travels.

photos etc.

2006-05-29T13:19:00.000-04:00

Seeing as how I'm back in America, I don't really have much of a reason to update the blog anymore. I have a LOT of stories to tell about my time in Kinnaur, but to write it all in here just wouldn't do them justice.

I put a few photos up online at http://photos.yahoo.com/ckassor , if you're interested.

I'll be in Ohio and western Massachusetts at various points this summer before moving down to Georgia, so if you're around, drop me a line and we'll catch up!

wow.

2006-05-22T23:22:00.000-04:00

well, i'm back from kinnaur. (back in shimla, that is. i go back to the u.s. on friday.) of my entire trip to india, these last six weeks have by far been the best part. and, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, these last six weeks have quite possibly been the best six weeks of my life. really.

there's too much to write about to go into much detail, but the hilights of kinnaur included:
- learning traditional kinnauri dances and songs;
- an impromptu 4-day trip to kanam, in upper kinnaur, where i spent 2 days with a lama and his wife and son (!) chatting about selflessness, equanimity, and jesus and the catholic concept of transubstantiation in a strange combination of broken tibetan and hindi;
- trekking around the mountainside, picking wild mushrooms and almost getting stranded in a thunderstorm 2 hours from the nearest shelter;
- trying to talk to old ladies who speak no english and no hindi (the kinnauri language is completely unrelated to any other languages in the area);
- laughing until my stomach hurt literally every single day;
- and spending time with some of the kindest, most amazing people i have ever met in my life.

yesterday, saying goodbye to all of the jomos (nuns) was really, really hard. when i left varanasi, i was ready to go, ready to say goodbye, ready to go back to america. but yesterday, i was incredibly sad. one nun made me some socks, others cooked my favorite foods, and they all wrote letters or drew pictures for me. after tea, each jomo placed a garland of nuts around my neck. (this is the kinnauri equivalent to tibetan kata, or hawaiian leis.) as each nun approached me to say goodbye, they started to cry. this made me start to cry, which made them all cry even more. even "api", the 75-year old nun with whom i could only communicate via sign-language, was crying.

i took lots of pictures, and when i get back to the u.s., i'll put them all up online. i've been out of email contact since i went up to kinnaur, and i'm going to be travelling from now until i get home on friday night, but within the next couple of weeks, i'll catch up on all my emails, etc. so if you haven't heard from me in a while, i promise i'll write/call soon!

in shimla

2006-04-09T07:47:00.000-04:00

last night i said goodbye to jojo in delhi and got on a "bus" for shimla. apparently i'm officially missing tourist season in shimla by 5 days - instead of a bus, the only thing that was available was essentially an oversized van that held 12 passengers. it was a really pleasant journey for a bus ride: i got on board at 9pm, slept, then woke up as the sun was rising over the himalayan foothills. i made it into shimla at 6:30am, checked into the YMCA here, and have spent most of the day wandering. it's a cute little town, but not too different from darjeeling. i have a feeling that all hill stations in india are essentially the same - crumbling colonial architecture, streets lined with overpriced shops, and and a population consisting of about 75% tourists. it's nice though, and the cool weather is a welcome change from the varanasi/delhi heat.

today has been a frustrating day, as it seems like every other man i come across on the street tries to either leer at me or touch me. i slapped one boy who grabbed my leg, though, and that made me feel a little bit better. dealing with sketchy guys has been one of the hardest things to get used to this year, and even though it's pretty commonplace (especially in varanasi), some days it's just more annoying than others. right now, i'm looking forward to hanging out in a nunnery for a while.

tomorrow morning i'm taking a taxi up to tapri in kinnaur, where i'll hopefully be met by some of the nuns i'm teaching. i called to let them know when i'd be arriving, but due to my rudimentary hindi and their rudimentary english, i'm not entirely sure that we were able to understand each other. that's the best thing about traveling in india, though - you don't have to plan things too far in advance, and really, you can't plan things too far in advance. somehow, though, everything always works out. i can't explain how or why, but it always does. it's one of my favorite things about this country.

delhi day #2

2006-04-08T04:36:00.000-04:00

yesterday was amazing. the best way i could have spent my first full day away from sarnath.

jojo and i spent most of the day wandering around connaught place, the fancy shopping area in the middle of delhi, then we took a rickshaw outside of the main part of the city to see a new film called "banaras: the eternal love story." the film itself wasn't that great, and the songs were mediocre at best, but the entire thing was shot in varanasi and sarnath. throughout the entire film, jojo and i kept smacking each other, whispering, "hey! i know where that is! hey! i was inside that building last week!" it's not a great movie, but i really, really recommend it to anybody who has spent some time in varanasi. it's pretty exciting to see aarti on dhasasvamedh ghat, or the stupa at sarnath, or the steps down from assi ghat, portrayed on the big screen in a big bollywood film. the greatest part of the whole film, however, was right after the intermission. there's a scene in sarnath, at the archaeological ruins next to the stupa, where a tour guide is leading a group of people around. for about two seconds, a tibetan girl's face popped up on screen. it was my friend pamo from the institute! she lived 3 doors down from me all year. when she came on screen, jojo and i simultaneously jumped out of our seats and screamed, 'oh my god! pamo!' i'm sure that everyone else in the theater thought we were idiots.

after the movie, we stopped in a swanky lounge next to our hotel for a drink. the evening's entertainment was a skinny indian boy who played covers of guns 'n roses and the eagles on his electric guitar. the scary part was, he was actually really good.

today i'm leaving for shimla at 8:00, and hopefully before that i'll get to meet up with my smith friends, marilu, tatjana, and aditi, before i take off for the cold white north.

hello from delhi

2006-04-07T03:18:00.000-04:00

yesterday was a long morning of saying goodbyes to everyone at the institute. between 9am and noon, i think that i must have been given over 15 kata (traditional tibetan scarves) by friends and staff there. jojo and i went to see the director one last time and he gave us really long, fancy kata (it has a special name, but i can't remember what it's called right now). he sent for a car for jojo and me, our luggage, and 5 students who insisted on escorting us to the train station. i just kept thinking that the whole situation would be good material for some kind of funny joke: "how many tibetans does it take to drop off some inji at the train station?" anyway, after a long, drawn out goodbye to our friends at the train station, jojo and i said goodbye to sarnath and goodbye to varanasi (and goodbye to the best chai i've had anywhere in india) for a while. i think the best thing about leaving varanasi is that it's a place in which i know i'll end up again at some point in the not-too-distant future. 'you can take the tibetan studies student out of varanasi, but you can't take varanasi out of the tibetan studies student.'

this morning jojo and i arrived in delhi. i'm in the process of booking my bus ticket to shimla for tomorrow night, and then we're going to take the metro to a movie theater that's showing a new film called 'banaras.' tonight will involve lots of lounging and eating. delhi is a weird place - coming here from sarnath almost feels like going back to america. everything around here is so westernized, it's like going through mini-culture-shock every time i come here. it is nice that everywhere is air-conditioned, though.

it's so hot in banaras...

