This is Why I came to India

Yesterday was one of the most amazing days of this trip. Mind you, today I was at the Dalai Lama’s spring teachings, and yesterday beats that (sorry, HHDL, but it was hard to understand the translator and four hours of sitting on the floor makes for a sore and sleepy me).

Anna and I were on the road to Triund by 7:30 am, early enough to be the only trekkers in sight. Triund is a mountain top about seven kilometers from Mcleod, 2,875 meters above sea level. Though the most traveled hike from Mcleod, a trip to Triund promises breathtaking views of the Himalayas and –unfortunately– plenty of tea shacks to ruin the experience of nature by selling Lay’s potato chips and sweet teas along the way. They make all the effort to carry the potato chips to the top, but when it comes to trash, the tea shop owners are lazier, barely making it to the precipice before throwing the garbage into the nature that draws trekkers there in the first place.

Nevertheless, the walk remains breathtaking. Almost as soon as we’d left Anna and I ran into Tender, a Tibetan friend I’d made the night before at one of the beer bars at Mcleod that plays Backstreet Boys on a loop for ambience. He’d joked about coming with us, and I’d gone along assuming he wouldn’t wake up in time. But as soon as we reached Mcleod’s main rode, there he was, and so he came. To tell us about growing up in India, to guide the way, and to lead the way on the snowmen building and the snowball fights.

About 45 minutes from the top I almost bailed. We’d been told it’d be cold and snowy at the top, and wishing to minimize our footprint as much as possible, Anna and I packed way too much food and way too much clothing, resulting in a heavy backpack we traded back and forth every half an hour or so. Adding to this weight –which wasn’t that much of an issue at all– was the sight of a mountaintop covered in iced snow. The sun was on the other side of the mountain, and overnight whatever snow melted during the day turned slippery and smooth. It was clear trekkers turned back here. In the distance we could discern faint footprints, a haphazard ledge on the side of the cliff wide enough for about one foot.
“Let’s just come back when it’s melted,” I suggested, prudent. Anyone who knows how clumsy I am can understand my hesitation.
“No, we’re just so close,” Anna replied.

She’s much more stable than me and took the backpack and proceeded to claw her way up the ice. I shrugged, making a mental reminder that I’d hidden the emergency numbers in the backpack, just in case. When I finally stepped onto the flat mountaintop and first glimpsed the mountain range and the snow –invisible until the very last turn– I was so grateful Anna refused to turn back.

Pictures are coming soon, promise, as soon as my Friend Hong Kong helps me take them off her camera. This weekend Anna, Kylie, Hong Kong and I are heading to the Elephant Festival and Holi in Jaipur, which will provide the perfect opportunity to test my new camera.

Even as we make plans to go back and camp out in the caves, the underlying knowledge remains that every day the snow melts, that even though without the ice we can explore beyond Triund, there won’t be on this trip another gorgeous day on the snowy mountaintop, the sun in our faces and the view stealing all our words.

On the way back Anna and I sang the Sound of Music Soundtrack at the top of our voices, the beauty we’d glimpsed reminding us of another similar sight on the Swiss alps.

Back When I Couldn’t Feel My Fingers

The week before last the weather was beyond awful. Frightening even. The sky would take turns between snowing and raining and the temperature was permanently bellow 10ºC (the forties Fahrenheit), which doesn’t seem very cold until you remember there’s no heating anywhere. This was the week I came down Giardia, the week we moved in with our host families, the week the electricity went out in our library –where there are geysers that will heat up water for showers– for three days. Mind you, I’ve become flexible when it comes to showering regularly –not something I’d want to admit to the world in writing but here it is. By Friday, the situation was dire, and I left my host family’s house early, embarked on the brisk hike up to the library, only to discover there was still no electricity. By this point, I was feeling so dirty and cold and frustrated that I jumped into the freezing shower and wept through the process of washing my hair and soaping my body. It was so cold I couldn’t feel my fingers by the end of it, and to my great enjoyment, it started hailing ice the size of mothballs that afternoon. Let’s just say it was a low point, one of the lowest so far.

I can write about it now that the sun is shining and I have showered each of the last three days. I even had my first glimpse of His Holiness the DL last Thursday, when he gave a speech inaugurating the 52nd Tibet National Uprising Day.

