A Little of the Life in the Hills

After the crazy bus ride things have been much quieter up here in the Himalayas! It isn't snowing here yet but it is certainly fall and BEAUTIFUL! We are staying in this great little hostel away from town about a half mile sitting above a glacial river! Amazing! And there are all of these AWESOME people staying here- English, Irish, Australian, Isreali. It is so cool because we all just sit around and play uno with the guest house owners at night and the owners are sheep hearders as well as apple growers and they have owned this guest house for 15 years so they just tell us about life here and all the guests that have come through and we play uno since that is a game that everyone can understand no matter what language you speak! The owner herself is a woman but she barely speaks English so her husband does most of the business (I think it is sort of cultural too, that women don't really work here) but for some reason she has really taken a liking to me. So her and I just speak some weird form of hand gestures because we really can't communicate at all! She is really really nice and shows me pictures of things on her phone all the time and sits next to me every night and it is just very funny seeing us try to communicate - mostly just by laughing! I'm really frustrated by all of the languages here! Everyone speaks a different language so just when I get some words of one under my belt, there is someone new and they speak something else completely! It stinks because I basically can say hello and thank you in about 6 different languages here and some more in Hindi but I just can never be sure that someone I meet actually speaks any of the languages I know four words in! It's quite frustrating to only use English because then I feel like I'm missing out on stuff with this lady for example, but I guess the hang gestures and laughter are a form of communication too so at least we all have that! Who knows what she thinks I'm talking about most of the time ha ha!

Hanging out with the beautifully-dressed mountain people, hiking to new heights in the Himalayas and just reading and relaxing in the river is absolutely amazing and a nice break from the busy cities, but I'm so eager to get to some volunteering! We have found some really awesome opportunities and we'll be moving on to Dharamsala at the end of this week for one of them which I'm so so so so so excited about! Since Dharamsala is the home of the Tibetan Government in Exile, we found some connections to help with refugees there! I think I will be teaching English but we will know more when we get there! Also we have some really cool water project stuff lined up in the South of India in the poorest state here actually so I'm just so so so excited about all of these little opportunites to see more and DO more!

Tuesday one of the coolest things happened here in Manali! Actually the whole day was totally awesome. First, we had brunch at this little cafe and sitting next to us was an old woman speaking French. There are actually a lot of French people here! That is very exciting because I get to use my French at least once a day and I just love that! Anyway, my ears immediately perked up when I heard her so I started talking to her and then her friend came up, a German so we switched back to English. Anyway, they both have been living here for more than 20 years because they found this yoga teacher here that they just love. They were telling me all about their practices and how they mostly like it becasue of the meditation part. It was cool because the German lady was a medical doctor before she moved here but she found that she believed much more in the spirit and mind and body connections offered through yoga and from their guru than what Western medicine offered. It was nice talking with them also because they were not like a lot of the hippies in town which Tim and I like to describe as "ommed-out." Ha ha, a lot of these other ommed-out types have the mangiest dread locks and are just very interesting versions of westerners!

Anyway, after brunch, the coolest thing in 1,000 years happened! They have just completed a brand new temple here in Manali - it is a temple for Kali and they have been preparing it for opening all week. Then yesterday, they had this huge, huge ceremony. The whole town was closed and everyone was in the main center. They had HUGE pots of food and were feeding everyone and the temple leaders were preparing all of the blessings and gifts for Kali outside of the temple. Then they started to dance these huge thrones with Kali faces around the whole town for hours until it was finally time for Kali to "come down into her temple" which basically meant for her statue to be unveiled and the temple to be officially opened. It was really cool to be a part of! Everyone - seriously hundreds and hundreds of people just sat in rows on the street and ate the food. I tasted it even though I'm sure it wasn't sanitary and I hope won't make me sick but it was delicious! It was such a great thing to be a part of because I guess their tradition is to build a new temple every 1,000 years and so this event really only happens once in a thousand years! It was awesome to be here for it!