2006-04-05T06:55:00.000-04:00

how hot is it? it's so hot that when i went to the post office today, i saw a man wet a stamp with the sweat on his forehead.

it'll be good to head north. a few days ago it reached 40C (not sure what that means in farenheit, but 20c = 70f, and 30c = 90f, just to give you a general idea). they say that sometimes it reaches 50 in the middle of the summer. no thanks.

anyway, i'm leaving sarnath tomorrow afternoon (wednesday night america time). after that, i won't be able to check email all that often, and i will no longer have my phone. i'll try to update the blog whenever i get a chance, but if you don't hear from me for a while, i promise i'll put up lots of pictures when i get back to the u.s. of a. at the end of may.

a bunch of people have sent me email lately, and i apologize for not responding. i probably won't have time to write back until the end of may, but i promise i'll write all of you back as soon as i can.

last day in banaras

2006-04-04T07:18:00.000-04:00

saying hello to people is a long, arduous process. just popping your head into somebody's shop/home/etc. usually turns into a few cups of chai and an hour-long chat.

it's nothing, however, compared to saying goodbye.

saying goodbye takes at least twice as long, and involves not only chai, but entire meals. over the last couple of days, i've had people buy or cook for me breakfast, lunch, and dinner. and it's only going to continue right up until i leave sarnath. it's not necessarily a bad thing, though.

last night tsetop and namgyal, two friends of mine and jojo's, took us out for dinner at rangoli garden - the fancy restaurant in sarnath. the evening started out pleasant, but eventually turned into a long, involved discussion about feminism, in which tsetop gave biological explanations for the reason why women can never be as good as men. (he's a medical student... it involved arguments about blood flow to the brain and menstruation... i'm still not entirely sure about his arguments.)

over the next two days, jojo and i have multiple meals scheduled with all of our sarnath friends. today we made one last trip into varanasi to say goodbye to all of our city friends and buy some last-minute banaras souvenirs.

it hasn't hit me yet that i'm not going to be back here again for a while...

good weekend

2006-04-02T07:08:00.000-04:00

This is my last weekend in Sarnath, and I can honestly say that it's been one of the best weekends I've had since I've gotten here.

Saturday morning: John Dunne from Emory called to let me know that I had been accepted into their Ph.D. program in religion. Their offer: full tuition + 1/2 health insurance + $15,500 (+ lots of opportunities for summer funding and jobs) for 5 years. He said that the admissions committee wasn't too sure about letting me in, since they generally require applicants to have an MA beforehand, but once they read my writing sample, they changed their minds. I accepted the offer right then and there. So starting this fall, I'll be in Atlanta.
And my pal Jo got into Emory's anthropology program, so we're going to try to get an apartment together. I'm beginning to realize that Smith and Smithies will haunt me for the rest of my life. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though.

Saturday afternoon was basically spent lounging around inside watching movies, being out of the sun. I had a meeting with the director of the Institute, just to officially wrap things up here before I leave on Thursday. I told him about Emory, but since he's been pushing for me to go into a philosophy program all along, he didn't sound quite as thrilled as I was. All he said was, "Emory? So you're going to get a degree in religion?"

Saturday night: I went into Varanasi to spend the night with Jo. The program that she's here leading (Where There Be Dragons) was having a big dinner/classical Indian mucic concert at their program house. Ramu and Goswami, two excellent musicians in Banaras, gave a great concert on the roof that lasted for 2 or 3 hours, then we all had wonderful food. Jo and I had our picture taken (she was wearing a sari and i was wearing a chupa), and we're going to send it to the Smith Alumnae magazine to show everyone how awesome we are.

Sunday: I took a rickshaw back from Varanasi and realized that in spite of all of the obnoxious, disgusting, and just plain irritating things that a person can experience here, there are really a lot of amazing things in this city. I'm going to miss it when I leave.
I came back to Sarnath and went with my friends Yangri, Tsechu, and Ugyen to Tsechu's brother's house. (He's a teacher here and has an apartment right on campus.) Tsechu cooked an amazing farewell lunch for me. I don't think I'm going to have to eat another meal for a couple of days. The rest of the afternoon was spent lounging/sleeping/drinking tea, while watching some of the best Bollywood films I've seen in a long time.

life is pretty good right now.

2006-03-30T23:32:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-03-30T23:18:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-03-27T00:33:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-25T23:56:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-03-24T22:49:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-03-24T01:34:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-03-23T02:44:00.001-05:00

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.

2006-03-23T02:44:00.000-05:00

2006-03-22T01:51:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-21T01:28:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-19T00:42:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-18T01:17:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-02-22T00:25:00.000-05:00

haven't posted in a while. i got really sick for a few days and had an adventure at varanasi hospital. i'm okay now, but when i went in there to have blood work done, i have never been so homesick for the west. indian pathology labs are not necessarily the cleanest places in the world, and probably not a place where you want people sticking needles into you and doing things with your blood.

anyway, the weather is getting hotter again, and on sunday i'm heading up north to dolanji with my pal yangri. i won't be back till the 16th or so (i think), so i'll be out of regular e-contact until then.

i have lots of ridiculous stories to write about since the dalai lama left, but i've been too busy to sit down and type them out in my blog. they'll come soon, i promise.

in the meantime, here's the coolest photo ever:

long update

2006-02-10T00:41:00.000-05:00

so i have lots to write about, but i haven't had time. i've been busy rubbing elbows with the dalai lama, you see. i'll try to recap the last few days. (this is a long post - the best part is at the bottom though, so make sure you read that.)

MONDAY:
the dalai lama arrived at the institute at about 5:30pm. tibetans have perfected the art of standing around waiting for important people, and today was no exception. students and staff were supposed to line up to receive him when he drove through the gates. they painted a white line on the ground that we all had to stand behind, and, just to make sure that we all understood this important rule, we had to practice standing around waiting at 10:30 in the morning. then, at 2:00, we had to line up again to wait for him to show up. all in all, it was a total of about 4 hours spent standing around waiting to see a car drive by - an event that lasted a total of about 15 seconds.

TUESDAY:
it pays to have connections. there was a conference today between the dalai lama, some buddhist monks, and some indian pandits about buddhist and hindu philosophy. it was a pretty exclusive thing, but jay was able to sneak me in. we met in the library in the tibetan scripture room, which is a pretty small venue. out of 50 people in the room, i was one of:
- a dozen people who were not either tibetan monks or indian pandits
- 4 women
- 3 westerners
- the only student
and i was by far the youngest person in the room. needless to say, i felt incredibly out of place. it was pretty cool though. the whole thing was conducted in tibetan, hindi, english, and - for a very short time - sanskrit. they debated philosophy, and talked about everything from atman (soul) theory, to cloning and evolution, to the big bang. the dalai lama deferred to jay at one point when people were discussing the origin of the universe, and jay attempted to explain the big bang and its relation to concepts of space and time. i don't think people really understood, but now folks around campus refer to him as 'mr. big bang.'
the whole thing was videotaped and shown on closed-circuit television in atisha hall, the big venue on campus. apparently atisha hall was packed with students, because when i was wandering around later that evening, folks i didn't even know came up to me and said, "wow! i saw you on tv!"

