Back to Delhi

Had a relatively stress-free journey to Pahar Ganj and settled into a reasonably priced hotel with a clean bathroom, helpful desk staff, and cheap airport taxi service. (What's the catch? Hoping there is none..)

Please note that in order to fit all our bags and all 3 of us into one rickshaw, I was lucky enough to get to ride shotty with the driver, basically half hanging out of the car to avoid being elbowed in the boob every time he made a turn and having the ultimate front-row view of the ridiculousness that is Delhi roads. No, I am not being sarcastic when I say lucky. I freaking love sitting shotty.

Went to a cafe with Liz and Jessie to get my morning cappuchino fix, then we split up while Jessie went to get passport photos and Liz went to use the phone. I just wanted to go to the passport photo place and grab the key from Jessie so I could go back to the room and stretch.....

I get to the passport photo place. Jessie is not there. "Passport photos are 100 rupees, ma'm." "I'm just looking for my friend." "She already left." So I leave the photo place and start walking back to the hotel. Some guy is following me and I am trying to semi nicely explain that I am just looking for my friend while he is trying to show me another place to get passport photos. Then I say no thanks and get asked if I want to do shopping. I say I want nothing, thanks.

Get to the hotel, nobody is there. Attempt to walk around.
"Taxi, ma'm?"
"Do you want to do shopping, ma'm?"
"What do you want?"

I say nothing, thanks.

I duck into a side alley which ends up being a loooong street full of fruit and vegetable stands. Here the vibe is completely different - I do not get offered to buy one thing, it is unusually quiet, peaceful, and orderly for India.

**Keep in mind that quiet, peaceful, and orderly for India still involves dogs on top of banana peels making narrow escapes from rickshaw drivers who are trying to make their own narrow escapes from motorcycle drivers while people with bags of fruit are ducking this way and that and bike riders are backing up into a semi parking spot next to a pile of trash.

But anyway, orderly, peaceful, everyone buying fruit and doing their own thing and I don't even really feel like I'm getting that many stares.

Back on the main drag, making some left turns to get back to the hotel. I stop to look at bags and find one that I really like. Of course the shop owner coughs all over everything in the world when he gets it down but honestly, that barely even phases me at this point. Then someone runs over from across the street and says "ma'm, I have much more bags in my shop, it's just across the street." And the owner of this shop is also like yeah, let's go look at the bags across the street so I think fine, I'll look at more bags. Note that at this point I am in an open spot on the main drag, completely visible and safe. But then...

THE STORE OWNER HAS THE NERVE TO OPEN A DOOR TO A PRIVATE STAIRCASE AND BECKON ME UP THE STAIRS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Do I really look like I have ONE TOTAL BRAIN CELL and I am going to follow you up a sketchy staircase to "look at bags?"

At this point I keep walking down the street, lividly fantasizing of punching coughing creeper man in the teeth.

And the comments continue.. hello how are you? where are you from? I like your hair! Do you want a rickshaw? Do you want an ATM? Come to my shop!

By the time I made my third loop around the block looking for my friends, though, I think I was emanating enough "I-will-punch-you-in-the-teeth-right-now" vibes that the constant nagging somewhat died down.

Yeah India!!!!!

Manali is...

I am really having issues producing semi-coherent sentences right now, perhaps due to the Kingfisher Strong I was downing while waiting for dinner. We did a gorgeous waterfall hike today, had lunch in someone's apple orchard, saw ridiculous looking vintage ski clothing, and now I am more or less procrastinating leaving this Internet cafe to begin the walk back to the hotel in the brutal cold.  But once we are home, there will be fire and friends and beer. And more untangling of the yarn. Good night!

Songs from a Distance

Is a poetry book by Bhuchung D. Sonam, a Tibetan writer living in Dharamshala, that I happened to pick up and flip through at the Commonground Cafe while Liz and I were waiting for our meal at the same time as he was having dinner and doing a book signing with an Australian tour group one table over. The book was meant to find its way to me - half of it is what I feel about life and the other half is what I should learn about life. And yes, I got a free signed copy.

