Lance in India!

The Monastery

2010-01-22T23:23:00.001-08:00

The monastery that we stayed at was named Bylakuppa, it claims to be about 600 years old, at is considered by the locals as the Golden Temple. There are about 4000 monks in the area, as there is actually several monasteries combined into one big one. Most of the monks are refugees form Tibet that have come here to maintain their faith and way of life. India is very supportive of refugees coming from Tibet, and welcome them.
The main reason that it is referred to as the Golden Temple is the main temple has been painted a very bright gold color and can be seen for miles. I would guess the temple itself is about ten stories high with a very large arch at the top rising another 20-30 feet from the top of the temple. If you think of Buddhist temples or any traditional Chinese buildings, they are built in tiers or levels, each one getting smaller. That is how this temple is built, and the arch on top starts on a mid level tier, but circles over the top of the temple. They have then put large figures/ornaments (possibly ten feet high) within this circle, hanging on the inside. I think the best way to describe it is to say it looks like a ferris wheel on top of the building. The main walls of the building are painted bright blue, and the roofs of each tier are painted gold. The circle is both blue and gold with the ornaments being painted in gold. This main building can be seen for miles around as it is the only building that tall for many more miles around.
We were not allowed into the Golden Temple, but we were able to enter several of the smaller temples at the monastery. Whenever I think of monasteries I always imagine something I’m sure I’ve see in movies; small and quite. Nice green grass with lots of trees for shade and water falls/fountains with benches in front of them for quite contemplation. Monks here and there going about their chores, maybe some chanting off in the distance. There is always a feeling of peace as you walk around the grounds able to loose yourself at any moment.
NOT! There was green grass, which they had fenced off so you couldn’t walk on it. With 4000 monks thats probably not a bad idea. They did have nice gardens, they were kept up, and there were trees, but a feeling of serenity.... nope! There are 4000 monks here. It felt more like army barracks than something a monastery should feel like. There were monks everywhere, all dressed in the same thing and moving about doing their tasks, it made you feel like you were sitting in the middle of an ant pile.
In one of the buildings there were a handful of monks playing some music. The instruments they used were very basic and prehistoric so the sound was also very basic, and the chanting didn’t sound like the gregorian chant CD’s that I have. I must say that it was a big let down based on my preconceived notions of what to expect. Thanks Hollywood!
The temples however where a different story. Most of the smaller temples from the outside looked like standard square buildings, something you might see on a campus of a university, or a group of government buildings. All being several stories high, with lots of windows and some decoration, but not like the main golden temple. Most of the buildings also had lights strung up on them in a draping fashion. You wouldn’t know you were entering a temple based on the outside of the building.
Once you got to the doors, however, the unknown would be left behind. The doors on the temples to enter were huge. 10 - 12 feet hight and 4 -5 feet wide. They they both opened like french doors the entry was grand and magnificent. The doorways themselves were carved of designs, each temple being different, and were all brightly colored; reds, yellows, golds, blues, greens. Sometimes to the sides, or above the door would be small statues of mythical creatures, like dragons and such. (If any of you reading this are buddhist, sorry, I haven’t done any research into this.)
Once inside the temple you can be transported to another place. If the temple was free of decoration, it would be a very large, very square room with support columns. The structure itself is a very basic design. Support columns every so many feet, level ceiling, and lots of windows on all sides except the back side. This of course is looking and the building free of ornamentation.
Each of the support columns are decorated with extremely colorful fabrics that run from the ceiling all the way to the floor which is about 40 feet high. Colors, designs, symbols, tassels, embroidery! In-between the columns are large columns of fabric, once again in more colors than you can imagine, hanging from the ceiling almost to the floor and were about 4 feet in diameter. We had to duck to walk under these. Its really hard to describe what this looked like. It all fit so well, yet as I looked closely, there appeared to be no rhyme or reason for the choice of colors or designs. It was so busy everywhere, up close is didn’t look good, but when viewed as a whole it was spectacular. It was truly a color fairy tale, an image from Dr. Suess, or maybe every holiday all thrown into one!
The back of these buildings were very similar. They all held three very large statues. One large one in the middle and two slightly smaller ones on each side. I will now write a quote from a plaque in one of the temples to explain;

“The statue of Lord Buddha is 60 feet in height (from the base) where as the height of other two statues of Guru Padmasambhava and Buddha Amitayus are 58 feet. They are made of copper, plated with gold. Inside the statues are scriptures, relics of great beings, small clay mould stupas, and small statues, which symbolize the body, speech and mind of the Buddhas. Seeing these statues, venerating them, circumambulating and making offerings to them generates faith, peace, wisdom, loving kindness and compassion in our minds and cleanses unwholesome thoughts and actions.”

We spent the entire morning walking around this place. At one point there was a school field strip of students from a village near by that came into one of the temples and they were being told about the temple and how one worshipped in a Buddhist temple. There were also a few other westerners walking around, which did surprise me, based on the location of this monastery. We were in the middle of now where, off any beaten track. If you passed through this town to get from one major place to another that would make sense, but you must go out of your way from anywhere to get here!
I’m very thankful to Ajay for suggesting that we spend the night here and visit the monastery during the morning hours before we returned to the wedding. We would not have had time in the afternoon to visit before heading back to Mysore. Its back to the wedding now!