WEDNESDAY:
another, even more exclusive conference. this one was a discussion between the different sects of tibetan buddhism. and, i felt even more out of place than yesterday. here's a breakdown of the demographics:
50 people
6 lay-people (everyone else was a tibetan monk)
2 westerners (me and jay)
1 woman
i wasn't the youngest person in the room this time, though, but that's only because the karmapa was there. (the karmapa is 21, and is the head of the kagyud sect of tibetan buddhism - pretty much as important as the dalai lama, just the head of a different school.)
it was amazing. the whole thing was done in tibetan, and the best part was, i could follow a lot of it. the dalai lama gave an excellent speech in the beginning about tibetan religious history, and then a bunch of folks read papers about the differences between the four main schools of tibetan buddhism. i looked and felt incredibly out of place there, and i think everybody knows that i wasn't really supposed to be there, but it was really, really amazing to get to go. i think it helped that my philosophy teacher was the organizer of the whole thing. again, everyone saw me on tv.

THURSDAY:
his holiness addressed the students and staff, and a lot of tibetans were allowed in. atisha hall was PACKED. they've kept the institute locked up pretty tightly while the dalai lama has been on campus - you need special passes to even get onto campus. of course, when westerners see me waltz in and out of the gate like it's no big deal, they come running up to me asking, "how did you get in? how can i get a pass? can you get me in to see the dalai lama?" i have to admit, i feel a little smug, being able to tell them that i'm a student here, and no, they're not allowed inside.

FRIDAY:
jojo and i had a private audience with the dalai lama. we went into the house where he lives on campus, and the director of the institute escorted us in. he introduced us, and mentioned that i had studied philosophy in the u.s. and was continuing to study tibetan philosophy here. his holiness proceeded to ask me all kinds of questions about western philosophy and whether i thought there were any similarities to buddhist thought. i told him about my thesis, and we talked for a bit about david hume and greek philosophers. when we left, i said "thug je che" which means 'thank you' in tibetan. the director pointed at us and said, "oh yes, they've been studying tibetan language for quite some time." his holiness smiled at me and said, "great! that's wonderful! if you want to be a truly authentic scholar, it's important to know the language." then he slapped me so hard on the back that i nearly fell over.

we have photos. i'll post those as soon as i get my hands on them.

2006-02-02T00:28:00.000-05:00

it's been busy around here lately.

after coming back from kalachakra, i didn't have any classes. the dalai lama is coming next week for a big conference and everyone's busy getting ready. my hindi teacher is booking hotel rooms for guests, my tibetan teacher is busy showing bhutanese dignitaries around india, and i honestly have no clue what my philosophy teacher is up to.

but i had a lot of fun with the exchange program folks. the americans said a teary goodbye last thursday, and the australians left for delhi on saturday. they had an extra train ticket (and an extra bed in a swanky delhi hotel), so i tagged along and pretended to be an aussie for a couple of days. it was a much-needed break from the institute, and it was nice to just be able to pick up and leave at a moment's notice.

this month is pretty hectic for me. next week the dalai lama comes, and jojo and i are scheduled to meet with him! i can't believe that i will be meeting the dalai lama for the second time, and this time, it will just be me and jojo with him. that's just amazing. after his holiness leaves, jojo and i will head down to sanchi with jay and nalini, two smith profs doing research down around there. there's a big stupa in sanchi, and a lot of old buddhist relics that should be really amazing to see. when i return, my pal jo will be in varanasi, and then a week later, it's losar (tibetan new year), and i'll head up north with my friend to see her family.

this spring is going to fly by.

2006-01-13T03:48:00.000-05:00

kalachakra is about halfway over. it's been really interesting so far, and i'm realizing that i know a lot more tibetan than i think. i've been talking to monks and arguing with shopkeepers every day, and i'm having lots of fun. yesterday we met s. rinpoche, the former director of CIHTS and current prime minister of the tibetan government in exile. he talked to us about nonviolence and tibet, and we got to ask him some questions afterwards. he's a strange guy with some really bizarre views.

two days ago, we all took a trip to nagarjunakunda, a place where nagarjuna (an important buddhist philosopher from the 2nd century) lived. we left at 3.30am, and spent 5 hours on a bus. after we arrived we had to wait in line for an hour and a half, then take a 30 minute boat ride across a lake.
the hour and a half of waiting in line was by far the most exciting part of the day. we were the only westerners there - everyone else was tibetan. and tibetans seem to have some weird kind of phobia about waiting in line. as we made our way toward the boats, we found ourselves immersed in a mob of people, pushing, shoving, and shouting. this was all made worse by the indian police, who, after standing around watching the mob for a while, decided that they wanted everyone to form a single-file line. they started shouting at people, but nobody understood them. like i said, everyone was tibetan, and these policemen were speaking telugu. so, when the shouting didn't seem to work, the police resorted to pushing and pulling, and hitting people with sticks. luckily i was in the middle of the mob, so i just got pushed around a little. the crowd was so thick that at one point i had completely lifted my feet off the ground and was just carried for a while.

we were all exhausted by the time we got to the island, and we spent 2 hours wandering around the museum and the island, looking at archaeological relics. it was all really fascinating to see. at 1:00, half of our group got onto a boat to head back to the mainland. the other half of the group had to wait for the next boat, but they didn't make it back to our bus for another three hours. apparently another mob formed as soon as we left, and the police were unable to control them all.

so all in all, our day took 19 hours, only two of which were spent seeing the thing that we had intended to see. and we got pushed around by the cops.

2006-01-08T04:28:00.000-05:00

long time no update.
Christmas was good. i spent the morning at raj's school, helping out with a christmas party that she threw for all of her students. jojo and i bought them all oranges, and we had a fun time.

the folks from america and australia showed up just after christmas for the annual exchange program. my friend makenna brought me dark chocolate, jay brought me really good coffee, and my friend marnie sent a package for me and jojo complete with american candy and trashy celebrity magazines. it's been good to see some familiar faces.

new year's eve was spent in the hostel. we had a big party and danced to really really bad pop music until 2am. i woke up the next morning at 4.30 (yes, 2 and a half hours of sleep) to see the sunrise on the ganga with the exchange program. we went into varanasi, climbed onto a big boat, and watched the sun rise over the river. it was a great way to spend the new year.

now i'm down in south india for kalachakra, a big teaching that the dalai lama gives every couple of years. people have come from all over to hear it. the town where it's all happening used to be a sleepy little place, but now the streets are so crowded with people that you can barely walk. it's lots of fun though. kind of like a big buddhist carnival. a little like the ohio state fair. with monks.