As the ceremony happened a little boy who was about 9 came up to us and tried to sell us saffron and we were kind of trying to ignore him but he was just so funny with his salesman ways! He had obviously learned English just to sell things to English speakers so his English was so proper and seemed to make him sound so much older than 9. We ended up just sitting down and talking to him for a long time and then some other beggar kids came up to us - a girl of 7 and her little brother of maybe 1 who she was carrying all over town and then her older brother too. The five of us just spent about an hour just sitting on a bench during this festival talking and taking pictures. It was so cool! The salesman, who preferred to go by the name "Sun" even though his real name was something else in Hindi, basically had to translate almost everything between us and the beggar children who spoke Gugarati (which is a language from the southwest that I haven't yet learned a single word of). They were so fun and cute though. It was really interesting because all four of the kids were acting so "adult" when they were asking for money or trying to get us to buy stuff from them. The 7-year-old girl, Sima, was carrying her baby brother around all day long and acting like such a mom. They just seemed so "harsh" as little grown ups, but as soon as we sat down with them and started talking to them they transformed into kids again and it was really cool to see! We bought some juices so that they were at least getting something from us even though it wasn't money. When we finally started walking they followed us for a while and eventually it was like me walking through the street and holding hands of six beggar children by the time Tim and I finally made our escape through a back alley. It was so hard to leave them like that, but it is just a hard thing all around! I think there is nothing I can do for them really other than just play with them so I guess that it was still positive for them, but it is just hard to see such little kids with such hard difficulties to face everyday. I can't wait to get to volunteer with some children in one of our next few spots so I can hang around them for a little longer and hopefully try to do something more helpful with them!

Anyway, that is a little about life here in the Himalayas! More to come after the next grueling bus ride to Dharamsala!

Learning the Definition of “Grueling”

Hello from the Himalayas! We have safely arrived in Manali, but not without quite an adventure through the mountain highways of Himachal Pradesh!

After another full day of wandering, we boarded our bus to Manali at 6pm Thursday. Our travel agent (you have to use them to buy any type of traveling tickets here, and there is one or two per corner) told us to meet our bus at the gas station across the street. We packed up and walked over to where, sure enough, about a hundred people were waiting to catch a bus. We hung out there waiting for our bus and watching jam-packed buses leave the gas station, hoping that ours would leave room for seated passengers only! When our bus pulled up we boarded with our backpacks in tow (we were told it was a bad idea to put them under the bus so we pushed our way through the people and hoped there would be room for them somewhere near us). Just getting on the bus was crazy. People were pushing and yelling and the conductor was trying to tell people where to go. Someone was sitting in Tim’s seat and when the conductor asked the person to move they got very upset. Unfortunately that person ended up sitting right behind Tim and was quite a pain the whole trip.

We finally got settled in. We put our bags under our seats or in the aisle like all the Indians were doing so they were within reach the whole trip. Some people had brought their tin milk jugs (sort of similar looking to say, the Stanley Cup only they actually drink out of it) and some brought sacks of rice. All of these goods were crammed alongside luggage and people into the coach-sized bus. Luckily there weren’t any standing passengers on our bus, but we soon figured out that the seats were pretty much all broken. They were basically airplane seats in that they had a little button you could push to lean back slightly, but the button didn’t work so almost all the seats leaned back all the time, and to say the ride was bumpy would be an incredibly understatement. Our seats were in the back of the bus, right before the last row of five passengers, so that meant that the bumpiness was even more intensified. We sat next to a really nice Tibetan family- a mom, a grandma, and a baby all sitting in two bus seats and they were so helpful showing us the ropes of the system. As we started going and we all realized the bumpy ride that was ahead of us, we were laughing hysterically together. The little girl would hold onto the handles on the seats in front of her and basically fly around as though they were the reigns of a horse! And there was another little girl sitting with her family behind the Tibetan family and all of us except the grumpy man behind Tim) were laughing so hard and enjoying the ride…until we realized that the bumpiness wouldn’t stop, it would only get worse as we climbed higher and higher into the mountains for 16 hours!

Before we got on the bus we had been reading a lot about the area we are going to in our guide book. It kept saying that people would arrive to this area in the mountains after a “grueling” bus ride from Delhi. It seemed sort of strange because, I mean I’ve had some wonderfully grueling rides back and forth from Texas and other places in 15-passenger vans with 20 stinky rugby girls and I thought, hey, what could be more grueling then that right?! So we figured it was just one of those things put in guide books for sissy travelers or something, but around 11:30 when we had been moving for about 5 hours and were realizing that not only was sleep nearly impossible, but there was no bathroom on this bus either…we began to realize what the definition of grueling!!

Well…of course I was the first passenger that had to pee so my new Tibetan friend kindly swam through the sea of random luggage in the aisle to the front of the bus to ask if they could pull over for me! She even stood guard for me so I could find a bush! Then we were back at it and all through the night we bumped through the Himalayas.