Mcleod is turning out to be quite the experience. My friends and I hike to the nearby waterfall in Bagsu on an almost daily basis (pictures coming soon, promise), and I’ve discovered my host family is flexible about me coming in and out and staying out at night, though I’ve never pushed their flexibility past midnight. One of the Teaching Assistants has a kitchen where I cooked my ginger almond broccoli last Wednesday night (I mention it because chances are, if I’ve fed you, you’ve had my ginger almond broccoli), and we shared a couple vodka-lime-sodas and spoke into the night. Similarly, my Pa-la is teaching me to make Pale, the Tibetan morning bread, and taught me how to make the vegetable momos that gave this blog their name. Of course, once steamed, you could tell which ones he had made and which ones I haphazardly assembled. I’ve been eating so uch my a-ma-la has taught me how to say, “I’m full” in Tibetan, a phrase I use every night after downing bowls of noodles –called thugpa or tentuk in Tibetan depending on the shape.

Barriguita llena, corazón contento, verdad? Especially after being sick, every bite tastes of glory and I’m looking forward to hiking to Triund tomorrow with Anna, a good six hour hike that should make me feel that, despite all I’ve consumed, I’m nearer to my regular shape than I am today. We’ll see.

Sun setting = curfew

Yes, Tibetan families are very traditional. Yesterday I was allowed out but today am not nearly as lucky. I have to run home right now, but just wanted to post a couple of the pictures meant to go with the Khapsay entry. And good news about the camera situation: It's not getting fixed but another study abroad student, Hong Kong, is lending me her spare until I sort everything out! The flash doesn't work, but soon I'll be showing and posting about our Losar celebrations, hail as big as mothballs, cold showers, and getting lost and trekking through barbed wire.

Giarda, Khapsay, and Mcleod Ganj

It has been an eventful week, marked by losar preparations, our move to Mcleod Ganj, and me being too sick to notice much of it.

I can write it now that I’m on my way to a –hopefully– full recovery. I’ve been diagnosed with Giardia, a nasty parasite that’s very persistent but also very common. The details aren’t pretty, and I want all of you to continue reading so I won’t talk about them now, but suffice it to say that it was bad enough to make me swear off all sorts of spicy non-cooked sauces at roadside dhabas –my absolute favorite. Dhabas are traditional Indian roadside restaurants, and mine and my roommate’s shared love for spicy was the first thing that allowed us to bond.

About my roommate: last week was my last week living with Gaphel, and now the Emory group has moved from isolated Sarah college to the bustling hippie enclave of Mcleod Ganj. Compared to the size and surroundings at Sarah, most of us feel like we’re now in New York, where there wifi cafés abound, yoga studios are a dime a dozen, and Pure-Veg restaurants are populated by westerners with dreadlock with not one Tibetan or Indian in sight. This change epitomizes the notion of bittersweet; as wonderful as it is to have easy access to internet and hikes to waterfalls and falafel and yoga studios, leaving Sarah college was much harder than I once thought it would be.

I love my roommate, and miss her. There was no escaping the separation, so we celebrated our friendship in style. We had meals and spicy at all sorts of canteens and dhabas close to Sarah, and last Thursday we even made khapsay together. Khapsay is the traditional Tibetan biscuit made for Losar (the Tibetan New Year). There are several kinds of Khapsay, the most intricate, resembling donkey ears, are only made by specialists, but all the students at Sarah cancel classes on one day to make countless smaller Khapsay.

The process takes an entire day, and biscuits can be as simple as tiny squares or braided designs. Here you can see some pictures of the Khapsay making process, including a Khapsay I am very proud of having made given my lack of skills whne it comes to arts and crafts. The best part of making Khapsay is tasting them at the end. Sweet dough and white flower is fried, sometimes in butter.
“Do you like?” Gaphel asked. What’s not to like?