Check out www.tibetwrites.org or http://www.rangzen.net/author/bhuchungdsonam/ to learn more!

Now we are in Manali, back in the mountains, staying in a rest house with a sun deck from paradise. The nights are chilly and the views and stars rival those of the Dharma valley - of course, it is more built up though, complete with road. The leaves are changing and it's crisp, very satisfying.

I have been nursing a slight sleeping-on-a-bus hangover for most of the day, been relatively sluggish and spent a lot of it stretching and untangling my yarn. Apparently, Liz and mine's sleeping pill and motion sickness medicine induced state of unconsciousness on the bus led to some ridiculous looking cuddling positions. I can't really tell you much about the bus ride except a delicious plate of rice and dal at 9 pm, waking up to duct tape a window shut that kept sliding open, then suddenly being ushered into a hotel in dark Manali at 3 AM.

Anyway, today is sluggishness and hanging out with the couples staying at our hotel, promising them that we will party tonight and questioning if I can hold out.  A lady at a guesthouse was wonderful to let me borrow an Agatha Christie novel for the night, even though the policy is usually no removing books from that guesthouse's library (it's a different hotel from the one where we are staying.) So tonight will most likely consists of cuddling with my book along with all the warm clothing I own. Yeah late-fall high elevation. Good night!

Independent Travel

Most vivid memory:

Hearing the Muslim call to prayer in the middle of a country club in Delhi near the bus station, that we may or may not have snuck into through a gap in the fence, sitting on the grass with a very special recreational apple near a more or less abandoned mysterious temple. The music was coming through so clear and surreal amidst the grass in this completely surreal place, an oasis in the middle of the bustling city where the city noise was almost completely blocked off by the barrier of the trees. Trash was virtually non-existent which is practically impossible in Delhi, trust me. Instead there was a clean lawn to relax on, birds and trees, old buildings to explore, and eucre to be played.

Other impressions? In Mukteshwar we flew. Went paragliding. I felt like I could see the whole world. Bought two sweaters at the same shop where I found my gem of a sweater last year. Saw dear old friends. Had my first one-on-one encounter with a threatening dog that involved scrambling to find and throw three rocks while getting out of the territory that dog was protecting. Collapsed into a giggling fit with Manoj's friends while attempting to wring my towel out over the fire. Took a nine hour bus to Delhi. Haggled with rickshaw drivers and hotel owners at midnight. Got on a "VOLVO" tourist bus to go to McLeod Ganj after being very sketchily driven there from the main bus station and tricked into taking the (SWELTERING) AC bus for an extra 100 rupees. Took sleeping pill on said bus at 7:30 PM and spent the good portion of the rest of the ride passed out. Arrived in an awesome town at 5 AM, two cups of espresso and five hours later we have found a hotel, found our friends, explored, and my graduate school applications are one small step closer to being completely done.

Namaste!

Svecha gorela na stole

After finishing up the trek, we are briefly in Almora before ending up the program in Syat. Even though we were in a lodge in Munsiari just a few days ago, the technology and buildings here feel so much more foreign. Is it because the trek is over and I know I won't be back in the woods tomorrow for an undetermined period of time? Is it because the program is coming to an end? Because I've been to Almora before, so this is a familiar place with technology and not another new exciting destination? Who knows?

I woke up at 5 of my own volition and decided that it was a great time to get up and get on the Internet, much to the shock of my roommate who insists that it is unnatural to get up before it is light out. Well, I have had a fabulous hour taking care of business, googling Russian poems I have been craving, and watching the sun peek out from beyond the haze over the hills.

I won't have Internet that much but it shouldn't cost you anything extra to text me, so I would love a "hello" or an update!

Chedabagar

I am channeling my blog through my father because as I had warned, has been spotty at best (read: five minutes per month IF your day in town happens to coincide with a day that the power is on). Anyway, when you’re in Himalayas, who needs facebook? All my worries about a sense of permanence and being distracted from the now were swept away by a very strong physical sense of the great distance the airplane covered before it dropped us at New Delhi. Eight thousand miles is comprehensive! The landscape here is so vast and the mountains so much greater than you that together they act as a vacuum cleaner and sponge, sweeping away your worries and absorbing them into their mass. Last year I felt I was learning so much about the humanity and the tiny role I played in it, but this year the dominant discovery has been how much I have yet to learn.