Panchakarma IV

2010-01-22T03:55:00.000-08:00

One week to go with the Panchakarma. After having to drink the castor oil, things can only go up hill from here. After the cleanse one of the treatments changed and I think it was my favorite one. It was called the oil bath.
So, as usual, I go in for the foot massage first, and by this time there is a part of me that is not looking forward to the massage as it is a little rough, and not relaxing, but there is also another part of me that realizes that it’s doing me great good, and so I should put up with it. Parts of my body that were tight such as my neck and quads have now loosened up very nicely, and I have noticed that my practice is getting much better, especially in the binding asanas like marichyasana D. That is a pose I have never been able to get into until this trip, and I do feel its a combo of the daily practice, plus the foot massages.
Once the massage is over, they put me back up onto the beautiful wooden table face up. There is once again two therapists as they do both sides of your body in unison (right and left) They place between your legs a large pot of warm herb infused oil and using small sponges, they soak the sponge in the oil and the first path they take is up your chest, they circle your nipples then continue up to your shoulders and then down the arms and trace each of the fingers. The sponge goes back into the oil and the second path goes up to the belly button, then down each of the legs, and traces the toes.
They would do this over and over until the pot ran out of oil. The way the table is shaped, its designed to catch all the oil, there are edges on both sides, and it runs down to the end and falls into another pot. They also have a small quantity of oil sitting over a small burner, keeping it hot. They change the empty pot for the full one, mix in some hot oil, just so that it is warm, and start the process over.
This is done twice, then they have you lay on one side, and follow a very similar procedure, first going up your side and down the arms, then moving down your legs. After two pots of warm oil, they have you change sides and do it again.
The last step in this oil bath they have you sit up, with your legs out straight on the table. Then with the pot between your legs again, they would soak the sponge and start at your shoulders, first sweeping across the back and down the arms, and the second sweep would be across the chest and down the legs. Then with the first pot of oil, just before it was gone, they had you sit up nice and tall with the head tilted down and would pour the remaining oil on your neck and let it fun down your back. With the second pot of oil, after the back and chest, they had you lean back just a little so they could pour the warm oil down your chest, and legs, and they paid special attention to your knees and toes.
This oil has the same texture and feel as Olive Oil, very thick and slick, but my favorite part was because of the herbs they used, it was orange! A warm orange oil bath I’m quite sure has just got to be good for you. My two therapists were very friendly, I had one male and one female. The female only knew a few English words such as Hi, and “See you tomorrow”, but the man could put together simple sentences. We all enjoyed teasing each other as best we could without language. I would always act like I couldn’t sit up on the table without sliding around, and sometimes I wasn’t kidding, that stuff was slick! You could have all sorts of fun with the oil..... anyway.
The way they cleaned most of the oil off was by using the strips of the leaves of the coconut tree like we would use a squeegee to get water off on glass. It worked much better than you can imagine. The male would always like to take the leaf and hold it up to my neck like I was a hostage. I’m sure some people would take offense to this, but he always did it after I would slide around, and when you can’t speak it was a fun way to make me behave. After getting as much oil off this way as possible, they would have me stand up (on the floor), and use a towel to get the remaining oil off.
They would then quickly clean the table, and I was back on it having the oil on the forehead thing again....heaven. The last two days, they added one more simple thing, which was a warm water massage on the neck because that is what I had the most problems with. No oil here, just water and I’m quite sure the herb was Cumin. They may have used more than just Cumin, but that is what I smelled. I love cumin, and even make a tea at home using it, so this was great!
One sign that a cleanse is working for you is the condition of your mental health. Many people experience stronger than normal emotions during a cleanse. This can mean feeling happy, sad, depressed, anxious, confused, etc. For me it was a feeling of being afraid of the future, not wanting to be here, not wanting to practice, and not knowing what to do. Even though I knew this was because of the cleanse it doesn’t make things easier to handle sometimes. There were times, and sometimes even days where I just wanted to go home - hated being here, wanted to go back to Vegas, complained about everything, I was simply a reck! This is the main reason why I’m just now writing some of the blogs. The first part of the trip was very busy and didn’t have time and the middle of the trip I felt like throwing the computer in the ocean! Happy to report, feeling great now, my mind is once again organized, and better then before, computer is not in ocean, only me every morning after practice to body surf. (almost wrote the word smurf!)
Only one more thing to do to complete the Panchakarma for this trip. Can you possibly guess what that might be? On the last day, Dr. Unni actually had the nerve to present to me ANOTHER bottle of castor oil!!!! Just who in the hell does he think he is. Of course I smiled graciously and took if from him. This time I’m quite certain that he somehow managed to put at least 3 gallons into that little bottle. I did ask him if there was any other way we could do this as I’m not sure I can drink that stuff again. He told me there was, but that it was very unpleasant (did he just say unpleasant? I don’t think he’s ever taken this stuff before!), and it was considered hard on the body. Since my body took the cleanse very well this was the best way to go.
There was a lady sitting down next to us, and after his answer, she was nice enough to speak up and tell me that she felt the same way I did years ago and wanted to try the other way despite the challenges. She assured me without any doubt that the caster oil was indeed the way to go. I figured if a complete stranger was willing to tell me this, then okay, caster oil it is.
On my way home I was thinking about the different ways I could take the castor oil. I had realized that the “main event” happened about 6 hours after taking the stuff the first time, of course in the middle of the night. It was only about 2 in the afternoon, so I thought that if I took it now instead of at bed time, 6 or so hours from now the event would happen and I would be able to sleep all night. (This was what Daren had done.) I could still be active in the late afternoon and closer to evening I would park myself on the bed and watch a movie until it was time. (This sounds like I’m getting ready to give birth or something.)
While I’m sitting in the hotel room, thinking about drinking warm milk and castor oil again, I became nauseous. At that point in time I realized there was no way I was going to be able to drink the toxic mix again. I keep thinking that this was the last time, and it would do me good, and I’ve spent all this money so I should make sure I get the most out of it, but I resolved it wasn’t going to happen. Sitting on the night stand was a bottle of water that was about 1/4 full. (Not 3/4 empty!) I’m not sure why I thought this, but since the oil has no smell maybe water would be the better choice over milk. Without much more thought, I poured the bottle of oil into the water bottle. I wasn’t drinking it with milk, so if I can’t drink it with water then I wasn’t drinking it, and would just through it away anyway.
As I was shaking the water and oil together in the bottle, I decided that I would start drinking it, and see how far I could go before the awful taste hit my mouth and I needed to stop! I didn’t even give myself a chance to second guess what I was doing, I just did it. I’m happy to report that I was able to drink the whole thing. (The 1/4 amount of water in the bottle, and all 6 gallons of oil!) The after taste was not however pretty at all, and once again made me nauseous, so I simply brushed my teeth! Done. Easy!
I’m happy to report that the rest of the day actually went as planned with one minor drawback. I was slightly nauseous all day long. Daren had reported this as well when he did it. The next day for breakfast and lunch I had that incredible warm salty rice soup, but instead of those scrumptious boiled veggies for dinner I had a warm lentil soup that was very tasty and I felt great after.
There is one more thing I would like to mention, and I have intentionally left this out until the end. After knowing this, it might be fun to go back and re-read all 4 entries having this piece of information. All three hours of treatment, everyday, was done completely naked!
Namaste!

