ALSO:
i forgot the most important thing.

last night was spent watching a jackie chan movie dubbed in hindi while teaching spanish to a nun.

on tuesday, i had yet another day-of-indulgence with jojo and jo (fellow smith alum who's living in varanasi right now) in the cantonment - the swanky part of varanasi with lots expensive hotels and restaurants. we each paid 200 rupees (about $4) to use the swimming pool at the clark hotel, and spent the day lounging around, ordering overpriced food and drinks from the pool. we had the whole place to ourselves - it was wonderful. by the end of the day, each of us had spent about 1000 rupees, which is generally what i spend in a week here, but in U.S. terms that amounts to just over $20. not bad for a day in a fancy hotel.

in the continuing graduate school saga, i may have been offered a spot in emory's Ph.D. program. i got a phone call on wednesday from john dunne, the guy there who i'd really like to work with. he said that he's trying really hard to get the admissions folks to make me an offer, and he'll be calling me again in the next couple of days to let me know. the offer would be way more than what chicago wants to give me, and slightly more than UNM (and i wouldn't have to work or teach for it). i figured that emory would be a long-shot, since they usually require all of their applicants to have an MA, but john said that since i know some tibetan, they want to let me in. (see, mom? this year in india was good for something!) so now i'm sitting by the phone, waiting for somebody to call me from atlanta.

so, i have a plan now: jojo and i are both leaving sarnath on april 6, and spending the next night in a fancy hotel somewhere in delhi, where we will sip fancy drinks, eat good food, and veg out in the air conditioning to celebrate living in the maya devi girls' hostel and making it out alive. on the evening of the 8th, i will leave jojo and take an overnight bus to shimla, where i'll spend the next day wandering. then early on the morning of the 10th i'll make my way to the nunnery in kinnaur.

yesterday i called the nuns there. a girl named dechen answered the phone, and we chatted for about 10 minutes. this was the basic tone of the conversation:

me: i am coming to teach on the 10th of april.
dechen: no! come tomorrow! i wish that you would come tomorrow and teach me!
m: i can't come tomorrow, but in two weeks, i will come.
d: two weeks! so far away! april 10!
m: and i will stay for six weeks --
d: NO! don't leave! stay for six months! why do you have to go so soon?
m: i have to go back to america, so that i --
d: don't go to america! stay for six months, not six weeks! today i am so happy. today i am very much laughing. my english teacher is coming!

every sentence was punctuated by one or two other girls giggling in the background, and whenever dechen would stumble over english words, she would say, "oh i am sorry, teacher. i don't know english well and i do not know what i am saying. but i am very much happy! i am very laughing! my english teacher is coming! you will come and teach me english and then i will know what i am saying!"

it was really wonderful to hear how genuinely excited they are. i'm looking forward to going. dechen asked what the weather was like in varanasi (today the thermometer says it's 93 degrees, and that's in the shade and under a fan), and she said that as we were speaking, snow was falling there. i can't wait to escape the heat here, but i'm a little worried about the sudden shift from blazing heat to bitter cold.


*also, i have to go straight through dolanji on my way back to delhi in late-may, so yangri and i decided that we're going to meet up once more before i have to leave for america. this also means that i can take pictures of dolanji - something i really regret not being able to do when i was up there for losar.

good weekend

yesterday jojo and i had a much-needed day of indulgence.
at 9:30 we hopped onto our favorite rickshaw (the one that "bob marley" pedals), and went to the swanky area of varanasi known as the cantonment. we sat in the air-conditioned raddison hotel, eating toast, muffins, and croissants (items that are pretty scarce around here), drinking tea and coffee, and watching MTV india. we finished off our breakfast with a banana split.
then we went to modilal, a wonderful bookstore, and each bought some books that we've been eyeing all year. if they're published in india, books are a LOT cheaper here than they are in the U.S., so it's worth it to buy things here and have them shipped home.
after that, we spent a couple of hours at phulwari, a restaurant in the main crossing in the city known as godoulia. we sat in a courtyard, drank fancy juice drinks and had pizza. ('pizza' here is usually an interesting interpretation of what most americans are used to eating, but phulwari is a popular tourist spot, and they have the best pizza that i've had in india. i'd even argue that compared to a lot of pizza in america, it's pretty darn tasty.)
then we went to three more bookshops, where i bought gifts for my tibetan teacher and my pal lhamo. we caught an auto back just in time to make our 6pm curfew in the hostel, and then we cooked the box of kraft macaroni and cheese that the smithies sent us last week. (it tasted AMAZING.) later that evening, i made some coffee, yangri and tsechu joined us, and i made everybody watch "the silence of the lambs."

it was a good day.

the most popular song in the girls' hostel now is that one-hit wonder from the 80's... i can't remember his name, or the name of his song. but it's that one with the cheezy saxophone riff and the chorus goes:
i'm never gonna dance again, guilty feet have got no rythm...

try waking up to THAT at 6am every single morning for the past week.

okay, i lied about the weather being beautiful. the weather is now only beautiful between sunrise and 9am. after that it starts to turn into that uncomfortable kind of hot if you're out in the sun.

