love the life you live Peace Corps Cambodia ☮: March 2012

Thursday, March 22, 2012

More on being a nomad in Inda

Okay im horrible at keeping up on my blog and I don’t feel like writing a blog for each crazy event that transpired in my trip so this will be less detailed sorry. After the north we spent a short time in the city then headed to Agra to see the taja mahal which I did not actually pay to go into instead I opted to eat on a roof top and see it from a far for free im just not as much into buildings and things as natural ecotourism/ cultural tourism so when I go somewhere that wants a shit ton of money for me to stand for 30 mins and leave ill pass. Agra was a desolate town did not like it I would say pass unless ur dying to see the taja mahal we had to deal with a real creeper there who tried to come in our room with whiskey and bragged about how rich he was but sexual harassment in general is horrible in India as a female you ust have to except that its going to happen which sucks in general guest house are really skeive and if you can not afford something nice I say skip the guest houses bc they are more unsafe then couch surfing. This brings me to what made our trip we only spent limited time in guest house thank god for that bc every single place we stayed was creepy really where couch surfing its like u get this inside view of the cultural and life of people you are visiting we had some great host. Jaipur is the capital of the Rajasthan desert and is the first planned city in India and its supper nice and up scale and way more put together then New Delhi I had the chance to stay with this family near the amber fort which was this little nitch away from the city but still close to get to other places soo awesome. The father of the family and me really got along exchanging ideas and philosophies he was a wealth of knowledge I learned that most pray beads in any religion adds up to 9 for the plants in the sky in India its 108 1+8=9 the rosary 2+7=9 lots of mythology was talked about and of course palm reading. I should note most of this trip was spent with me palm reading I even read the palm of my astrologist good fun always perfecting my skills I also read other couch surfers who were staying there as well and apparently I was really on with a few of them. I also found out Brahman is not the highest caste in india like I thought but raja Stan which is the royal class who are the ones who are in power. However I personally could not figure out how u figure out who belongs to which caste I asked but I guess the days of yester years are over and they don’t have as obvious dress etc like back in the day however I guess the richer class has nicer clothes. In Jaipur have a lot of interesting forts and things that we were able to explore with these awesome side streets it really felt like this unique place to be when we couch surfed. Another plus of this trip and couch surfing was that we met people from all over the world and just had great convos and taught people about not just American culture but Cambodian culture as well. Most people didt think I was American while in india pretty much I got Spanish everywhere I went how I know this because they kept trying to say hi to me in Spanish and ask my name in Spanish apparently that much of my 8^th grade Spanish class I could apply yay for me lol. Exploring broken down forts and palaces getting o know a local family it was time for us to move on to jasomere. We couch surfed with another really nice guy who actually owns his own guesthouse hotel and gave us a room for free and took us out to this none touristic desert it was just so amazing. Him and his friend sonny threw us a dance party and we ate really good Indian food with them as well. They were telling us about village life and how he was forced to get married at 14 to his cousin and just a lot of cultural stuff and understanding of more human beings. The biggest aspect of this leg of our trip was the camel ride not going to lie had no real desire to ride a camel but this was Hannah’s dream mine was that elephant I rode last summer but for the sake of saying I rode a camel I signed up. When we get on our camel I soon realize how big they are soon after we start walking hannah’s camel starts to make werid werid sounds like it sicks and then is foaming at the mouth its tongue is enlarged and cant seem to stay in its mouth and we are both like wtf. So after 2 hours we finally are asking this 10 year old kid who is in charge of the camel whats going on and he just laughs and finally this other old man with a handle bar mustache just looks at us and is like he wants the female and we are both like what then he goes on to explain it’s the mating season and im not buying it bc none of these other camels are not acting like this. Then he is like no no this one is really in heat and before we know it at a rest stop they take off all the camels gear and start to help the camels have sex like really it was crazy see pictures below. So after our adventurous Horney camel ride we eat dinner and then get to go back in the desert to sleep under the stars which was just the coolest thing ever I love stars and getting to sleep under 1000 of them that were visible even better. Overall ill leave you with this India is a place to see and so big you will have to go back more then once but understand it really is one of the most challenging places to see while I had a chance to see so much meet some great people I also has to be on my guard the whole time and can say I don’t know how untrusting I had to become while visiting India traveling takes it toll but each place we made it to was out of the world and recommend trying it out for ur self but only if you can live by patients in a virtue or go on a tour. Until next time peace out from the other side of the world!!!!