Coconut Harvest

2010-01-19T04:00:00.000-08:00

One morning while we were at breakfast, the locals began to harvest the coconut trees in the area. There’s a couple of things I should tell you about Kovalam; first, I would say that 99% of the trees here are coconut. The other 1% are Banana, and they are really not a tree, but thats another story. The other item for discussion is that most buildings with the exception of hotel rooms are all open air spaces. The roofs in the area, with the exception of one hotel (see entry about hotel), are very well built and can withstand both rain and wind for the rainy season. However, most places don’t have four walls. The restaurants will usually have four walls for the kitchen area, but not where the guests sit. Most of the restaurants have ledges that go up between 36 and 48 inches, but that is all. No windows, no doors, nothing (I will be writing soon about what to expect when you visit places like this and the things that can happen). Imagine a pool side bar at one of the large hotels in Las Vegas, open air, no doors, etc. That is what Kovalam is like all over the place. There is really no such thing as locking up. There is nothing to lock up!
So, we are sitting at a place called “The Lonely Planet”, having our breakfast when a few guys come around and begin to harvest the coconuts in the area. The first guy finds the next tree they are going to harvest and walks over to it. Using a small rope of some kind, he tosses the rope around the tree and himself making a loop and begins to climb the tree. He pulls on the rope which keeps him from falling down. Thats it! Nothing else to assist in climbing this tree which can be up to 50-100 feet high. By the way, he is also barefoot and wielding a machete. He “scurries” up the tree, as there really isn’t another way to put it, takes the machete out of his belt and begins hacking at the tree.
Coconuts grow in bundles, and on a good tree there could be 30 coconuts on one bundle, and three or four bundles on the tree at any one time. There is no harvest season, like we have for apples or veggies, as the growing season is year round, so the coconuts grow year round. This means that he doesn’t cut everything off of the tree. One bundle might be ready to go and the other ones are still growing.
When he cuts the bundle from the tree, down the coconuts come. (Einstein proved this would happen but the Indians have known all along!) They don’t place anything down to catch them or to protect anything, they simple let them fall, then go and pick them up. Sometimes the coconuts break away from the bundle and go rolling around. If they fall onto the roofs of homes or restaurants before hitting the ground, the noise can be scary if you don’t know what’s happening.
After the first guy comes down from the tree and looks for the next one, the other guy has a huge burlap sack and he collects the coconuts in the sack and takes them somewhere. I didn’t see where he was taking them, but I know that not only restaurants but many vendors buy them. Here in India, if you want some coconut water, unlike in the states where you need to head to the nearest Whole Foods, a local shop will just pick up a coconut from their little pile, whip out a machete, chop off the top and stick a straw in it for you to drink. (I’m really not kidding here). Then you hand them back the coconut, they cut it in half, and somehow make a small scoop out of some of the husk and hand you back the coconut so you can then eat the white fleshy part. If it wasn’t for the straw it would be completely 100% Bio-Friendly. And they only give Westerners straws. An Indian will just drink the water from the coconut with no straw.
This was actually something I wasn’t going to write about. I was just sitting there eating and watching not only the guys doing the harvest, but the other westerners watching the harvest. Then a thought hit me and I started to laugh out loud for I couldn’t help myself. I am now going to re-write this entry, only explain it from the perspective of being in the United States.
Its now time to harvest some coconuts out of some of the trees in town. We need to imagine that we are taking the coconuts out of trees that are growing throughout a small town as opposed to say a plantation since that’s what was going on in Kovalam.
What would be the first step in doing a coconut harvest? We need to visit City Hall to get a permit to harvest the coconuts. This of course takes, two visits, five forms, and a small fee to accomplish. Great! The city has approved the harvest of the coconuts within town.
We next put an add in the local paper to find two guys that are willing to help out with this harvest. Guys who are not afraid of heights or hard work. We need two people who are strong, but able to work inside trees, so they must also be flexible. Three days go by, and we find two men that should work out for us.
Problem. At least one of these guys is going to need to use a machete. This of course requires another trip to City Hall to get the permit to carry such an object. Yes, the customary two visits, five forms, and a small fee where required. Now we can actually have the machete with us, but the guy using it needs to have a background check done. This is actually three visits, seven forms, a test for mental stability, and a small fee.
The next thing we need is one of those “Cherry Pickers”. OSHA doesn’t allow us the have the guy just climb up into the tree. He needs to be able to use the cherry picker, plus wear a bright orange vest and a construction hat for safety. Of course to use one of those pieces of equipment out in public, we are going to need a permit. Yep, you guessed it, City Hall, 2 visits, 3 forms and a small fee.
Perfect! We have that accomplished. Now, the challenging part is that the person carrying the machete must stay at least 1000 feet from any school, church, shopping mall, convenience store, home, police station, fire department, mosque, temple, city park, hospital, grocery store, hotel, daycare, restaurant, college, zoo, amusement park, racetrack or bar. We have found four trees in town that do not have these limitations.
The permit states that we must zone off the area around the tree that we are harvesting with a circle of 30 feet in diameter. This is just in case a coconut falls astray. Okay, all we need to do is put up some hazard tape, warning people of what we are doing. Thats not to difficult, except that two of the trees are very close to a street, which we will need to block off. Can you guess what’s going to happen? City hall here we come. This time we already have the forms filled out and the check ready so it takes only one visit. However, now we must rent all the road signs that warn motorists of the hazard ahead.
Last but not least, we need to have proof of insurance for the two workers, the machete, the cherry picker, the road signs (in case they get damaged), the road in case a coconut damages it, and for the first insurance company in case they go bankrupt! When all is said and done, we have spent $9827.53, and the 192 coconuts we collected brought in $134.98. God Bless America!