2005-12-24T21:34:00.000-05:00

cihts is such a wonderfully weird place. sometimes it drives me crazy, but most of the time i love how bizarre things can be.

i was intending to write a really long post about one of my evenings last week, but i think it's enough to say this: the evening was spent watching a documentary film about muslim tibetans in ladakh who don't like speaking urdu, followed by the director, a tibetan man, singing and dancing to a song about the dalai lama in hindi. and then we had a sing-along.

and this was all perfectly normal.

2005-12-20T01:14:00.000-05:00

on sunday i spent the day in varanasi.
i took a cycle rickshaw into the city, which took a long time, but i went with my favorite rickshaw-wallah (who all of the tibetans call 'bob marley' on account of his dark skin and long hair). i bought a sweater from the tibetan refugee market, and while i was there, i ran into the postmaster from the sarnath post office. after that, jojo and i went to arun's silk shop. arun is a friend of jay (the professor who brings students here every january), and he remembered us. we spent a good portion of the day with him and his family, flying kites on the roof. when we tried to haggle with an autorickshaw-wallah to get back to sarnath, we ran into a friend from the hostel who lives a few doors down from jojo, so we shared a ride back with her.

sometimes i want to wander through sarnath singing the theme song to cheers... "where everybody knows your name." granted, most people around here don't know my or jojo's name - they just know us as those two white girls who go to the tibetan institute. but still. when you're halfway around the world from everything that's familiar, it's nice to have some connections.

2005-12-13T22:20:00.000-05:00

not much is going on right now, but i just realized that i'm going to be really busy and have lots of fun in the next two months.

- the karmapa (the head of the kagyu order of tibetan buddhism) is in sarnath right now, and apparently he'll be giving public teachings at some point in the next couple of weeks.
- then i have lots of friends coming. at the end of december, my pals tatjana and aditi are coming to varanasi for a week, and the folks from smith are coming for the exchange program. my good friend elizabeth promised to bring me some coffee from my favorite northampton cafe.
- then, on 5th january, we're all going down to south india for kalachakra (a teaching by the dalai lama). there will be TONS of people there, and it should be lots of fun.
- and then, after the exchange program leaves, my friend jo is coming to varanasi for a couple of months to lead a group of high school kids around. i can't even begin to explain how excited i am to see her.
- and at the end of february, i'm spending losar (tibetan new year) up north near manali with my friend yangri. her brother is becoming a geshe (the tibetan monastic equivalent of a ph.d. - it requires nearly 20 years of studying), and her family is having a big party to celebrate.

i'll post pictures soon so you can all see me with my new long hair and girlish figure. it's creepy.

also, i was just able to access my email for the first time in 2 weeks today. so if you've emailed me and i haven't responded, give me a couple of days and i'll get back to you soon.

winter

2005-12-10T05:01:00.000-05:00

it's getting pretty cold here. during the day, in the sun, it gets up into the low 70s, which is nice, but inside and in the shade it's always a few degrees colder. at night it dips down to probably about 50. now, i know that everyone reading my blog (except for karla in sunny florida) is suffering through either a midwest or new england winter right now, and probably hates me for complaining about the low 50s. BUT, the girls' hostel has no heat and no hot water. the door to my room opens into a courtyard, so essentially there's no difference between 'indoors' and 'outdoors' - the temperature is the same no matter where you are. it's not too hard to get used to, but it's forced me to alter some of my habits.

i remember the last time i came here, it was january, and every time i'd walk into the girls' hostel, there would be a crowd of five or six girls around the faucet outside, washing their hair. i was staying in the guest house at the time, where we had private bathrooms and hot water for showers, and i didn't understand why the girls would all be squatting on the ground outside when they had perfectly good bathrooms inside that they could use. but now i know. when there's no hot water, getting your hair wet is a LOT more tolerable when you're in the sun.
and, starting a few weeks ago, i saw some boys at the chai stall wearing gloves with the fingertips cut off. i thought that this was just another strange appropriation of bad western fashion trends from the early 90s (because many of the boys seem to really like bad fashion from the early 90s), but as it's gotten colder, i've realized that it's really the only way to keep your hands warm when you're studying.

when jojo and i first got here, whenever something happened that we didn't understand, we would just shrug our shoulders and say, "tibetans are weird." it became our mantra for a while, while we were still figuring out how things worked. but the more time i spend here, the more i realize that people have reasons for the things that they do. now, i too am washing my hair outside and studying with fingerless gloves.

i still think that tibetans can be pretty weird, though.

2005-12-06T01:28:00.000-05:00

two important things to report today...

first:
on friday, my philosophy teacher managed to compare candrakirti's philosophical strategy to the british occupation of india. it was brilliant.

second:
i've lost quite a bit of weight since i've been here, and my hair has grown almost to my shoulders. this makes me feel very, very strange, but my friend pema thinks it's wonderful. she keeps telling me that now i need to buy some tight pants and short shirts so that when i get back to america, all of the boys will follow me around. when i tell her that i don't want all of the boys to follow me around, she grabs me by the shoulders, shakes me, and yells, "why not, connie? WHY NOT??"

and the other day, pema and i were talking about how much longer we're both going to be in school. i explained that i'm planning on going to graduate school in the fall, and that i'll be studying philosophy for a long time to come. she thought about this for a while and said, "connie, you should become a nun. you're not interested in finding a boyfriend, and you like to study. if you're not going to have any fun in this life, you might as well work on having a good rebirth."

i've been thinking about what pema said, and if those are the criteria for entering into monastic life, i think that smith should just put a stupa on the campus center lawn and call itself a nunnery.

2005-12-03T00:25:00.000-05:00

my "tibetan class" has slowly turned into "drink chai with kinley and talk about philosophy for a couple of hours". we're both learning a lot from each other, and it's really fantastic, but my tibetan isn't coming along as quickly as it should be. i mean, i've learned some things - i can tell now the difference between when the girls in the hostel are screaming because their friend has a phone call and when the girls in the hostel are screaming because the milkman has come - but i still can't really have a conversation with anybody that lasts longer than a few minutes. my ability to read philosophy is really coming along (i can read entire passages of candrakirti without turning to the dictionary for help), but it's just hard sometimes... nobody really takes me seriously because i can't speak. the girls in the hostel are always amazed to find out that i know something about tibetan philosophy.

the girls in the hostel also don't take jojo seriously. she has a little gas stove, and whenever she cooks dinner, people come in and try to help because they don't believe that jojo knows how to cook. when she says, "guys, i cook at home all the time," they just shake their heads and laugh.