sunset 45 mins to the boarder of Pakistan

couch surfing friends shark and sonny

this is a pool extremely old but built very artistically

so this is the little road we had to walk to get to the house everyday

snake charmer

my camel

yea thats the tongue situation no exaggeration

my camel is on the bottom

lights out the stars

The Dalai Lama Teaching

Im only going to re cap ill see if I can post the video so you can watch it for ur self if you so choose don’t know if that allowed yet but ill try. Anyways he started off by talking about intelligence and to use it how not to just follow any one-thing religion etc and used Syria and China as examples. Then he went into compassion and the human condition of how we all want to be happy and don’t want to surfer and knowing this we should look at each other in the same way. Then he started an enation in to Buddha and talked about to take in the Buddha as to be a selfless act of not just thinking about ur karma or ur next life etc but to taken the Buddha is deciding that you will not move on until you can help every living being reach a state of happiness or enlightenment. Wise words I really did get a lot out of it however I feel it would be unfair to only talk about what I agree about with the Dali Lama because if I saw the pope I would have some ideas that I would need to express so I must hold all religious leaders to the same standard. Okay so this event took place march 8^th international women’s day so he did talk about women some what in passing but I was pretty disappointed with his idea of how he supports women and feminism. So I have a major with most world religions they make women the second sexs they use langue, which justifies women as being un pure not as worthy as men blah blah im not going to interrupt religious text right now but feel to do some research on it. When bring up women he talks about how he encourages women who are nuns to take part in debate with the male monks and supports there studying. Why this is disappointing is that he has enough power to really work with what ever the board of Buddhism is to take away this separation of not allowing women to be monks in the first place. It also bothers me some what more in Buddhism that women cant be monks vs in Christianity women can be priest why this is bc Buddhism is all about how enlightenment works and equality and eliminating suffering for all living things but how can this be the case when they would allow half a world population to be seen as less equal and contribute to half the world suffering. I talked about this with a friend when I got back and she had to remind me that the Dali lama cant admit to it to do so would mean he would have to give up his title or whatever because they don’t even test females to be the dali lama and how can a person so revered by the world come to terms with the fact he is on the top of the high archy chain. Despite this lack of support for women he really does have really positive good energy and the most unique laugh he really has away to make everyone feel at peace and like the chance to have a world of happiness is so possible and its hard not to respect that. It is said now that once this Dali Lama die which he claims will be at the age of 113 they will be stopping the tradition of having a Dali Lama because of china making a mockery out of it so is hard to believe I might have seen the last Dali Lama to ever exist. When we left the teaching we discovered it was happy holy day in India which I just thought was like a once a month thing but turned out to be this big festival of color that only comes once a year. all day long people come up and put all these color all over u its a lot of fun however we had to travel so did not get it to bad it was cool to experience. Until Next time Peace out from the other side of the world.

you tube video of the teaching sorry it would not embed http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie2wgOzvDN4&feature=relmfu