Speaking of Khapsay, I have a plate of it in front of me as I write this at my host family’s. Since Saturday, I’ve had a new a-ma-la (mother) who works at a tailoring shop, a pa-la (father) who is an ex-monk and former political prisioner –he was caught by the Chinese trying to flee Tibet and was tortured for four years at a Chinese prison– and a ten-year old pochun (little brother). The four of us sleep in one cozy room –by cozy of course I mean tiny– but we’re lucky to have our own kitchen and bathroom –both also tiny. They’re so kind, offering me all kinds of Tibetan medicine to cure my Giardia, and my little brother is a bundle of energy with a special place for Tom and Jerry. The pa-la and a-ma-la are amazing cooks, and already I’ve been allowed to make the breakfast omelettes. I’m hoping to leave in four weeks with knowledge of the preparation of a couple Tibetan dishes under my belt.

Unfortunately, I have no pictures of them at the moment, since my camera suffered a mysterious accident and the lens refuses to open.Also, old pictures are taking too long to load, so it's either this or nothing. More updates coming on Losar celebrations.

Unplanned Experiments with Navy Blue Dye

I must confess I was so pampered I didn’t wash my own clothing until I went off to college. Since then, I’ve never opened my washes to discover all my clothes have been turned orange or pink or neon green. That is, until last week.

Last week it rained every day without fault, the days were abysmally cold and my enthusiasm for doing laundry –none to begin with– turned into dread. Nevertheless, we were heading to Bir for the weekend, and wearing something that didn’t reek became pressing. So I left my clothing soaking overnight, and woke up at 5:30 on Thursday morning to scrub at my clothes in water so cold I lost feeling of all my digits. While scrubbing and soaking I discovered that a pair of fluffy navy blue pants I bought in India had turned all my bra’s and whites into interesting shades of violet. Oh well. So it goes.

I took my experiments with blue dye to be an auspicious sign of this week’s trip. It did turn out to be a mind-blowing two days. Bir is another Tibetan exile settlement in Himachal Pradesh. It’s about two hours from Mcleod, but has an entirely different feel. Bir is known for housing “New Arrivals,” or Tibetans who’ve escaped Tibet in the last two decades –as opposed to Mcleod, center of Tibetans in exile since the Dalai Lama escaped in 1959. Additionally, most of the New Arrivals have escaped from Amdo, the north eastern region of Tibet, while the bulk of earlier refugees came from Utsang, or central Tibet. Though claims are commonly made that Tibetans have a unified culture and language, Amdo dialect is incomprehensible to most Tibetans in exile who learn Lhasa dialect at the Tibetan schools in exile. The new arrivals go to specific schools the Tibetan Exile government has created for them, and we had the occasion to visit one on our fieldtrip.

Moreover, because Bir is a newer settlement, the monasteries built in the surrounding area were built with more funding than the first monasteries constructed in exile. What this translates into are breathtaking halls with marble floors and twenty foot Buddha statues. These monasteries are built in the scale of the greatest monasteries in Tibet, and even though they’re built of cement instead of stone, great use is made of traditional tanka painting and Nepali metalwork. The two days were filled with the most beautiful monasteries we’ve had the opportunity to visit. Even now, thinking back to the trip it’s hard for me to believe that most of these structures were built in the last two decades.

Oh, and did I mention we got to see some dead guy in a glass case and our first reincarnated lama? Thogten are monks in the Kagyu school famous for their unconventional methods; they let their hair grow long, unlike other monks, and generally meditate in isolation. They are reminiscent of Indian Sadhus. When Kamtrul Rimponche escaped Tibet, he brought eleven thogtens with him, and when his teacher died, special rites were performed to preserve his body. Though the mind has left the body, it’s believed that because this person was such a great practitioner, some of the karmic imprints may still emanate from the body and benefit other human beings. Sometimes, the salts that are used to preserve the body are handed to devotees to eat. Though it’s supposed to be very auspicious, I’m squeamish about the prospect. Nevertheless, it was an honor both to meet Kamtrul Rinpoche and to visit the preserved body of one of his teachers. Overall, the trip was no less breathtaking than the one to Amritsar, though interesting in a different sense because the most beautiful monuments we saw in Bir were all built within the past fifty years.