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

2005-11-29T22:22:00.000-05:00

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.

2005-11-27T15:45:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-26T10:30:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-24T08:30:00.000-05:00

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.

2005-11-21T14:06:00.000-05:00

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.

2005-11-19T13:34:00.000-05:00

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.

2005-11-17T23:24:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-13T08:30:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-06T11:16:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-04T14:17:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-02T09:50:00.000-05:00

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.

russians, rivers, and violence!

2005-10-31T11:37:00.000-05:00

FACT: i have discovered the single most annoying song of all time. it's in hindi, and i have no idea what film it's from, but the chorus is, "just chill chill just chill, just chill chill just chill (repeat 8,000,000,000 times in a high-pitched voice). and i hear it about 25 times a day. it's awesome. and by awesome i mean it makes me want to puncture my eardrums.

in other news:
saturday i went to the ganga with my pal byarma. byarma is mongolian, and came here from russia to do a trial year at the institute before she takes her entrance exam. she's in my hindi class, which is really confusing for her because it's taught in english by an indian man with a really thick accent. so sometimes we do homework together, and it's really kind of ridiculous. an american who knows no russian and a mongolian who knows very little english, studying hindi together, explaining things we don't understand in tibetan. this is why i love CIHTS.
ANYWAY, she had never been to the ganga before, so we went and took a boat ride and did the whole touristy thing. we went with two tibetan girls, who were TERRIFIED of the boat. every time it rocked the slightest bit, they would scream, "ama!" and clutch their seats. but it was great. varanasi is really beautiful from the river.

and then, we spent an hour and a half in lahaurabir looking for an eyelash curler. (that is a sentence i never thought i would ever utter.)

also, i punched a guy who tried to grab my chest that evening. men trying to do sketchy things like that is commonplace here, and usually it's just something that you have to deal with. normally i don't condone violence, but i have to admit it was pretty satisfying to see him swerve and almost fall off of his bike when i hit him.

grad school

2005-10-25T12:45:00.000-04:00

the final grad school list (sort of ranked by preference):

chicago divinity
harvard tibetan and himalayan studies
michigan philosophy
emory religion
columbia religion
texas philosophy
ucsb religion
cornell philosophy
unm philosophy
umass philosophy

looking at that list, i realize it's not really ranked by preference beyond the first two schools. seeing as how things like geography, money, etc. factor into it all, i really have no idea where i would like to end up, even if i got accepted into every school. i'll find out sometime in march, apparently. now comes the task of actually filling out applications.

that's all. i'm trying to teach the girls in the hostel to throw a frisbee, but it's not working out so well. the indian boys who do the landscaping around campus, however, are pretty awesome at it.

2005-10-23T08:47:00.000-04:00

all of a sudden, three days ago, the weather decided to get cold. i woke up in the morning and immediately reached for my sweater. at breakfast, instead of drinking sweet tea (tea with milk and lots of sugar), everyone instead went for the tibetan tea (which is basically milk with salt and lots of butter), because it's more filling and keeps you warm. everyone was amazed at how cold it turned so suddenly, and that's all that anyone was talking about. then i went to jojo's room and looked at her thermometer. it was 79. i was amazed that (a) it had finally dipped below 80, and (b) that 79 degrees would make me reach for my sweater and want to drink hot butter.

it's really nice though. i don't have to use my fan, people are in better moods, and everything is just a lot more comfortable. it's just like somebody hit a switch and turned off the heat everywhere. i love it.

i started teaching my english class on friday. it's strange because the students treat me like i'm a real teacher or something. they all kind of bow when i walk into the room, and whenever they answer a question, they stand up. but i've learned that the way of learning here is basically this: the teacher lectures at length, and the students do nothing but sit and listen. they don't even take notes. i want my class to be discussion-oriented, which i'm afraid is going to be like pulling teeth.

it's good though, in a strange way. seeing the tibetans' self-consciousness about speaking english makes me feel a lot less self-conscious about speaking tibetan. and i've met a few more folks. friday after class, my friend lhamo and i went to the tibetan restaurant in town for momos. we were able to speak (mostly) in tibetan for the entire rickshaw ride there.

after we sat down, one of the boys from my class came in and addressed me as "miss connie," which i thought was hysterical. he told me that he's going to new york this summer, and he was asking me all about america. the tibetans here seem to have this fascination with hip hop (which they pronounce, "heep-op"). and they are convinced that everyone wears baggy clothes and says "yo yo yo" all the time. it's strange.

they also have really weird misconceptions about black people in america (that they're all poor, and that's because they're lazy) and about muslims (that they're all terrorists who sacrifice animals). i don't know where they get these ideas, but it's really strange and kind of upsetting.

in other news, applying to grad school from india is hard, and i think it was a dumb idea to wait until i got here to start filling out applications.

photos etc

2005-10-18T14:34:00.000-04:00

there's no funny story behind me falling into a sewer. i was just searching for a chai stall a little too intently and didn't look at the ground under my feet. my left shoe smells lovely, though.

here are some photos (in no particular order):

my shoes. and below them, the himalayan foothills as seen from sanghachoeling monastery.
bhutia busty monastery. this is where the old man showed me the original copy of the tibetan book of the dead, and pechas from the year 1277. that's the kangchendzonga range in the background.
this is the hill i had to scale to get to sanghachoeling monastery. there wasn't really a road per se, or even a path. just steep, steep rock face.
but this is the view from the top.
my favorite photo. a chorten (tibetan stupa) and prayer flags from sanghachoeling.
this is an old photo... there was a beautiful sunset in sarnath one night, and jojo took this photo from the roof of the hostel.
jesus, the buddha, and shiva. (i have no idea who the guy on the far left with the afro is). this was taken at the mahakala mandir, which is perhaps the most bizarre thing i've ever seen. i got blessed by a buddhist monk and a hindu priest in the same temple, at the same time.
the sunrise from my hotel in darjeeling.
and, as per mom's request, me in a chupa. that's what i wear to class.

fun in gangtok

2005-10-15T18:40:00.000-04:00

did you know that leeches live in the mountains? and that they can burrow through your shoes? well, they do, and they can. i learned that the hard way trying to find a shortcut to a gompa. jojo and i hiked about 8km UPHILL to find enchy monastery, and when we got to the top of the mountain, a woman told us that we could take a shortcut back down. said shortcut took us through spiderwebs that were about 4 feet across, and somewhere along the path we both found a handful of leeches INSIDE our shoes. i don't think i got bitten by anything though. then we somehow wound up inside of a military compound, and some soldiers laughed at us.

um, and yesterday i fell in a sewer.