i'm in the process of wrapping things up here. today was my last hindi class, and i'm almost finished with the things that i had planned to accomplish in my philosophy and tibetan classes. in early april (or as soon as i decide on where to go to graduate school), i'm escaping from the heat of sarnath (it's uncomfortable, but tolerable now - i'm worried about what it'll be like in another month). i'll be heading up to tabri, kinnaur, in himachal pradesh to teach at a nunnery. i'll be volunteering for The Jamyang Foundation, an organization that works to provide education for Himalayan women. Two of my Smith pals worked at schools in Spiti a couple of summers ago, and had a great time. Even though I'll be sad to leave the friends that I've made here, I'm excited to get out of the girls' hostel and go somewhere new. And after visiting Darjeeling, Sikkim, and Dolanji throughout this year, I'm anxious to go back up to the Himalayas. This time I'll be in the mountains, as opposed to just being able to see them from the foothills. From what I hear, I can still have some email contact up there, and there's a phone, although I don't think that my mobile phone will work.

That's still a couple of weeks away, though. In the meantime, I'm still living the hostel life. Last night Yangri and I watched 'Kal Ho Naa Ho', a sappy Indian love-story set in New York City. If you're in the U.S., and I haven't made you sit through a Bollywood film yet, you can rest assured that I will force this movie on you when I get back.

Speaking of coming back, I'm pretty sure I'll be home in late-May. I just need to change my return-flight.

some of the smithies who were here in january just sent jojo and me a package. it contained the following:

1 plastic french press
1 lb. pete's french roast coffee
1/4 lb. earl grey tea
1 box shortbread cookies
3 smith newspapers
2 letters
3 boxes of mac & cheese

last night jojo and i sat on the floor of her room, dipping shortbread cookies into coffee, complaining about smith and eating annie's white cheddar macaroni. it was BEAUTIFUL.


the weather here is perfect (at least in the mornings). i miss my bicycle.

some of the smithies who were here in january just sent jojo and me a package. it contained the following:

1 plastic french press
1 lb. pete's french roast coffee
1/4 lb. earl grey tea
1 box shortbread cookies
3 smith newspapers
2 letters
3 boxes of mac & cheese

last night jojo and i sat on the floor of her room, dipping shortbread cookies into coffee, complaining about smith and eating annie's white cheddar macaroni. it was BEAUTIFUL.


the weather here is perfect (at least in the mornings). i miss my bicycle.

i just want to recount what i had for breakfast today:
-two cups of chai made with fresh buffalo milk
-an omlette with fresh vegetables, fresh eggs, served on warm homemade bread
-fresh-squeezed orange juice

all for about 25 cents, and all from stalls out on the street.

i'm going to miss this when i leave.

photos

the gompa in dolanji.


"chu parka" (literally, 'the other side of the water'), across from the gompa in dolanji. you can see the tiny ani gompa (nunnery) on the left side, and the bluish house in the middle of the hill is yangri's childhood home.


me and my philosophy teacher, tashi tsering. he's wonderful. geshe yeshe thabke is the older monk on the right. he laughs at me whenever he sees me around campus, but thinks it's great that i can speak to him in tibetan.


some friends in the hostel: ugyen, tenzin choedin, ani wangmo, and kalsang dickey.

more on losar

i forgot to mention one of the best things about the geshe ceremonies and spending all the time in the gompa around losar: the hats. tibetan monks have some of the coolest headwear i've ever seen. during the geshe ceremonies, they wore the yellow hats that i had always associated with the gelug sect of tibetan buddhism. (made me wonder which aspects of buddhism have been taken from bon and which aspects of bon have been taken from buddhism... maybe a potential thing to research later on in my academic career.) anyway, these yellow hats are my favorite ones. they basically look like giant, fuzzy mohawks, and when the geshes weren't wearing them, they draped them over their shoulders. then there were the traditional bonpo hats. they're big, white, pointy things with red triangles on the sides and a big red swastika on the front. on the sides are either two or three blue stripes, representing sutra, tantra, and dzogchen, the three main areas of study in bon. there were other hats that the geshes wore on the last day of their ceremony, that were bright blue on top with panels around the bottom that looked like lotus petals. they can only be worn by high lamas and people who have received their geshe degree, and the lotus petals are symbolic of the fact that even though these geshes live in an impure world, they themselves are pure (just like a lotus grows in muddy swamps but isn't defiled by mud). and then of course, the masks for the cham dances. my favorite ones were the masks of wrathful dieties. red, blue, black, green faces, with bulging eyes, sharp teeth, tongues sticking out, and tiny skulls decorating the tops of their heads. it was all really cool, and i'll try to find photos somewhere to put up here.

in other news, so far i've gotten into the M.A. programs at U New Mexico in philosophy (with fee remission + a TA-ship in English for $12k), and at U Chicago in the Divinity school (with a $16k scholarship). I still have 4 more schools to hear from, but now I have to make big decisions, about whether I want to go into philosophy or religion, how much debt i'm willing to put myself into, how/where i want to get a Ph.D. after 2 years, in addition to geography and all that. Philosophy folks are pushing me toward UNM, religion folks are pushing me toward Chicago, and right now I'm really torn. It's good to know, though, that come September I'll be back in school.

dolanji

I just got back from two and a half weeks at Menri Monastery in Dolanji, a little village in the Himalayan foothills just south of Shimla. I had a WONDERFUL time. My friend Yangri grew up there, and invited me to come spend Losar (Tibetan New Year) with her family and watch her brother's Geshe ceremony.