Berlin III - Final Berlin Entry

2010-01-16T02:07:00.001-08:00

Transportation in Berlin, and I’m sure most of Europe, is very different than in the U.S. Many people have cars, and the roads are very busy, but not like it is in large U.S. cities. Its not a habit for the people of Germany to get in their car to run to 7-11 for a large Coke, or even to make a run to the grocery store like we do. They Walk! I think I’m going to repeat that sentence; They Walk!
I will admit that geographically they life is different with respect to distance, but I’m happy to see they haven’t adopted our lifestyle. They can walk to stores because they are close by and easy to get to. Here they have lots of small markets and such, neighborhood stores that you visit for you fresh groceries. In the US we have Super Centers, stores the size of some small towns sitting in a parking lot that is 15 acres in size as well. It feels like if you were to walk from the street, into a grocery store, to the back of the store where the dairy case is, for a gallon of milk, and walked back to the street, that distance would be a mile!!! Germans don’t have stores that size, and parking, if for some reason you need it, is on the street in front of the store.
Berlin has created an amazing system for people that ride bikes. On all major streets, and on many smaller back streets they have marked lanes for bikes. This is not that extra ordinary, except that they treat them as we would a lane in the street. Depending on the size of the street, sometimes the lane is in the street with the cars and other times the lane might be part of the sidewalk, but its there. You learn real fast when you are on a side walk to look for the bike path and make sure you are not walking down the middle of it. They are not rude, but they will ring their bell if you are in their way.
What I found most fascinating about this, is that at certain intersections that we would walk through there were two sets of lights. The large set, over the street was for cars just like we would have in the states, and the second set, was smaller and placed on the support poles. These were used for the bikes. They would give bikes the right of way to cross, turn, etc, just like cars. It was simply amazing! Of course they would also have the walk/don’t walk signals for pedestrians as well.
The other form of transportation they used mostly, at least in the city was the train/bus. The public transportation system for Berlin would put any system in the U.S. to complete shame. They used 4 forms for public transport, the S system, which was the subway; the U, which was the above ground, usually elevated; trams, which were similar to light rail that ran down the middle of streets, and the buses. Purchasing one ticket; one-way, round-trip, or all-day, didn’t matter, included all modes of transport.
In the U.S. most public transportation systems are based on getting people to a downtown area and back into the suburbs, to their homes and cars. Berlin’s system was based more on a wheel and spoke design and there were actually and inner and outer wheel. What would be the difference? If you lived outside the downtown area and you wanted to go somewhere that was also outside the downtown area, in the states you would need to travel downtown, change trains and head back out to your destinations. Berlin; you could get virtually anywhere from anywhere, without the need to go “downtown”. It only took us about one day to figure out how to use the system, and from there the city became our playground. The only taxi we ever took was to and from the airport because they don’t have a train to the current international airport. They are building a new airport, more modern, and the train system is ready to go for that one when it opens in about a year.
One of the main stations in the City of Berlin is right near the government buildings and servers all of not only Berlin, but Germany and Europe as well. It is a recently built structure so very modern and well organized. One of the great things about it, is for its size, it’s not overwhelming like many similar places are. The building has a large square at the center and two tunnel-like extensions on either side. The entire outside structure is made of glass. Coming and going from both ends of the tunnel-like extensions are elevated tracks, on bridges that are very modern in design and made of concrete. Its a very clean, attractive look that doesn’t create a feeling of massive proportions. I think because the glass is in an arch shape and it reflects the sky at different angles it really makes the building look small.
You walk in at ground level, the main area is large and open. Plenty of room for large numbers of people to walk around in, and the glass helps with the open air feeling. The main level and one level up from there is full of shops, ticket agents, restaurants, and lounges. The best way to describe this would to simply think of an enclosed mall. There were clothing stores, a Virgin Records Store, places to get food, and trinkets, restrooms, etc. They also had of course ticket offices and lounges like airports have where if you have a layover you can go there sit, relax, have some coffee, read the paper, and some of them even had food service. You could also go to one of the many restaurants they had as well. During our entire stay in Berlin, we realized that many of the larger train stations were set up this way, almost like malls, but more for basic things such as groceries, dry cleaning. You drop your cleaning off on the way to work at the station, and pick up your veggies on your way home from work! Brilliant!
On the level below the main level was 8 tracks. They had both stairs and escalators heading down between each pair with signs that displayed to perfection the time the next train was arriving and its destination. I noticed at least 4 different types of trains that came into the station on these tracks, one being ICE, Inter-City Express, which is Germany’s “Bullet” train. Out in the country it runs at about 154 mph. On the fourth level of the station is where the four sets of tracks are you could see coming into the station from the bridges. These tracks also served several different types of trains not only for Berlin, but out lying areas.
It was so amazing just to watch the people coming and going. Some trains were full, other trains were not, but it was mid-day and the number of trains was amazing. I would guess that the station sees at least 500 trains per day. This number does include the subways, etc, but still, what an amazing place.
When we made the reservations to go to Berlin, we did it more to see a friend, than because Berlin was on our top ten list of cities to see. After the tickets were purchased we realized that we would be there in December!!!! We leave Chicago to southern India for warmth and sunshine - not snow and cold. I plan to head back to Berlin and spend more time there as a week just wasn’t enough, but if you ever think about going, December is a great month to go. Yes its cold, and I don’t think I would go in January or February, but, Germans LOVE Christmas and so it goes the city was dressed and ready for the holidays.