Instead of thinking about how this experience will let me take knowledge and awareness back to my “other” life, I realizes THIS is becoming my life, and I can work instead on constantly being the person I’m out here because that IS who I am, not some alter abroad ego. Life is so rich with meaning, the air is thick with it. I think that if you really find meaning once, it becomes easier to rediscover it in the seemingly mundane things you do.

That meaning is personal and highly individual, but you are lucky if you can recall a time when you felt inspired, in awe, and full of purpose – wouldn’t we all be much better members of society if we could approach everything we do with complete reckless commitment? Anyway, dusk is descending and with it the hum of cicadas above the Ramganga river, trees glowing eerily perched above the hilltop, and fireworks going off in the distance to celebrate Deepwali in a smooth transition from the daytime blasts of dynamite that would jolt us out of our haze every so often. I am off to enjoy this in-between stage before night sets in.

On Transience, more on Journeying

The danger with seeking permanence in a state of change is that you tend to get attached to everything that comes into the lens of your transition stage.

A transition stage is a kind of journey, after all - and if I am to lump the next six months of my life into an entity I term "journey," there is no reason why a transition stage cannot also be important enough to receive that term. It is literally the movement from one stage into another stage.

And Buddha had it all right, it seems - seeking too much permanence in a stage of constant flux can lead you to cling to those things. I had my first mini crying sesh over leaving the country today. Was it because I am realizing how many things (and by things I clearly mean people - yes, lack of avocados will be traumatizing, but nothing to cry about) I will miss, or is it unrelated to any tangible experiences in my life and just my way of over-attaching to things in this temporary state?

So maybe the answer to how do you create permanence when change is the constant is - accept and embrace the fact that you will not have any permanence. THANKS BUDDHA I KNEW THAT, now how do I make myself actually believe it? It's one thing to have a fact written inside your head and an entirely different animal to believe that fact, live and breathe it with your every cell.

But that is part of the journey that is this week (it's really satisfying how that sentence makes no sense, in the context of grad school applications where sentences aren't allowed to be rambly and imperfect) ANYWAY, the part of the journey that is this week is preparing myself for the next six months. The tangible is all but done, it is the mental I am still struggling to figure out. See above with permanence, belonging, etc.

The other part of mental preparation is figuring out what to pack into my virtual duffel bag. I didn't realize this until week 5 or so of last year's trip, and when I did, it was a powerful realization. But while we are all the sum of our experiences, that doesn't mean that we have to carry all our experiences everywhere we go. Think of it as a duffel bag, storage unit, two small planets, what have you, of stuff - but abstract, mental, memory stuff that adds up to all your experiences that define you as a person. You would never carry around everything you own all the time. Your back would break - to prolong the metaphor, you would get incredibly overwhelmed and feel a little nutty. So you can pick memories, experiences, people that you will put into your wallet, day pack, overnight pack, or leave behind in some deep dark storage corner of your mind.

As another example, just because you were going through a really rough patch a few years back and couldn't handle spending time with anyone to whom you couldn't constantly whine doesn't mean that today, every new acquaintance and potential friend has to pass the whineability test.  Even if something was a part of your life at some point and significantly contributed to who you are as an individual, you don't have to share that something with everyone you meet for the rest of your life and have it be a dominant feature of your personality and key topic of discussion on a day-to-day basis.

So this week is supposed to be about figuring out what people, experiences, and character traits make it into my trip pack, day pack, close-to-my-heart toolish touristy money belt.

Then there are those experiences which are very current, but the circumstances of being lots of miles away (yeah geography) and sans consistent technological access (Skype is a freakishly artificial construct anyway) require them to be put on hold.

And I've figured that out to about the same degree as I have finished all of my grad school applications.