On the Universality of Twilight

It’s official: there is no escaping cheesy American trilogies anywhere on this planet. Stephenie Meyer's brand of flat but addictive writing has made it as far as Sarah Campus, in the middle of nowhere, Himachal Pradesh, where the internet is about as frequent as solar eclipses. Yes, even here, Team Edward vs. Team Jacob is an issue of primordial importance to teenage girls.

A couple nights ago, I was speaking with my roommate Gaphel, who loves TV as much as I do, but indulges in it much more often than me. I asked her what she had spent her Saturday watching and she told me she watched a soap opera version of the American vampire series.

“Do you know Twilight?” She said to me. Uh, oh. I nodded my head. I wasn’t sure I was going to like where this was going.

Well, she explained that every Saturday there’s a thirty-minute installment of a Hindi version of Twilight. Las Saturday, Gaphel told me, the girl found out the Indian equivalent of Edward was a vampire, but that she still loves him. Bet none of us can predict where the story’s going next.

I am committed to experiencing the phenomenon of Twilight in Hindi one day to witness first hand the capacity of a bad novel to captivate so many people in so many languages across most of the world’s continents (If anybody hears of Twilight in Antarctica, let me know).

On a disparate note, here I am posting some more pictures of my trip to Amritsar this weekend that I was unable to upload yesterday due to a slow connection.

Mercurochrome

Salman Rushdie titled the chapter in Midnight's Children dedicated to the British Massacre at Jalianwalah Bagh "Mercurochrome." The title is an allusion to the color both of the blood spilled when General Dyer opened fire on a group of non-violent Sikh protesters celebrating the Sikh New year and to the color of the solution used by doctors to heal some of the wounds. It is one of the most powerful images in the novel, which I recommend to all.

I was at Jalianwalah Bagh this past weekend. Nowadays, the land is the site of these beautiful gardens. You would never imagine them to be the site of such misfortune if it weren't for the bullet holes on some of the walls and the well that reminds visitors of the many who drowned trying to escape the shooting by diving in. What I most remember about the visit,though, were none of these remainders but the little alleyway that serves as the only entrance to the gardens. When General Dyer ordered his men to fire, the thousands of people in the garden could only escape through this tight alleyway.

Just 400 meters of this site is the Golden temple, the most holy site for Sikhs. The Harimandir, the temple itself, containes over 100 kilograms of gold and is surrounded by a commanding pool of holy water as well as a complex of countless buildings built in marble. The temple is remarkable. It is beautiful, sure, but the way it functions and the services it provides to the surrounding community are impressive. The Sikh religion puts a lot of emphasis on service, and as a result a large part of religious practice is serving others.

What this means is that surrounding the temple are a free kitchen, free lodgings, a free school and a free hospital. The temple itself is polished from ceiling to floor every night.Even the children help out. What's more, free food is available twenty four hours at the Langar, the temple's kitchen were we had a dinner of dah, chapatis and chai. On weekends, when the temple is busiest, the Langar feeds over 100,000 people. All of this, completely for free. The Guru Ram Das Niwas, where our group stayed, is one of two complexes the Sikh providing free housing to all who want or need it. In our case, we stayed in a wing reserved for foreigners where we benefited from a guard outside our door. Though the accommodations are beyond basic, it was so striking how organically the temple works; it's an arrangement that has been maintained for hundreds of years. However, what is most striking is that within the Sikh compounds no divisions of caste are tolerated; the rich man must sit next to the homeless in the Langar and vice versa. In a country where caste remains so important, staying in this small sanctuary for a couple of days was such an interesting experience

The final thing we saw on our trip to Amritsar this last weekend, were the border closing ceremonies between India and Pakistan. These are supposed to be incredible because Indians and Pakistanis shake hands, but personally I found the competitive nature of the whole affair a little overwhelming. On the Indian side people lined up to run back and forth while holding the Indian flag, and people kept shouting "India Live forever" at the top of their lungs. Turns out one of my high school teachers, Jeremy Jimenez, witnessed the processions in the Pakistani side. Since we couldn't see into Pakistan from the bleachers on the Indian side, it would be interesting to compare what we saw.

Anyways, now we're back in Sarah college, with a lot of Tibetan to memorize and map assignments and memorization tests, but only for a very short time: next weekend we're going to Bir, a Tibetan exile settlement with mainly refugees from East Tibet.