the institute library. not only does it have an extensive collection of western, buddhist, and indian philosophy books written in hindi, tibetan, sanskrit, and english, it also has the ENTIRE hardy boys and nancy drew series.

sarnath wedding

Last night my Hindi teacher invited JoJo, Byarma, and me to his niece's wedding.
We met him at the Institute at 5:30, and he drove us to Rangoli Garden, the fanciest restaurant in Sarnath. (It's really not all that fancy, just ridiculously expensive - but compared to the rest of Sarnath it's a pretty swanky place.) The whole street was decorated with lights, and we went around to the back and sat under a big pavillion and ate sweets while listening to the same five Hindi film songs over and over and over again.

All of the women at this point were busy getting the bride ready someplace else, so we felt a little awkward for a while because we were the only girls there. After the women arrived, we tried to speak in Hindi with our teacher's wife and daughters, but wound up defaulting to English after 5 minutes. But later, we made friends with some young girls (maybe eight or nine years old), who were really excited that we knew some Hindi, and corrected our sentences when we made mistakes. I bonded with two of them over Hindi films and we talked about our favorite actors. (They were a little disappointed when I told them that I liked Amitabh Bachchan better than Shah Rukh Khan.)

Then we ate.
And ate.
And ate some more.
And then we had coffee.

At 9:30 or so, the groom arrived. There was a big procession with people carrying huge, ornate, battery-operated lights, a band, and men setting off fireworks. (The fireworks were kind of ridiculous - there were maybe a dozen or so of them in a big can. One man lit a match, threw it in the can, and held it up in the air over his head. One by one, the explosions went off - directly under trees and power lines, and only a few feet away from the wedding guests.) Then the groom arrived in a car covered in marigolds. His friends all stood around the car door and talked to him for a few minutes, then two of them picked him up and carried him over to a priest. He tried to smile, but looked absolutely terrified. (He and the bride had only met once before.) He and the bride's father sat down on opposite sides of the priest, and they did some kind of prayer or ritual. I tried to ask people what was going on, but nobody seemed to know or care. The whole time that this was going on, there was still Hindi film music blaring over the speakers, and only a quarter of the guests there were actually paying attention to the ritual. The rest were eating.

And after five minutes, our teacher found us and made us go eat as well. Again.

After we had stuffed ourselves once more, our teacher's wife took us to meet the bride. She looked absolutely beautiful - her hands and arms were covered in jewelry up to her elbows, she had a big, ornate nose ring, and jewels in her hair, and her sari was magenta and silver. She had been sobbing all day, and while she wasn't crying when we went to see her, she looked terribly upset. I know that in these weddings, the bride is supposed to cry, but I couldn't help feeling really sorry for her.

At 10:30, the groom walked up onto a raised platform under the pavillion, where there were two huge gold and silver chairs set against a backdrop of marigolds and silver tinsel. He still looked terrified, but tried to smile whenever his friends came over to talk to him. After 10 minutes or so, about a dozen women escorted the bride up onto the stage. She and the groom faced each other and put garlands of flowers around each other's necks. Then everyone clapped. Apparently that was the whole ceremony. Then they both sat down, and for the next half hour or so, they sat there (the groom still looking terrified, the bride staring at her feet) while groups of men came up onto the stage to throw flowers on them and have their picture taken.

I have to say, I think western weddings would be a lot more fun if they involved bright colors and Hindi music. My stepsister is getting married right after I go back to the U.S. - maybe I can convince her to play the soundtrack from 'Kal Ho Naa Ho' during the ceremony instead of traditional hymns.

on saturday night i exchanged slang terms with some of the girls in the hostel. now i can say things like, "you're annoying," "he looks really hot," and all kinds of slang terms for bodily functions like vomiting and farting. they now know things like, "word," "sweet," and "oh jeez." the weird thing about tibetan slang (and spoken tibetan in general, really) is that because there are so many isolated groups of tibetans in exile, every dialect is different. so i didn't really learn "tibetan" slang saturday night; i learned "CIHTS girls' hostel" slang. if i went anywhere else - even if i talked to the boys here on campus - and said the things that the girls taught me, nobody would have a clue as to what i was saying. jojo has run into the same sort of problem. she learned lhasa dialect this summer, and whenever she tries to talk, people just kind of laugh at her.

it's really kind of fascinating, but sad at the same time. yesterday i was talking with my friend yangli, and she said that even if tibet was free tomorrow, it could never be like it used to be. tibetans in tibet now all speak with chinese mixed in, while tibetans in india speak with hindi and english mixed in. then there are the tibetans in nepal, in the u.s., etc. if everybody went back to tibet, they wouldn't be able to understand each other. yangli even thinks that if it were free and people could return there, tibet would become so segregated between those who stayed and those who left that the country would turn into an india-pakistan sort of situation. i think that's a little extreme, but i definitely see her point. it's amazing to talk to people like my friend lhamo, who just came from tibet and feels so out of place here, and yangli, who says that she really doesn't feel connected to tibet at all because she was born and raised in india. lhamo thinks in chinese, yangli thinks in hindi. tibetan is a second language for both of them. it's just really amazing (and incredibly upsetting) to be able to actually observe an entire culture disappearing in front of me.

yesterday i went to see "taj mahal" with a few girls. the movie was a little slow and the music wasn't terribly exciting, but it was entertaining enough. one of the girls who came with us is a nun, and she really doesn't like wearing her robes. so, as soon as our auto got out of sarnath, she took off her robes (she was wearing pants underneath) and put on a hooded sweatshirt, sunglasses, and a baseball cap to cover her shaved head. apparently she does this whenever she goes into varanasi, and the other girls just tell people that she's their sponsor from south africa.

my accent is horrible whenever i try to speak in tibetan, but apparently i'm really good at imitating a tibetan who is trying to speak english with an american accent.