but gangtok has been great. this whole trip has been great. i've met a bunch of interesting people (some brits who are teaching in kolkata, some israelis who are trekking around on school breaks, graduates from CIHTS, and some friendly nuns), seen more monasteries than i can remember, and have been able to see snow-capped mountains every single day. it'll be bittersweet to go back to sarnath; there's oppressive heat and constant harassing by men in the streets, but there's also routine, and people i know. i'm too much of a creature of habit for my own good. i'm kind of exhausted and ready for things to return to normal. (or at least as normal as they can be in sarnath.)

jojo and i head out at 6am tomorrow, to spend 5 hours in a jeep, 12 hours on a train, and another 5 or 6 hours in a car to get back to sarnath in time for class at 10am on monday.

sikkim

2005-10-12T10:05:00.000-04:00

tuesday was my last morning in darjeeling. jojo and i woke up early and walked to a gompa that was down one of the steepest roads i've ever seen. we were greeted there by an old monk (wearing a yellow sweater and bright red cargo pants), who showed us around the main temple. the downstairs portion of the temple had beautiful murals painted with gold, and pechas from the year 1277 that were all printed on paper made from yak skin. the most amazing thing though, was that jojo and i got to see the original copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. the monk took it out off of the shelf, unwrapped it, and showed us some pages. he explained that the paper was made with yak skin, yak butter, and yak shit, and you could still smell it on the book. it was absolutely amazing.

after we left the monastery, we spent 2 hours walking all over darjeeling to get our permits to enter sikkim. then we hopped into another crowded jeep and headed north to jorethang. the trip was only 26km, but took us about 2.5 hours because we had to descend 2km down the side of a mountain. the road wound through tea plantations, and at times it was so narrow that i could have reached out and touched the tea bushes. (at times, we got so close that the tea bushes reached in and scratched my arm.)

from jorethang, we caught another jeep and headed up another 2 hours to pelling. this one was a lot less crowded and our driver was a young guy who played good hindi music. darjeeling was beautiful, but it's absolutely NOTHING compared to sikkim. the road up to pelling snaked along a river, then wound its way up the side of a mountain. the air here is so clean, and people are so friendly. it's amazing to walk down the street and not get stared at or shouted at.

this morning, jojo and i walked to sangachoeling and pemagyanste monasteries, which were absolutely gorgeous. (i'll post pictures as soon as i get back to sarnath.) to get to sanghachoeling, we practically had to scale the side of a mountain, but the views of kangchendzonga from the top were worth it.

this afternoon we took a cab into gangtok, the capital of sikkim. we haven't seen anything except for our hotel, but there are a ton of gompas and institutes around here that i'm really excited to check out. sikkim's state religion is mahayana buddhism, and it's incredibly environmentally and socially conscious. all along the road are signs reminding people that it's illegal to throw cigarettes out of car windows, solar panels for street lights, and hydro-electric plants. plastic bags are illegal here, too.

it's amazing to think that this place belongs to the same country as filthy, crowded varanasi. it's beautiful here.

magic

2005-10-10T06:32:00.000-04:00

darjeeling = magic.
this morning, jojo and i took a taxi down to ghoom, the next town south of here. we walked back up 11km to darjeeling, stopping at gompas scattered along the road. in one of the monasteries, we met a graduate of CIHTS, and he invited us to have tea with him. we chatted about sarnath, and tibet, and the institute - he was incredibly friendly and happy to hear that we were enjoying ourselves in the girls' hostel.
on our way to another monastery (that was built in 1850 and is absolutely gorgeous), we wandered past a prayer hall and could hear monks chanting. an old tibetan man with prayer beads in his hand smiled and motioned for us to come in. apparently today was some auspicious day, and there were about two dozen monks sitting in the hall reading pechas. five or six old, OLD tibetans motioned for us to sit down, and they forced massive quantities of tea and cookies on us.
after wandering around to just south of darjeeling center, we stopped to take a photo of a gigantic shiva linga on the side of the road. some nepali boys were sitting down the hill at the base of the temple, and motioned for us to come down. we wandered down and they handed us chairws and offered us more tea. today was a hindu holiday as well, and one boy who spoke good english explained the images on the temple and the meaning behind the holiday. then an old lady came by and gave us tikkas (hindu blessings on our foreheads made with colored rice), and told us to call her "grandmama." after we thanked the family and headed back up the hill, the boy gave us his phone number and told us to call him if we ever had any problems while we were in darjeeling.

people here are so incredibly friendly, it's amazing.

darjeeling

2005-10-08T13:20:00.000-04:00

i'm in darjeeling, and it's kind of the most amazing place i have ever been in my life. after a 2-hour autorickshaw ride to the train station and a 16-hour train journey (on which jojo got an uninvited massage from a hijra - the indian equivalent of a drag queen), i really wasn't looking forward to the 3+ hour jeep ride up into town. but as soon as we started to climb the main road, the view was absolutely gorgeous. i didn't care that we had 18 people crammed into a jeep that could comfortably seat 8, or that we got a flat tire on the road, or that one of the passengers was a screaming baby who only stopped crying if the driver played hindu devotional music at full volume... the views of the himalayan foothills made me smile like an idiot for the full 3 hours.

we got in last night, and from our hotel room, we can see mt. kangchendzonga - the third highest mountain in the world. this morning we woke up to the sound of tibetans chanting at 5am, and spent 6 hours wandering around the mountainside, taking shortcuts through tea plantations, stopping to chat and have chai with tibetans on the side of the road when we got tired. one of the boys who made us some tea asked us about george bush. when we told him that we didn't like him, he said, "good. that man thinks he is king. but he's really a snake. he's a king cobra!" it's really amazing how many people hate bush and the american government - i haven't met a single person since i've left the u.s. who thinks that bush is a good person (or even a halfway decent person).

anyway, tomorrow we're going to see the sun rise on tiger hill, then walk back and stop at some gompas (tibetan monasteries) along the way. rumor has it that one gompa around here has the original tibetan book of the dead, but they only show it to you if you get special permission. we have an official letter of introduction from CIHTS, explaining that we're students of tibetan philosophy, and jojo's teacher has friends all over darjeeling. i'm really excited to find out what we can see tomorrow.

monday, we go to sikkim.

more photos

2005-10-05T03:42:00.000-04:00

yesterday i met a woman who is doing Ph.D. research in tamil nadu... she's at the university of chicago, so we chatted about grad school things. she's researching roman catholocism in south india, and the portrayal of mary as she is influenced by local hindu customs. it's really interesting stuff, and she has gotten all kinds of grant money for it, but the indian government won't let her use any of the money because she's researching roman catholocism. it's crazy.

this morning i hung out with marilu (a fellow smithie who is spending this year in delhi). she dropped into varanasi for a few days, and came out to sarnath this morning. we circumambulated the main temple in town, drank lots of chai, and ate chipatti and omlettes out across the street from the institute.

durga puja is starting, and even in sarnath, there are people out everywhere. there's even more hindu spiritual music playing in the streets than usual, and it's really kind of awesome.