It was dark and Tim was by the window (completely unable to move his legs with the lady’s broken seat bruising his knees all night) so I couldn’t really see the road that much and when we were in the cities I purposely avoided looking. Sometimes I would here our horn blar and one time when we were backing out of a bathroom break, we definitely ran into another car so I figured I just would listen to my ipod and keep my eyes closed hoping sleep would kick in in some impossible way! But of course, as we got out of the cities the mountains showed up and were simply amazing so I wanted to have a look. Every once and a while I would look over just to realize we were climbing hair pin turns on a one-lane road with no side rails and traffic coming in both directions!!! We would stop every time someone came in the other direction and the two of us would slowly slide past each other so closely that we could hold hands with passengers in the next bus!

It was a wild ride to say the very least! Knowing me, no one will be surprised that I slept through a lot of it! But Tim was constantly flailing around in his rollercoaster seat and didn’t sleep for more than two minutes at any give time! Needless to say, when we pulled into our stop in Manali at 10:30am on Friday, we were exhausted and disgusting! I hadn’t really washed my hair in a few days and a little dreadlock was forming beneath a messy side pony (cute I know!) and Tim was basically a zombie by this point so getting off that bus was truly magical! The fresh mountain air and dramatic Himalayan peaks surrounded us…along with about 30 rickshaw drivers asking to take us places- a quick reminder that we may have left the city but we were still in India!!

We took an offer for a ride to a part of town called Old Manali where we stopped for breakfast at a café before beginning the undertaking of finding a guest house. Finding things here isn’t necessarily the problem, actually. It’s more so just that everywhere we go someone is calling to us saying “You need a hotel, my cousin knows this owner, get you a good deal” or “Going somewhere, I’ll take you.” It’s kind of getting old…one time a man pestered us for a ride for so long that he was eventually saying he’d give us the ride for free!! It is really strange and Tim and I have really played with a bunch of fun ways to say no. One day in Delhi a man asked me something and I just blurted out a random little phrase of gibberish, something like: ladi ladi ladi and walked past and the man repeated it back to me in the same tone I had used! It was really goofy, but the point is, sometimes saying no can be sort of entertaining and sometimes it is so annoying!

Anyway, after breakfast we sought out to find a guest house that was in our guide book but off the beaten path. After about a half mile trek through the woods we emerged to a little house towering over the glacier stream. It had a café and the most beautiful gardens next to a kitchen from the late 1700s! And now I’m sitting writing this from the balcony of our $7 a night “cottage” in the middle of Kullu Valley!! It is really amazing that in one night we can go from the craziness that is the city life in India to the quaint little town in the middle of the most amazing mountains! India is quite a place indeed! And needless to say, with a ride like that ahead of us, I think we will be staying here for a little while!

Reflections on Delhi and Mumbai

We’ve officially been in India for one week now, and we are high tailing it out of the big cities! The past week has been filled with many amazing and wild experiences and I just wanted to make sure and record some of our highlights and lowlights before I start to forget anything.

Trip-ups

Let's get a few of the unfortunate incidents out of the way first. As many of you know, I am a little, well, accident-prone. I’m sure you may have heard stories about me getting trapped in a stair well or two in an unfamiliar place or being in a plane that may or may not have been struck by lightning. Well it is true, sometimes I find myself in unfortunate situations like these while traveling and this trip hasn’t really been an exception to that!

For starters, when I was walking out the door to the airport, all my bags packed and ready to go, I somehow managed to step in some dog poop in one of the two pairs of shoes I was going to bring on the trip. In a frenzy, I got some expert advice from the Queen of Clean and luckily was on my way! Little did I know this was foreshadowing how I would again step in poop but this time in Delhi and much more disgusting! So…one week down, two unfortunate poop stories! Wah wah wah. But the good news is that I am putting a new (and clean) foot forward with soap at the ready for any more unpleasant surprises!

In other news, I successfully electrocuted my hand as I tried to plug half of my converter into the wall at Sam and Laura’s house. Not my finest moment, but again, a learning experience!! Luckily no severe damage was done. Then, Wednesday night I was carrying a cup of coffee to Tim and a little spilled on my hand causing me to burn myself and throw hot coffee all over the road. Again…unfortunate, but I’m sure a very common accident…right?! Luckily the barista was nice enough to give me another cup, with much less coffee inside and a frozen water bottle to numb my throbbing hand! A random nose bleed in the middle of a busy, busy alley rounded out my time here! I know, I know...just call me Grace ;)