All over the city they put up little Christmas villages. The best was to describe them would be to imagine a street fair or an arts festival. Only about 10 times better. Each merchant has their own little space, like a tent, but most of the villages were made of wood and decorated to look like a small bavarian town. They would hang the green garland all around the little shop and put lights up. They would put up lots of trees with lights in them all over the place and local restaurants would come in and set up temp places to serve the thousands that would come to shop, converse with friends and truly enjoy the holidays (something I think Americans have forgotten how to do).
Some of the villages would charge a Euro to get in, and the one we paid said that all money collected when to a charity, others had small stages for entertainment. The first one we came across had an ice skating pond, and we thought it was luck that we found this little fair here in Berlin, but soon realized they were everywhere!
In the old East Berlin, one of the main streets is called friedrichstrasse, I would call it Fredrick Street for ease of understanding as I have a hard time pronouncing German. This street could very easily be called the Fifth Ave of Berlin. For several blocks on both sides of the street, store after store, several enclosed malls, hotels and banks. All places were decked out and ready for Christmas and of course there were many of the familiar places we know of such as Gap, Victoria’s Secret, etc. Although we had no interest in shopping, it was nice to walk down that street and watch the people coming and going, looking in the windows, hearing the cheer in the air as friends would run into each other while shopping. This I enjoyed, as I don’t feel that Americans have this experience anymore. They are all in the enclosed malls mad at the world because this store was out of that item in this color and the last 12 credit cards they tried were declined! (So glad I’m out of retail!)
Speaking of American, the one thing that I was very surprised to see in Berlin was the number of Starbucks. Yes, I can see all of you rolling your eyes going of course they have Starbucks. I was sure we would see several, as we saw several McDonald’s and the likes, but the number of Starbucks was incredible. Based on the number of locations, you might get confused and think you are in Seattle! I am happy to report however, that I held to my rule that when in a foreign city, I don’t do things I can do at home and I only went to Starbucks once, and I’ll just add that it was Daren’s fault! :)
(We were standing in a long line, outside, and Starbucks was the closest place to get hot coffee!).
One quick thing about Germans and their beer. The beer there is amazing and you can get so many kinds that you can easily confuse yourself. So, all I’m going to say is that by me going the Germany and being able to order in a regular restaurant MANY different kinds of fruit flavored beer, including my two favorites which was Grapefruit and Banana, you can no longer make fun of me and my pumpkin beer as the Germans think that is completely normal!
The last part I would like to share with you about our visit to Berlin was a spa we went to several times. It was very walking distance from the hotel so we didn’t even need to take a train there. It was called the Liquid Dome, their website is aslkdghjoih and they have an English page. It was very modern in appearance. Exposed cement and wood were the main construction materials used for the decor as well. You would think that this kind of look for a spa would be cold and uninviting, but they pulled it off very well.
After check in you went to the locker rooms where you would store your clothes and personal belonging. They rented towels, shoes and robes if you wanted them. You could also bring your own. Once in the spa, there was a salt sauna, which is similar to a sauna except the temp is not as hot, and the humidity is about 60%. There is also a wall of salt bricks that are reported to balance the positive and negative ions in a room. The salt bricks were back lit, and as the only light, made the room feel very comforting. Canyon Ranch in Vegas also has one of these rooms.
They had two other standard saunas. One was very large and could fit probably 20 people. Both times we were there, there were groups using this room. I’m thinking some kind of workshop or something that includes a detox in the sauna. The other sauna was smaller but over looked the outside hot tub. The wall that everyone faced while in the sauna was floor to ceiling glass.
There was the standard steam room which was made of black tile and had an arched ceiling. They had three small rooms for massage therapy which we did take advantage of both times and there was also a very large bar. This was were you could get water, an assortment of drinks, including beer, and simple food dishes.
They had two hot tubs, but not like the ones in the states. There were no bubbles, it was simply nice warm water. You could feel a current, so the water was circulating, but no jets. The one was outside, which we enjoyed because of the cold weather. One night it was raining/snowing and we were out in the hot tub! The other one was indoors and tucked kind of away from everything. The walls went straight up from the water so there was no ledge to speak of. It was like walking into a room, down some steps into the water. It was lit from lights on the floor in the shade of green with blue tiles on the wall and ceiling. They also had a cold plunge, but can say what that was like, and an area with warm baths for your legs and feet.
The last room was their signature item. It was a room, made out of the cement, but in the shape of a dome. In the middle was a heated pool (not quite hot tub hot, more like bathtub hot), round in shape and about 4 feet deep. They had lights aimed just right that when they hit the water they would reflect up onto the ceiling and create wave looking designs. (Those of you at Canyon Ranch, same thing as the wave room but instead of chairs to sit in, you are in the water) They had water noodles for everyone so you could easily float on your back and watch the light show above. The other treat in store was they also had underwater speakers so when you put your head down in the water to look up you could hear music!
This was a great place, we did go twice and I would almost make a trip to Berlin just to visit the spa again. The last thing I want to share is; We are in Germany and when in Germany do as the Germans do...
In the wave pool a swim suit was required, however, in most of the other areas, expect the lounge/bar, clothing was not allowed. Even the locker rooms and showers were co-ed.