jojo unloaded her memory card from her camera onto my laptop, so i've co-opted some of her photos:

sometimes it pays to be a tourist

2005-10-02T14:25:00.000-04:00

jojo and i started making big plans to go to darjeeling, but when we contacted the travel agent, they told us that every train was booked until the end of the month. then we asked about dharamsala, but that was booked too. sarnath is a great place, but it's so tiny that i really wanted to get out of here for our break next week. i was kind of bummed about not being able to go anywhere, and mad at myself for not thinking about this ahead of time.

then we discovered the greatest thing ever: the foreign tourist quota. apparently all trains in india have a limited number of seats reserved for foreigners. all we had to do was go to the train station, fill out a form (in the separate, air-conditioned tourist section of the station), and BINGO. instant ticket.

so now, jojo and i are going to darjeeling. our train leaves thursday evening and gets in on friday. we're going to take an extra 2 days off of school to spend a full 8 days there. we're hopefully going to get permits to go to sikkim while we're up there, too. jojo is contacting our friend ashok, who is some high-ranking official in the indian army. he said that he can get us military escorts anywhere... maybe we'll be able to get into northern sikkim, closer to bhutan, nepal, or even tibet.

also, today i bought half a kilo of pomegranates for $0.45.

so

2005-09-29T08:45:00.000-04:00

next week i think that jojo and i are going to head up to darjeeling. we have 5 of 6 days off of school for durga puja (a hindu festival), and since most of our teachers are skipping out a little early, i think that we might do the same. the weather up there will be much more tolerable than here (55-65F as opposed to 85-90F), and there are all kinds of gompas (tibetan monasteries) scattered around the hills. but really, the one reason why i REALLY want to go to darjeeling, is for the tea. some of my favorite tea in the world comes from tiger hill, and right now is apparently the best time to go take a tour of the plantations. if we have time, we're going to try to get permits to go up into sikkim for a day or two as well. from some of the towns in sikkim, you can see mt. everest.

in other news, i spent an hour and a half in my philosophy class yesterday discussing the different ways that you can interpret the tibetan terms "nyon sgrib" and "shes sgrib." i think it's kind of awesome that people want to talk about that sort of thing with me.

par-tay

2005-09-25T13:05:00.000-04:00

so.
last night the tibetans had a party. it was kind of ridiculous, but in an awesome sort of way. the night started as traditional tibetan parties go, with lots of food and people taking turns singing songs and telling jokes and stories. then, the next 3 hours turned into a weird combination between a middle school dance and a smith quad party. they played everything from mid-90's dance music, to bad hip-hop, to hindi film music, to bob marley. the evening started off with the girls awkwardly standing on one side of the floor, while the boys tried to look too cool on the other side (as per middle school dances); but as the night progressed and people started dancing, it turned into something like a smith quad party (minus the alcohol and scantily-clad women), with loud popular music that i hate and random sketchy boys trying to dance with groups of girls.
it was actually a LOT of fun though, and it was nice to get to spend time with some of the students when i didn't have to worry about talking to them too much. one thing that i learned last night though: tibetans can't dance. not a single one. it was pretty awesome.

school

2005-09-22T12:29:00.000-04:00

classes started on monday.
on the one hand i'm excited because i'm learning a ton and have lots of things to do.
on the other hand i'm exhausted because i'm learning a ton and have lots of things to do.

hindi has gotten off to a slow start, but i'm in that class with jojo and a girl from russia who is doing a preperatory year at the institute before she takes her entrance exams to become a regular student.

tibetan is fine, albeit frustrating. i just wish that i had studied harder before i got here so that i could have an actual conversation. BUT, my teacher is this guy who just graduated from CIHTS last year. he's sticking around to do a post-grad year, working on western idealism. it's great to talk to him, because right now he's reading hume (one of the central figures in my honors thesis). yesterday we talked about hume and candrakirti and their notions of identity.... ahh, it's great to be around folks who like philosophy.

and my philosophy class is wonderful. my teacher gave me a copy of the tibetan edition of the madhyamakavatara, and we're going through it bit by bit and picking it apart.

it's great, but i'm spending all my time studying. i'm worried that if i keep going at this pace, i'm going to burn out in a couple of months. it's great to be busy with schoolwork again though.

around the hostel

2005-09-19T12:15:00.000-04:00

i don't know which photos are which as i'm uploading these images, but here are some images of the girls' hostel. (my room is on the ground floor.) the nun with the shaved head is my pal shanti, the white girl with the glasses is jojo, and the tibetan girl with the long hair is my pal lhamo.

finally, some photos

2005-09-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

old delhi:

the red fort

chandi chowk

jama masjid (the biggest mosque in delhi)

aaaaand ridiculous indian english.

sunday

2005-09-18T10:32:00.000-04:00

yesterday i had my first bout with culture shock since arriving in india. just a combination of being exhausted and frustrated with not knowing enough tibetan/hindi/etc., made me lock myself in my room and sleep for most of the day. everyone says it takes 3 months before you feel really comfortable with a language, and i know that it'll take time, but it's upsetting to get so frustrated sometimes.

things are going well, though. i'm in a much better mood today, and classes start tomorrow. i'm looking forward to having a routine. i'll pick up my chupa (tibetan dress) from the tailor tomorrow, then i'll be all set. all of the girls wear chupas to class... mine is navy blue with a yellow blouse, and jojo's is grey with a red blouse - michigan and ohio state!

2005-09-17T09:36:00.000-04:00

so i'm having a rough time uploading pictures, but i'll do that soon. apparently there's wi-fi in the library on campus, but i don't know how i'm supposed to use it, because we're not allowed to bring personal belongings into the library...

yesterday i visited a school for poor kids from surrounding villages. it's run by a woman named raj, whose husband owns the restaurant where i always eat. raj took me around and introduced me to some of her kids - it was amazing. she has six tiny classrooms and over 200 kids, between the ages of about 4 and 12. they all come from poor or low-caste families, and they're learning hindi, english, math, and social studies. she runs the school completely on grants and donations, because the families that send their kids there can barely afford food, let alone education. i met one seven-year-old boy, who lives with his mom and two younger siblings. when he realized that they had no money for food, he decided that he would lie down in the middle of the road until a car ran him over. he told his mother that once he was killed, his family would finally have something to eat. and now, two years later, he can read english and hindi, and he loves school. it's just amazing. nearly every kid had a story like that. it's a level of poverty that i honestly just can't wrap my head around. it makes me feel incredibly fortunate (and incredibly guilty) to be an american.