We spent most of our time at the monastery, hanging out with Yangri's brother Nyidhon and his friends. On the first day of Losar, it's considered auspicious to stay at home with your family, to show that you don't need to rely on other people for things. We spent the day at the gompa, visiting all of Nyidhon's friends in their rooms. Every room (like every Tibetan home during Losar) had an altar with piles of food - kapse (Tibetan cookies), tsampa (flour), fruit, sweets, biscuits, chips, candy, soda, bottled water, and just about any other kind of snack food you can find in India. As soon as we entered a room, the monks would jump up and say, "Sit! Sit! Eat some kapse! Have some tea!" And they would literally push us down onto their beds and shove cups filled with Tibetan tea into our hands. Tibetan tea is essentially milk mixed with melted butter, so after visiting 3 or 4 rooms, you can imagine how my stomach was beginning to feel.

The second day of Losar is the day to visit friends and family. Dolanji is a tiny village in a valley, with the gompa at the top of one hill, and Yangri's childhood home and relatives' homes scattered along the side of the hill on the other side. So on the second day, we walked down and crossed the river that runs through the valley to see her family. On the way, we stopped at a small nunnery that just opened up two years ago. About half of the nuns there are from Nepal, and under the age of ten. I had fun trying to talk to them, especially since their Tibetan is about as good as mine. The rest of the day was spent walking/hiking around to visit Yangri's grandparents and aunts and uncles, where more kapse and tea was forced upon me.

The third day of Losar also conincided with the birth anniversary of the first abbot of the gompa, so there was a big puja (prayer ceremony) performed by all of the monks, where they unveiled a HUGE thangka (cloth painting) of Dolma Sherab. [Menri is a Bonpo monastery - Bon is the religion that preceeded Buddhism in Tibet, and while it's similar to Tibetan Buddhism in a lot of ways, there are some fundamental differences, like the fact that they don't worship the Buddha but rather a guy called Dolma Sherab.] After the puja, all of the monks and laypeople from the village circumambulated the gompa grounds, led by monks wearing hats and playing cymbals.

Then the geshe ceremonies began. Out of about 400 monks in the monastery, 10 received their Geshe degrees this year. It requires 12 years of study, and a monk has to be well-versed in philosophy, poetry, astrology, medicine, debate, and a few other things that I can't remember. The ceremonies lasted a total of 11 days, with 2 monks participating at a time. For the first five days, in the morning the geshes had to recite prayers that they had memorized for about 20 minutes. Then in the afternoon, the monks had to recite more memorized prayers, this time while walking back and forth in the temple, scattering candy and money to all of the monks and laypeople who came to watch. One day, Yangri, our friend Tsechu, and I got to be "main guests" of one of the monks. Every Geshe was allowed 5 guests to sit inside and present kata (traditional tibetan scarves) during the ceremony, and since one of Yangri's friends didn't have any family members who could be there to see him, he invited us. Before his turn to recite prayers in the morning, we had to walk through the temple and present kata to the statue of Dolma Sherab, as well as all of the important lamas and rinpoches. It was pretty amazing to walk through the temple, being surrounded by 400 chanting monks.

The next five days involved an oral test, in which each geshe had to recite texts from memory for about an hour, and then in the afternoon they had to debate. Tibetan monastic debate is an absolutely amazing thing to see. I've never seen philosophy presented in such a dramatic way before. Usually debate takes place in a courtyard, with individual monks or groups of monks jumping up and down, clapping their hands, yelling, and swinging their prayer beads around. For the geshe ceremonies, two geshes sat in front of the altar, and for four hours, had to debate with all of the other monks in the monastery. One by one, a challenger would approach them and begin to debate on any topic that he chose. If he was able to stump the geshes, he beat a huge drum and all of the other monks shouted something, that was basically equivalent to publicly shaming them. They talked so quickly that I couldn't understand most of what they were debating, but it was still a phenomenal thing to watch.

Before the last day of ceremonies, there were cham dances. Cham dances involve monks wearing elaborate masks and beautiful costumes, usually dressed as wrathful deities to keep evil spirits away. The whole village turned out to watch the dances, which began at 9am and didn't end until about 6:00. Sadly, my camera is broken and I didn't get to take pictures of any of this.

On the last day, all ten of the geshes recited auspicious prayers, and, while walking up and down among the monks, again scattered candy and money to all of the monks and lay people. I collected about a pound of gum, coins, and hard candy, which I later gave to all of the small nuns that I had made friends with.

A lot more happened that isn't really fitting to write about. The village was so beautiful, people were so friendly, and I learned so much that I can't really convey it all in my blog.

Now I'm back in Sarnath and the weather is hot. I heard back from a few graduate schools, and things aren't looking promising. I still have 4 or 5 more programs to hear from though, so everybody keep your fingers crossed for me.