Berlin III - Final Berlin Entry

2010-01-16T02:07:00.000-08:00

Hindu Wedding-Part One

2010-01-13T08:39:00.000-08:00

Daren’s normal schedule is to head right down here to Kovalam, practice yoga with Lino for 6 weeks or so, then as it begins to get really hot and humid here, head up to Mysore, which is higher in elevation and about 600 miles north of Kovalam, so much cooler with little humidity. This year however, one of his good friends, Deepak, was getting married. Deepak even worked out his wedding, knowing that Daren comes every year, so that hopefully Daren and I could make it. Two years ago when I was here, Deepak showed me all over Mysore while Daren did some classes and worked from the hotel room. He took me to one of the main markets, and we walked all over in there, telling me why they have certain things and showing me how they do other things. I really enjoyed the time as I got to see India from a native perspective, as opposed to a simple tourist.
There are four main friends, friends that were together 12 years ago when Daren made his first trip to India, and are still the best of friends now. Ajay now is a yoga teacher and has his own shala (studio). sthalam8.com is the website for Ajay’s Shala. He is doing very well for himself, as his classes are full and he has even begun a teacher training program. Ajay teaches Astanga yoga which has it origins in Mysore. Deepak runs the restaurant that is located at Ajay’s shala. This arrangement has been going on for almost two years now and its working wonderfully. Rakesh is in school. and Umesh is a banker (thats the best way to describe what he does).
Because Deepak was very busy with the wedding, we spent most of our time with Ajay and Rakesh. They are also the ones that took care of us at the wedding. That statement might sound a little odd, but keep reading and you will understand.
I’m sorry to say, I really still don’t understand everything that went on at the wedding, and honestly, I don’t think anyone did except the priest - Hindu priest of course. I can say that with complete confidence since several days before the wedding I asked Deepak about what we should except, and even he didn’t know!!! For the most part, a Hindu wedding will last 2-4 days depending on a number of factors, one of which I was able to figure out; the more days that are in the wedding means the higher the caste you are in. I was actually told this, plus, higher caste people can afford longer weddings, so they naturally last longer. What I don’t understand is what could possibly take longer to do. Can you see this happening in one of our weddings; “Thank you for coming everyone. Today we are going to hear about the bride, tomorrow the groom, day three, exchange vows, and on day four they will kiss.!” Talk about a wedding. Plus, I can see this going over in the US. Parents would spend their entire life savings just to say that their daughter’s wedding lasted 67 days!!!!! Of course they spend their life savings anyway, just to out do the Jones’, but thats another story all together.
The wedding took place outside of Mysore in a village that neither one of us can remember the name. It was is a very small village about a 45 minute drive from Mysore. The people of this village consider Mysore to be a big city. (For my friends in Vegas, Mysore is about the size of boulder, and friends from Utah, make that Beaver!!! So think about how small this village is, if one of these places was considered a city?)
It seemed like the entire village was there for the wedding, and even if everyone from the village was not there, I can assure you that the entire village knew about the wedding.
This was an arranged marriage, the bride was a friend of the families, and all I can really tell you is that her and Deepak had talked many times on the phone together, but had only seen each other twice before the wedding. After talking to Deepak, he told me that he had turned down several other girls, some of which would have put him into family money, but even though he new the marriage was going to be arranged, he wanted to make sure that he had feelings, or thought he could love this person, not just because the family wanted him to get married. I told him that was a very honorable thing to do.
We arrived the evening of the first day of the wedding. The main reason was that we were traveling with Ajay and Rakesh, and Ajay had to teach classes during the first day of the wedding so we left Mysore at about 5:30 that evening. The car ride for me was as usual, very stressful, and I hated it, but it didn’t last long, thank god!
We pull up to the reception center (thats what I’ll call it, and will explain more about it later), and get out of the car. Getting out of that car was the biggest mistake we ever made during this entire trip. I say that with good spirit however. You would have thought, had this been a Christian wedding, that the Pope just showed up. This is a small village, and white man does not come through often, or at least doesn’t stop here! We became the ABSOLUTE focus of attention for at least the next hour! We found out later that by just having us there, two Americans, invited by Deepak, was a very high honor for both families to have.
For the next hour I think I shook ten thousand hands and said my name 150,000 times. Of course at the same time next to me, Daren is doing the same thing. Everyone wanted to know where we were from and what we thought of their village. (Here in India, you must tell people you are from America, because most don’t understand the difference between American and The United States. Many of the people here know of the city Chicago however, because of President Obama). People, I can’t see the village for the villagers! If you ever want to feel like a movie star, just find yourself in a small village in India; and if you have blonde hair and blue eyes... we would never see you again! We had experienced things like this the last time we were here in India, but on a much smaller scale. This time we were invited guests of the groom, and everyone was going to make sure that they got to shake our hands.
Because of culture differences, we spent about 45 minutes only talking to the men that were at the wedding, and then slowly some of the women were bold enough to come up and say Hi. We were escorted to the family members of both the groom and bride, and as per custom, we could and did shake hands with all the men, but with the women, especially the older ones, we could only smile, nod our heads and say hello.
We spent about 2 hours total there that evening. We did get to see Deepak for a few minutes, and we did meet the bride for the first time. She does not speak English except for Hello and a few other small words. She was even hesitant to shake our hands, but Deepak told her in our culture that was considered normal so she did.
I have no idea what went on during the day, the first day of the wedding. I didn’t even think to ask I was so overwhelmed by everything that was going on. There was a hotel located next to the center which most of the family was staying at. Technically they didn’t have a room for us, but many of the family members were willing to condense so that we could have a room. There were as many as 8 people in a room already!!!!
Ajay felt it would be better if they took us somewhere, away from the wedding party, otherwise they didn’t think we would get any sleep. The party goes on all night, and being American, we would not have been left alone. There is a Buddhist Monastery, Bylakuppa, about 20 kilometers way that had places to stay for guests, so off we went to the monastery.
It was just Daren, I and the driver of the car that went to the monastery. Ajay and the gang stayed at the wedding to party. We get to a hotel that is right across the street, and Daren goes in to see if they have a room. We are in luck, they do. Daren gets the room, comes back out to get me and our bag. (We left most of our stuff in Mysore as we were only going to be gone for one night.) There were several shops and a restaurant on the main floor with rooms on the two floors above that. We made it just in time to eat something as they were getting ready to close up shop for the night. Daren took our backpacks up to the room while I ordered for us since they wanted to close the kitchen down. In the states that means clean up for the night, but not really sure what that means here in India?
When you are in places like this in India, you must be very careful about the food you chose to eat. Its not quite like the touristy places that understand the western needs of being clean. Basically you can only order things that have been cooked to death, and even then you must take your chances that the plates and utensils (if they give you some) are clean. We did order some Dal (lentils) and Chapati (basically a tortilla), and bottled water. It tasted good, we ate, and then went to the room.
As we approached the room Daren kept smiling at me and I should have know that something wasn’t good, but, like a dumb ass, I just kept smiling back. I hadn’t seen the room yet. The room was small and very basic, that I understood, and he told me there was no not water. I laughed and said thats why god invented deodorant. I didn’t need to take a shower in the morning, and no offense to anyone, but could guarantee I would be cleaner than many at the wedding.
I can’t say that the room was dirty per say. Its just that it was an old building, and you could tell that no one had stayed in the room for a while. There was a cob web between the pillow and the sheets! As Daren and I looked around the room a little more, we found a few more things that were hard to swallow, but if we slept in our clothes, using our backpacks as our pillows, not turn on the tap water, and keep one light on, we should make it out of here alive in the morning.
At this point, Daren told me he would be right back and left the room. I thought maybe he was going to see if they had a more recently cleaned room. I re-inspected the room again, took a picture and laughed, thinking, well I’m in India. Daren soon came back and had gone and talked to the driver. The driver was able to find out that the monastery itself had a place that visitors could stay, and found out where it was. Daren said we should go and try that place out. At this point in time I was up to sleeping in the car so I didn’t mind. The man was not at the front desk when we left, and I asked Daren if he was going to try and get his money back. He just shrugged his shoulders and said “It was $5, he can have it!”
They did have a room for us at the monastery. It’s layout was exactly the same as the other room, but his one was clean. This is a monastery, and not one that is used to getting western tourists. The mattress, whatever it was made of was soft, but we shared one blanket. There was no hot water, but already went down that road tonight. There was also no soap, towels of any kind, or toilet paper! The walls were bare, but we did have curtains on the window. Thats about all I can say about the place. It was clean, and we could spend the night relaxed, knowing that we would wake up alive in the morning and not be somethings meal for the evening...and so we did.
I’m going to divide up the next several entries. One will be about the monastery, titled such, then I will continue with the wedding.