in other news, on tuesday i ran into two of my friends in the hostel. one of them said, "hey, we're going to my gen-la's [teacher's] house. do you want to come?" i wasn't really sure why they were going, but i decided to tag along anyway. it turned out that her teacher was taking a nap, and we were just going over to drink tea and watch hindi soap operas on his TV. at one point, my philosophy teacher poked his head into the apartment, nodded at us, and proceeded to mill around in the kitchen for a while until my friend's teacher woke up.

i know that this doesn't sound that strange, especially to my smith friends who are reading this. at smith, i spent lots of time with professors outside of class. going out for coffee, having dinner... i even went out for drinks with a few of them. but there's just something that makes it all feel a lot more strange when your professors have shaved heads and wear robes. i don't know if i'll ever really get used to that.

the main temple in sarnath has one of the buddha's teeth, and they took it out on tuesday for its yearly showing. i went with my nun friend shanti and there were HUNDREDS of people there - mostly pilgrims, monks, and tibetans. i was actually one of only 3 westerners there. but, following the usual method of waiting in line here, we found some friends toward the front and cut past about 75% of the line. inside the temple, there was the buddha's tooth (under a glass container that was under another glass container) and 4 or 5 monks. one to take money for offerings, one to shine a flashlight on the relic, one to point at it, and another one to push people out the door. all in all, it lasted about 20 seconds, but it was pretty cool nonetheless.

last week jojo's lip swelled up to about 3 times its normal size. she's better now, but nobody seemed to know what was wrong. she went to two or three doctors, and they gave her all kinds of medications - anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, antihistamines - but nothing worked. everyone had an opinion on what it was, though, and how to treat it. bee stings, infected mosquito bites, lizard bites... the list went on and on. my two favorite theories, however, were from a medical student who we see at the chai stall all the time and a girl in the hostel. respectively, they were:
- a physical manifestation of negative karma being expelled from jojo's body as a result of all of the buddhism that she's studying here
- she peed outside somewhere and angered a naga

again with the cultural exchange

last night i explained to some girls how americans order pizzas.
then i explained the electoral college.
and then, they asked me what viagra was.

just another day in the maya devi girls' hostel

cultural exchange is fun.

yesterday after hindi i had chai with byarma (the russian mongolian with whom i study hindi in tibetan). i like byarma a lot, because we have the same sense of humor. we entertain ourselves by hurling insulting stereotypes about each other's countries back and forth. i call her an angry, vodka-drinking communist; she calls me a fat, stupid imperialist. so yesterday as we parted ways at the chai stall, she made a gesture that, in russia, apparently means "i want to hit you." in america, however, it means... well... something much more obscene. it was fun trying to explain that to her.

and then last night my friend shanti asked me what typical american food was. i blurted out, "hot dogs and apple pie!" then i had to explain what a hot dog is, and why anyone in their right mind would want to eat something like that. you try explaining ground up scrap meat encased in a tube to a tibetan nun. it's not easy.

and last night, after i went to bed, i woke up to a loud banging noise. it wasn't the usual banging of residual diwali fireworks, though - it was a rythmic pounding sort of noise. then i noticed that there were lights flickering outside of my door. i opened my door to find my neighbor and two other girls, crowded around the outside of her room. it turns out that my neighbor left her key in the library, and was locked out of her room. this happens sometimes, and, indian locks being what they are, if you bang on them for long enough with something hard enough, you can usually break them open. so they were pounding on her lock with a hammer to break it open. and, indian circuitry being what it is, if you happen to be banging on a door, and said door happens to be near a set of light switches, all of the lights connected to those switches will turn on and off every time you hit the door. brilliant.

i talked to my mom yesterday and she said that people from home think that my blog is funny. i promise all of you, i'm not trying to be funny. this is my life. i couldn't make this stuff up if i tried.

thank god i'm not a landscaper anymore

CIHTS is a lot like smith in that they're way too preoccupied with the landscaping of the campus. but they do their landscaping here in the most bizarre ways i've ever seen. there's a beautiful lawn in front of the library, and for the past week, 5 women have been down on their hands and knees, literally tearing individual blades of grass up out of the ground. they've worked their way about halfway across by now, so that one side of the lawn is beautiful and green, and the other side is nothing but dirt. i asked a few students why they're doing this, and the looked at me like it was the most obvious thing in the world, saying, "so that after the winter the grass will grow back."

obviously.

happy diwali

the more time i spend in sarnath, the more i realize it's a lot like avon lake. it's a small town situated next to a decent-sized city (that has its virtues, but isn't the most exciting of all the cities in the country), and everyone knows everybody else. the town is constantly being developed; they've put a bunch of sidewalks in, and now they're working on widening the road. granted, instead of big construction equipment and ODOT workers in orange vests, it's men in their bare feet with pick-axes and women with baskets on their heads. but still... lots of real estate is being developed too. i think bucky kopf should stop chopping down all the trees in avon lake and come develop some stuff here.
yesterday was diwali (a big hindu holiday), and i spent a long time last night on the roof of my hostel, watching fireworks being set off from people's homes all over town. this morning, there's some kind of big festival going on, which reminds me a lot of homecoming at ALHS. some boys just ran a foot race through town, and now they're getting set up for a bike race. there's an announcer right outside of the internet cafe, who's giving play-by-plays of the races. it seems like the whole town is out to watch. (all they need now is a marching band and some cheerleaders riding on the back of decorated pickup trucks and i'd feel right at home.)

there are some very small monks (they can't be any older than 7) who have been pressing their faces up against the glass of the internet cafe for some time now. one of them just came in and is watching the computer over my shoulder while fingering his prayer beads.

oh man. a boy named ravi just won the race. people are freaking out.