No seriously though, these are all very minor incidences (God knows I’ve been avoiding bigger problems with stairwells and flying in lightning storms) and all in all I’d have to say, I do feel very safe here so far. I had read and been warned about women being groped and harassed in India and I’m very happy to say that I haven’t had any problems like that. I do carry my pepper spray just in case, I’ve been dressing very fully covered and I’ve been using a PscSafe bag which is very hard to pickpocket from so I think those things have really helped, but also it seems that foreigners are much more normal here now then perhaps ever before. From American music and clothes to soaring divorce rates, it seems a lot of western culture is permeating here and with that a lot less of me sticking out on the streets. I had read about white people being stared at a lot on the streets and other uncomfortable encounters from being different, but (aside from the begging) I really haven’t had too much troubles with this.

Tim and I have also been sampling a lot of the food here. We haven’t drunken any unfiltered water or eaten at some of the really “fresh” street stalls (although they look delicious!!) but we’ve definitely tried as many new things as we can and haven’t really had to deal with a lot of sickness either (knock on wood). Aside from my (slight) clumsiness, we have all in all had a really awesome week in India so far!

Top Moments

While everything in Mumbai and Delhi has been wonderfully exciting and new, some top moments really stick out in my mind. We of course had amazing, amazing times at Diwali festivities and cricket and we’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy meals and some of the top restaurants in India with some Indian friends, but most of our time so far has been spent wandering. We wake up in the morning and wander to a new part of the city and watch things happen and explore there.

During our explorations we’ve come across several small moments that just really resonated with us or were simply hilarious:

In Bombay we went into a market where they were selling EVERYTHING. It was sort of flea market style with everything from fruit, veggie, and candy stands to watches, sunglasses, and other fake expensive goods stands…and hair stands. Yep…human hair…sold at a market. Just in case, ya know you need some…hair?! It was very strange!

In Delhi we were riding in a rickshaw to a new part of town and our rickshaw driver pulled over by the side of the median in the middle of the road…not necessarily uncommon really! But then he grabbed a bag from the back of the Rickshaw and told us to hold on one second. He started spreading bird seed from the bag all over the median so the pigeons would have something to eat! It was totally awesome! What a guy!!

When we were wandering through a narrow alley with a bunch of shops, two little boys started to pick a fight with each other. A bunch of little kids all started to play with them. It was just a big game going on in the alley which also seems to be pretty typical. Well then a cow wandered through the game and the little kids just ran up to it and started to grab its udders and run away as if the cow were just another kid to pick on. It was really amusing!

Another awesome and funny time was when we were at one of the monuments in Delhi, India Gate and we were trying to take our picture with it in the background with both Tim and I in the photo and a man came up to us to ask if he could help. Well Tim asked him to be in the picture so I decided to take a jumping picture of the two of them. The man, a rickshaw driver was really amused by the idea of a jumping picture and the pic was hilarious as well!

Well those are just a few small details about what has been going on in our trip! We are now packing up and getting ready to head for the hills! Wandering around and sampling the cities has been so wonderful but we are also ready for a little change of pace with some air that doesn’t make your boogers black and somewhere with a little less honking! We are off to Manali, Leh, and Dharamsala for a few weeks of hiking, studying Tibetan culture, and exploring more new parts of the wild country before heading down to Orissa to work on some water projects!

Diwali and Cricket

After an excellent time in Bombay, we flew to Delhi on the night of Diwali. We landed just as the sun was setting and were able to see all of the fireworks erupting around the city on our descent. When I say fireworks, you all will think of 4^th of July or New Years I’m sure. But the fireworks for Diwali were much more like I would expect it to sound if I were listening to hours and hours of bomb raids!! We took a taxi to the beautiful house of some of our other new friends, Sam and Laura. All of us went up to their roof top to watch the fireworks with their land lord. Probably upwards of six hours of fireworks displays happened in all angles and from all directions around us. The kinds of fireworks everyone was lighting were probably also banned in at least half of the states in America! We all said to each other that 4^th of July would never be the same now that we had seen how Indians do fireworks!