Weekend Hotel

2010-01-09T23:42:00.001-08:00

During our stay, the hotel that we checked into had told us that during the New Years weekend, they had a tour coming through and that we would need to change hotels for several days. Keep in mind that the hotels here are very small. Only a hand full have more than 20 rooms. The one we are staying at has about 18. Its not like Las Vegas where 3000 is considered the average! We didn’t mind this as the location for this hotel is very central to everything we do, and for several days it wouldn’t be to hard.
Of course that last statement all depends on what you consider hard. The hotel we started in, The Hawha, is a very nice hotel, and for Kovalam one of the better ones. It has marble floors, air conditioning, hot water in the shower (this is not as common as you might think), a TV (we never used) and we also had a small fridge. In certain parts of India this would be considered a 5 star hotel. They even had a security guard up front to keep the peddlers and non guests from coming into the hotel. Without thinking, you get used to some of these, what would you call them; luxuries....?
We Are In India people...! The hotel that we found to spend the four nights over the New Year’s weekend now has a special place in our hearts. A dark place, but a place none the less.
From the outside it looks very nice. Bright colors of paint, the main one being Orange! How can a place painted orange be that bad? I will say, on their behalf, that for the most part it was a clean room. We were told that just over this last rainy season they had up graded the hotel and fixed it up really nice. If this had been last year, we would not have even considered it a place to stay. Fresh paint does not make a place nice!!!
They were asking for more than twice what the other hotel was asking, and they claimed that it was because they have upgraded, and now consider themselves one of the better hotels in Kovalam. They also wanted for us to pay the entire stay up front which we told them no, we would pay half and go from there. The only thing we wanted more than any other was to have internet in the room. We would have preferred Wifi, but just having a cable in the room would be enough. That was part of the deal when we checked in; Internet in the room.
So we check in and got settled for the evening. We had spent most of the day just looking at other hotels to make sure there wasn’t a better one, but because of the holiday we were kind of stuck. The hotel sat behind some larger buildings that faced the beach, and was kind of tucked away, hidden behind most everything else, including a breeze! Its late in the evening and we are getting ready for bed. At this point in time we don’t have internet in the room yet, but the manager said we would later in the evening (how much later, its 9 p.m.). Laying on the bed I realized that I’m not going to be able to sleep because of the heat and humidity.
Most of the hotels here in Kovalam do something that is very clever. All the A/C units are remote controlled, you cannot control the units without the remote. Because electricity in Kerela (the state Kovalam is in), is very expensive they charge you more for A/C. In other words if you want to use the A/C you go to the front desk, pay more money and they hand you the remote. So not only are we paying twice as much as we were (for the internet that we don’t have), but we needed to fork over 250 Rs ($5) for the A/C remote. Okay, so I can sleep tonight.
Something else that I thought was interesting. This is also something that is not unusual here in India. The locks on these doors were basically the same kind of locking mechanism you would find on a bathroom stall. There was one on the outside for when you left the room, and one on the inside for when you were in the room. The one on the outside was designed so you would put a pad or key lock on it, so the room was secure when you left. My thought however is that; if someone wanted to, all they would need to do is slide that bolt over into the latch from the outside while you were inside, and there was no way of getting out! Most of the windows here have monkey/people bars on them. Years ago, they placed the bars on the windows to keep monkeys from coming into your room, but over time the monkeys are no longer in these parts, but they continue to place the bars on the windows for your protection and for the protection of your belongings. So, bolt moved over, no way out! Fire in the building.... oh well. Indians don’t think things through the way we do in the west.
Morning comes and we go to practice and then breakfast as usual. Once back at the hotel, Daren goes to take a shower. No hot water! Actually we did have hot water; from the tap. The hot water was not plumbed to the shower head. So, in the room was a large and small bucket. You fill the large bucket from the tap with hot water and using the small bucket, you pour the hot water over you. I guess we didn’t think to ask if the hot water came from the shower or not. Our mistake... still no internet.
That afternoon I was sitting on the patio which was the entrance to our room. They had two chairs and a small table so you could sit and read, or whatever. I soon noticed there was a large number of ants in the area. This was not to alarming, but as I followed the trail of ants I looked over near the edge of the patio, as we were on the second floor, and I noticed part of a spine of a very large fish sitting there, covered with these ants. Now, this part of the patio was a dead end, and the hotel didn’t serve food of any kind, so I’m not sure not only how, but why, this piece of spine made it up to this area of the hotel. Not a huge deal, I just brushed it off the patio and within minutes the ants were gone. Problem solved....still no internet.
Night comes and its time to go go bed. The next day is Saturday and there is no practice on Saturdays, so we get to sleep in and have breakfast at our leisure. At about 1 in the morning it began to rain. The sound of the rain coming down woke both Daren and I up. It was coming down quite hard, so I went out on to the patio which was covered, and watched the rain for a little while. That rain storm would have shut Las Vegas down for days. The amount of water that fell from the sky in that short time was amazing. Of course, this is what it is like everyday during the rainy season so this was nothing to the locals. (Note: Last night, which is about a week after our stay, we had a real Tropical Thunder Storm which was completely amazing! The thunder lasted about 2 hours then it rained non-stop for 8. We had about a 4 hour break, and it is now raining again quite hard. I believe the term would be “cats and dogs!” It didn’t rain once last time I was here so this is very enjoyable to me, plus it keeps the temp nice and cool.)
Back into bed I go. Listening to the rain fall, drop...drop...drop. At this point in time, in bed, it seems like I can now feel the rain. The ceiling is leaking! I grumble a little, tell Daren and begin to laugh. We are in India! So we move the bed away from the leak and return to bed, by this time ready to sleep the rest of the night.
Drip...drip...drip. Again! Different place. Water falling on me. So this time we get up and Daren goes to get the manager. So he arrives and tells us this has never happened before. That was his first answer to the problem...it hasn’t happened before. I didn’t think that was a very good answer to this problem, but he sure did. This I also knew wasn’t exactly true, it just may be the first time they knew about it, as after closer inspection of the ceiling there were older water marks.
Shortly after, the managers helper has come up to check out the amazing ceiling that seems to be creating water, like the rain has nothing to do with it. Maybe they thought of turning this room into a temple and worshiping it, since water is falling from the ceiling? (That was mean, but it is the middle of the night and you are offering no solutions - and we have no internet!) After talking for some time in their local language, their solution is to move the bed. Now, we had already moved the bed into the middle of the room, so now the bed is moved into the other corner of the room. Because of the head board and two walls, we can only get into bed from one side! But hey, at least water is not dripping onto the bed.
Daren then asked if they had another room open in case another part of the ceiling decided to open up and cry for us. This also started a very long conversation between the two of them in the local language. I started to laugh at this because this was a simple yes or no question. This wasn’t something that needed to be debated. Was there or was there not a open room in the hotel? They were talking like we had just asked them to bring some carpenters in and fix the ceiling right now in the middle of the night during the rain storm and while they are at it, fix the plumbing so we could have hot water in the shower, and install internet.
So, after breakfast the next morning Daren was out looking for a new place to stay. It didn’t take long and we were packing our bags. He had a very heated discussion with not only the manager, but was lucky enough to have his uncle, the owner, there as well. Daren had been very smart on the first day and had written into the hotel contract that the price we paid included the internet.
We had paid in advance for three nights, and since we were only staying two was asking for the money back, and since they couldn’t deliver on the internet wanted some of the money back for the two nights that we were there without that service. In the end, we did get some of the money back, which I didn’t think would happen, and the owner called the manager, which was his nephew, “a donkey!” I’m not sure what calling someone a donkey means. Did he mean Jackass? I don’t think I want to know. In front of Daren the uncle asked him why he said we could have internet when he know that wasn’t possible. His response was to fill up the rooms!
Needless to say, the hotel we are currently in is a five star hotel for Kovalam and we are very happy. We have showered in hot water, no leaks, or even water marks on the ceiling, its a new hotel, and they have internet in the restaurant right down stairs!
After about a week in the other hotel, we are back to the original one, and while we were gone they had installed Wifi!!! Now, its not perfect, and does go in and out, but... we have internet!