in other news, i finally met my teachers. i start classes on monday. hindi, tibetan, and madhyamaka and cittamatra philosophy. it's so amazing to be at a school where everyone knows buddhist philosophy. when students in the hostel have asked me what i studied at smith and i tell them philosophy, they nod and smile. then they ask, "western philosophy?" and i tell them that i focused on madhyamaka, and they get excited. it's wonderful. yesterday at lunch i talked with my pal shanti about svatantrika and prasangika, a distinction between the madhyamaka school... no one who's reading my blog right now cares about the details, but it was just really exciting to be able to chat about this sort of stuff with people my age. it makes me wish that i was more fluent in tibetan - it's hard to talk philosophy in another language.

success

2005-09-11T11:29:00.000-04:00

yesterday i had my first entirely hindi conversation! it was pretty exciting. i bought bananas from the fruit-wallah. FYI, they cost Rs12 (approx. $0.25) for a dozen.

i just figured out how to load my thumb drive on these computers here, so i can post some pictures soon.

i didn't realize how horrible the damage from hurricane katrina really was. all this running around has really cut me off from the outside world. now that i'm getting settled though, hopefully i'll have time to keep up with the news. sukdev, the owner of the restaurant where jojo and i eat most of our meals, has arranged for his paper boy to deliver an english-language paper to the restaurant every morning. this morning jojo and i read the Times of India and drank crappy instant coffee. i think that might become my morning routine.

hmm

2005-09-10T08:50:00.000-04:00

not much to say today. after nearly a week of dealing with indian paperwork, jojo and i finally registered as foreigners in varanasi yesterday. we had a little time to kill in the city in the afternoon, so i bought the soundtrack to "bunty aur babli," one of the new hindi films. it's basically a remake of bonnie and clyde. but it's three hours long. and a musical. there's one song that EVERYONE in india knows, and it's on the radio ALL THE TIME. it's kind of annoyingly catchy.

my room is all set up now. yesterday afternoon some folks were sitting in my room, and we were sitting on my bed, listening to american music on my laptop and drinking some tea that i had brought from home. it felt like i was back at smith again.

funny

2005-09-09T09:45:00.000-04:00

yesterday i was taking a cycle-rickshaw back from the store, and i went past a chai stall. there were several old men sitting on the benches, talking and sipping chai. the oldest man had his back to me and was wearing a green t-shirt. as my rickshaw approached the stall, i read the back of his shirt. it said: JOHN CARROLL INDOOR TRACK CHAMPIONSHIP 1996

how a t-shirt from JCU made it all the way to sarnath, i have no idea.

hot hot hot

2005-09-08T09:00:00.000-04:00

it's hot in sarnath. i'm glad that i didn't come here before september. everyone assures me that it'll cool off soon, but MAN, i would love to have some air conditioning right now. or a fan. there is a ceiling fan in my room that works really well, but the power always goes out during the hottest part of the day.

aside from that, though, things are good. jojo and i shared some of our inji (tibetan slang for white folks) music with our friends last night. they were big fans.

2005-09-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

after a week in delhi, i finally made it to sarnath. everything is basically the same as i remember it, except there are a few more internet cafes, and a lot more people have mobile phones. (i just hooked myself up with a mobile, so if you want the number, send me an email... i don't want to post my number on the internet for anybody to see.)

delhi was fantastic. jojo and i spent our first two nights in a tibetan colony on the outskirts of the city, then we spent a night in a seedy little guest house in the middle of new delhi. the fourth night, we relocated to a guest house in old delhi, which was AMAZING. delhi has been rebuilt something like 15 times, the most recent of which was when the british came and relocated the capital to the southern part of the city. as a result, new delhi is super-westernized, with pizza hut, t.g.i. fridays, levi's stores, and coffee shops on every other corner. many of the folks there wear western clothes, and the streets are all paved. old delhi, on the other hand, is congested, dirty, full of bicycles and cycle-rickshaws. there aren't any internet cafes, and no one wears western clothes. the two delhis are like completely different worlds! after our old delhi excursion, we went back into new delhi to stay with the aunt and uncle of a friend of ours. the uncle, ashok, is some high ranking officer in the indian army, so he and his wife, anita, live in the defense colony. they had their driver come and pick us up from our hotel, and they had servants around the house to cook and clean. it was fantastic to spend some time in a house with a family, though. anita and ashok have a son and a daughter who is close to my age, and jojo and i had a great time with them.

on sept. 2 we took an overnight train into varanasi, and two girls from the institute met us at the train station. the girls' hostel reminds me of smith houses in a lot of ways... people study a lot and drink tea, and sometimes they play loud obnoxious music. but i already know a few of the students from the last time that i was here, and everyone has been incredibly friendly and helpful.

the power just went out in the internet cafe, and i'm not sure how much longer my computer will stay on, so i'll end my post here. hopefully i can update more frequently once classes start.

in india!

2005-08-28T16:53:00.000-04:00

i finally made it to delhi. after traveling for a little over 24 hours, jojo and i landed in delhi without any complications at all. the flights were all on time, and british airways was a MUCH better choice for an airline than air india, which is how i flew last time i came here.

anyway, after going through immigration, we found out that jojo's luggage was still sitting in london. after a long, confusing hour which involved jojo running back and forth between different officials (fill out a form here, get it stamped over there, bring it back here, fill out another form there, etc.), and me sitting in the airport with all my bags, we finally went through customs, changed our cash into rupees, and made it out of the airport. jojo's friend's brother, tenzin, was nice enough to meet us at the airport. he had a car waiting for us and booked us a room. the poor guy had to wait until nearly 1AM to meet us because of the lost luggage ordeal.

stepping out of the airport to get to the car, the familiar smell of india hit me. i was thrilled to be back here again. it's nice now, knowing what to expect - i wasn't terribly overwhelmed by everything after stepping off the plane. india is such a sensory overload that it's kind of a lot to take in when you're exhausted. we climbed into the car and made it about halfway to the place where we're staying, and then our car broke down. we sat in the dark on the side of the highway for about 20 minutes, while the driver jiggled random wires in an attempt to fix the problem. at one point, he pulled the driver's seat completely out of the car to get at some more wires, and just set the seat down in the middle of the road. tenzin flagged down another car for us, and we finally got to the hotel around 2AM.

i was so thankful that he had met us there - had jojo and i been alone when something like that happened, i don't know what we would have done. but that's pretty typical of india. if i was in the states and they lost my bag and my cab broke down, i'd be pretty upset. but here it's all par for the course. and really, i can't complain. things are good here.

school.

2005-08-24T08:52:00.000-04:00

Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies

photos

2005-08-20T19:58:00.000-04:00

hopefully these will upload...

varanasi and sarnath (where i'll be living)

test post

2005-08-18T22:47:00.000-04:00

i'm home in ohio.

it still hasn't hit me that i'm leaving in a week, and it probably won't actually hit me until i'm back in india again, navigating cluttered streets, avoiding children, cows, and vendors yelling, 'hello madam! look here! very cheap!'

i don't know how much i can update once i actually get there, but i'll upload some photos once i figure out how to do that.