After the amazing festivites of Diwali, the whole town pretty much slept in for two days just to recover! (But not Tim and I! With our jet lag, we were typically awake all the days of this week so far at 4:30am just waiting for the city to wake up!) Monday night, we went with Sam and Laura to a cricket match! It was so interesting! Luckily it was the 20-20 which means the short version because these games can last up to 5 days!!! The match we saw, The Dehli Daredevils versus the Cape Cobras was only 4 hours luckily! The game was held in the stadium Delhi is preparing for the Commonwealth games next year. Some parts of the stadium have recently been rebuilt but some were still a little old-fashioned. Instead of using a computerized jumbotron to change the players numbers and information for all the fans, there was a huge board that people walked up inside and actually carried the letters and numbers out of the board one by one and replaced them with a new number! It was very interesting! This year is also one of the first years that India has had cheerleaders attending the matches! It was pretty surprising when we saw scantly clad ladies dancing to Black Eyed Peas in front of a crowd of pretty much only Indian men! We all kept wondering why in the world such an interesting and unique cultue like India would try to adopt some of the worst parts of American culture!!! The Daredevils won the match and it was really cool to be able to learn a new game and watch the sport Indians adore in their own stadium!!

We are finishing up with Delhi today and tomorrow and then tomorrow night, we are off to the mountains! We are taking a night bus to Himachal Pradesh and the home of the Dalai Lama! More from the Himalaysa!

This is Our Life?!

Wooo hoooo! We made it to India! After 30 long hours of flying (and yes, one amazing leg in business class!!!) and waiting in airports, we arrived in Bombay, at 5am. Before we even left the airport, we had made two great new friends that are doing essentially the same thing as us. The girl, Mary, was even a rugby player!!

After a few hours of sleep we fought the amazingly chaotic Indian traffic with out taxi driver out to Navi Mumbai or New Bombay to go to Tim’s Indian Godfather’s home and church compound. Alexander was so wonderfully nice and welcoming! We enjoyed delicious Indian food at a restaurant near by with him and in the morning he made us an amazing breakfast of omelets and grilled cheese! The first day was just great and our host was perfect.

That afternoon, I went to the mall with two girls that work at Alexander’s church. It was such a great trip as we passed the goat farm and tailors on our way to the most American-like commercial mall I could have imagined. From chain restaurants inside to stores I’ve seen everywhere from London to Colorado, I was totally surprised to see the American influence of the suburbs of Mumbai, India! The girls that showed me around were wonderful guides! I loved having the chance to do something here in India, that girls our age do in America but with these two girls that could show me what it is like in their culture.

Saturday was the biggest holiday here in India, Diwali. Diwali is a celebration of the goddess Laxmi. She is the goddess of wealth and good fortune. Also it is the celebration of Lord Ram and his return from exile. Ands boy do the Indians know how to celebrate!! We met up with our great new friends Dipti and Nipolo in Old Bombay Saturday morning and they gave us a wonderful tour of the city! Then they took us to Puja. Puja is the ceremony for Laxmi that everyone does with their families and close friends on Diwali. It was such a wonderful experience to be a part of!

Our puja was very extravagant as we were lucky enough to meet up with the perfume suppliers for body products in their office in the historical district of Old Bombay. The women were dressed in the most amazing saris and with such beautiful jewelry. The food they insisted on serving us was so delicious. Diwali is a holiday of sweets and the sugary baked sweets they have everywhere for this time of year are wonderful! Our hosts explained all the traditions of the ceremony that ranged from lighting amazing incense and laying out three essential life grains to offering fruits and sweets and blessing paperwork from the office for prosperity in the upcoming year.

After the ceremony our new friends took us to their clubhouse where we ate more delicious food and even saw a Bollywood star! All of our new friends in Bombay were so kind and welcoming to bring us into their homes and show us their city! All day long I just kept saying to myself, this is my life?! Everyday for the next year, we get to meet wonderful new friends and see how they live in another part of the world and find places to visit and stay…It is truly a dream come true and everything I’ve wanted to do for so long!

Leaving on a jet plane!!

The big day is finally here!! After months of planning and years of dreaming, we are finally heading out on our great adventure!!

Our first stop, after layovers in Chicago and the United Arab Emirates, is Mumbai, India. We will be arriving during one of the biggest festivals in India, Diwali. From Mumbai, we will be heading North to Delhi. After these first few weeks, the sky is the limit for us! We have a few volunteer positions in the works- some Blue Planet Run water projects in various parts of India, some orphanages in India and Nepal, and a few school opportunities as well. Our master plan is to head down to Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand after a few months in India and Nepal but we are open to anything (and recently we heard Jordan calling)!! No firm plans there, but I'll definitely post any updates!

The last few weeks getting ready have been filled with shots and packing lists and all the other excitement that comes along with the amazing journey we are about to embark on! I am looking so forward to seeing India and experiencing all that it has to offer! First step...getting on that plane tomorrow!