India the dance of life... Tibet in Exile

India is now the home to the Tibetan people who have been exiled from china I will not go into the politics of it all but it’s an unfair situation, which has not really received enough attention. This part of India was my first stop and one I have to admit to you all I have been dying to see for a long time the combination of the Tibetan culture and the Himalayan mts just always left me with a yearning to see this first hand. Originally I had planned to do a 3 month tour of India which now in retrospect soo happy didt more on that later anyways what changed this big plan of action was that on march 8^th the 14^th Dali lama was giving a teaching and it became a how could I pass this up sort of a deal. Anyways me and Hannah a volunteer that lives about an hour away who I do a lot of gender based projects with are like we have to go and so started the trip planning on India. After getting off the plane we have to find the bus we need to take to take the 14 hour trip up north however before we do this we run into some tourist from new york and Bulgaria they are just giving us some heads up about prices etc much needed I did research online but India is not a place u can research you just have to experience first hand. However I can say Cambodia helped me deal with most things really well never the less we take a subway and then a tuk tuk or a rigs haw as they like to call it in India to the red fort area shocked that we did not get lost we had time to spare so we walked around just to get a feel for it all had some food it was pretty cool ill admit I did have some mcd frys to get some American western whatever into the mix as well. After we exchange money we head to the bus station to have our first sort of rip off situation so the bus does not pick us up there they make us take a guy who rides you around on a bike to this high way were I felt really bad bc I hate them in Cambodia to it feels weird to use a person like an animal he was struggling to get up that hill man anyways we make it to the bus and they try to charge us 100 rupe charge for our bags but we have been in Cambodia to long so we were like o we asked and they told us it was included in the price which we didt but we knew with out written proof they were going to have to drop it and they did won that battle on not paying. This bus was actually the best form of transportation we had the whole trip or at least for sleeping it was we had this nice bed with a closed door sort of thing I guess if u don’t like the idea of being in a coffin u might not like it but to be it reminded me more of a fort you would make as a kid so it just made it exciting. We began to climb up north and could feel the cold I knew it was cold but I don’t think I realized how cold it would feel to my now accumulated Cambodia ass of 90 degrees. We had to take a few more bus to get to our destination some bus that could have been out of some 1960s horror movies but never mind we were well rested and felt we could take on this adventure plus we had the drive that we had to make sure to get tickets to see the Dali Lama which you ended up not needing. On the web site they tell u about a passport showing up 3 days a head of time blah blah none of it mattered. We did not couch surf this part of India because my mom was awesome and for my bday got us a hotel which was sweet except said place did not have a heater or hot water for more then a min so washing ones hair was a master of tricks =) none of this matters to me any more bc once u live life with limited everything you are just like whatever im surprised at the level of whatever I have reached. So the name of the town we were in was Mcleod ganj it was a very quite town with small streets that are just ment for you to walk around talk to people supper relaxing with the Himalayan mts in the backdrop every which way you turned. We soon took on the chi tea habit to warm up every hour but it made it real nice Tibet people are really easy to talk to and the whole culture just gives you this energy of serein peace. Every place in the world has ideals etc but you never see it actually transcend into a culture for me this was the first the Tibetans walk around with pray beads and this circular looking thing they spin while praying this goes on all day long while they are doing simple task and it changes them or to the outsider such as myself it seems to really change them. What the bleep down the rabit whole is this movie about metaphysic anyways part of the movies talks about an experience done with frozen water by this Japanese scientist where he put words positive and negative and for whatever reason this energy changed the way water crystals formed then they turn it into the fact our body is more then 70 percent water is it possible the same thing could effect humans. I personally can’t say for sure but its left me pondering however seeing the Tibetan people makes me think maybe its more true then I ever thought possible. We spent more of our days just walking around talking to the people learning some things about the people and also the foreigners you meet this far up north are going to have some food for thought when you talk to them as well which helps keeps you thinking about the meaning of life etc etc. one night we were around they had a free Tibet rally which I went to I have video try to post it but it really made me think why cant the UN help them why does china get away with this the next chosen Dali lama has been kidnapped at like 6 and has been considered the youngest political prison and the rest of the Tibetans who never escaped deal with persecution and have lost so much of their culture to China. I also sprung for my astrology reading sorry everyone you have to wait until im 40 for me to have any real money however apparently I am going to travel a lot not get married until im 30 plus and I have to make up for my past karmic life which was bad it was determined I don’t have bad luck just obstacles that always come up. Hum whatever else I have a drive and am career focused and should work with people. We took a taxi out for the day and saw some of the sites around the area like the hot springs caves and tea fields which was really cool I can honestly say every step of the way we kept running into so interesting people and it was nice that they could communicate it what I now consider to be pretty good eng. The food it Tibet was pretty good as well I had something called momos with potato’s a lot sometime with chicken it was good eating street food cheap once again it nice to know that Cambodia affords me to eat street food with no side effects =) some places around the town were also a sigh to be hold the first day we actually made the walk to this church that was built in the 18^th century by the French it was like being in what I imagine the twilight book would use for a church really lol. Some the of the best moments of the start of this trip were out in the cold with some chi in our hand sitting on a log looking out into the mts talking about whatever came up. Next blog will be about the reading it has come to my attention that I try to pack to much into one blog so ill do more separating but that means you might read about India for 5 blogs or more sorry if that bothers you trying to see how things work out this way.