Berlin II

2010-01-09T03:19:00.000-08:00

As we continue the historic tour of Berlin, our next stop on the tour is the historic Checkpoint Charlie. This was the gate post between the American sector of West Berlin and East Berlin. Our hotel was a very short walking distance from Checkpoint Charlie. When the wall came down so did the actual checkpoint office. They have now recreated it in a replica hut and soldier’s post. Signs stating that you were “now leaving the American Sector”, as a hard reminder to what was going on at that time, have been replaced for historical value. Of course under normal circumstances, the people of West Berlin were allowed to cross over to East Berlin and return. It wasn’t so easy for the people of East Berlin.
This part of Berlin is full of indoor museums plus out door displays of the changes that took place over the years. One that I enjoyed was just across from Checkpoint Charlie, which had pictures of that area during different times during the cold war. It started with a picture of just the street being blocked off with a gate, guards and sandbags. Then as the time line moves forward new pictures with the construction of the wall, and how the area developed with the wall. Then of course the pictures of when the wall came down and what the area looked like then, versus what it looks like now. They also had very good descriptions of what each picture was in several languages.
Moving down the main boulevard, Unter Den Linden, which was occupied by the East and very run down during the cold war, now is a nice big boulevard full of hotels, shops restaurants, embassies, etc. If you walked down this street with no knowledge of the dark past, you would never think, based on the way this street looked, that something so horrific could have happen here, and so recently. Passing through the Brandenburg Gate, this was the main street of Berlin, where in centuries past, nobles would have parades, and it was the center of commerce. On this boulevard you can find the Berlin State Library and the Humbolt University where Einstein taught.
At one point there is a large square full of cobble stone and nothing else. There are no chairs, flowers or plants of any kind, no monument in the middle of the square sticking up out of the cobble stone to mark some place in history... or is there? In the middle of the square, or platz (plaza in english) is a small plaque that states, in German; If you burn books today, you burn people tomorrow.” This is the site where on May 10, 1933, 20,000 books, important works from the likes of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and others were destroyed by fire. Under the orders of the Nazi Propaganda Minister, right-wing students and Storm Section officers publicly burned literary works considered Jewish, communist, or degenerate in a bid to “purify” Germany.
Next to this plaque is a window in the ground. When you look down you see a very large room, a library, nothing but shelves and all painted white. The shelves are empty, but it is said there is enough room on the empty shelves to house all the books that where burned by the Nazis.
The next stop on our tour was the Berliner Dome. This neo-Renaissance cathedral was built in 1895, and of course needed to be rebuilt after the fall of the Berlin wall. If was damaged during WWII and not maintained much during the cold war. Its center piece is a brass dome 70 meters high, standing out over most other buildings. Inside are intricate mosaics depicting Biblical scenes inlaid with over 500,000 tiles including some in gold. You can climb to the second level where they have a small museum about the history of the church, which was actually included by the designer during the original construction of the church.
You can then climb another 267 steps to the upper gallery which basically takes you to the base of the dome and outside. From here you can see all of Berlin, similar to the Reichstag’s dome, except you are on the outside. You are able to walk all the way around the dome so you truly can see all of Berlin.
Berlin has a few building codes that date back hundreds of years and are still followed. They have a few areas within the city where they allow tall buildings, usually office, but now some are even condos, but for the most part there is a limit to the height that a building can reach. I’m not sure what the exact height is, but it’s somewhere around 70 feet, or a 6 or 7 story building. The exceptions are government buildings and churches. So when you are up high, or on a roof top; you see the tops of all the buildings, but above all of them are the steeples and towers of the churches. Its quite a beautiful visual.
The last place you visit on this tour is the underground part of the church, and what do you think they placed down there, in the basement of a church? After coming down stairs, and stairs and then a few more stairs we walked into this very large room, supported with while columns and arches. At the entrance to this large room, which is for the most part, the entire foot print of the church above, there is a sign which asks for your consideration in being silent as this is an eternal resting place for many people.
I’m sure the look on my face was priceless once I realized we were actually walking into the crypt of a church several centuries old. This room, like the rest of the church had been rebuilt, and most if not all tombs have been rebuilt as well. It almost looked like a showroom for tombs and caskets! The floor, walls and ceiling were made of white marble and all the tombs and caskets were arrange in a perfect manner with small rod-iron fences surrounding them. The lighting was crisp, but very dim, and you could have eaten off the floor the place was so clean.
We somehow managed to spend as much time in this one room as we did in the rest of the church combined.... not sure why? There were nobles, kings, queens, saints, and even children placed inside the crypt. Yes I stopped and looked at each and every one of the tombs. There were even fresh flowers on some of the tombs, not sure if that is surviving families, or the church doing that, but it did add a nice touch.
So the actual last place you visit when leaving the tour of the church is the gift shop! Very Disney. You think I’m kidding! And it was a large gift shop. Of course you want to buy all things associated with the church because you have just spend several hours there and it feels like home. I was a good boy and only bought a post card - of the crypt (of course), as my camera was not taking good pictures in the dim light! They had a beautiful “coffee table” style book exclusively on the crypt! Talk about tempted. If we were heading back to the states I think I would have bought it, but the thought of carrying that through India stopped me.
The last part of our historic tour took us to the East Side Gallery. This
“gallery” is the largest part of the Berlin Wall still standing. It’s about 4265 feet long (1300 meters). The entire Berlin Wall was 155 km long, about 96 miles. The Berlin Wall was not a very tall or forbidding looking wall. The catch was, which many people do not know, is that if you were lucky enough to get over the wall, heading into West Berlin, without being shot and killed, there was a second wall of the same size you needed to cross about 30 feet away. The area between the two walls was considered no mans land or the “Death Strip”, where East German Guards patrolled.
Using the Berlin Wall as the canvas, 106 politically charged works of art, painted by artists from 21 countries, were created in 1990. The works now serve as a memorial to German freedom. Its very easy to walk up to the wall from the train station, take a picture and say you have been there. We decided, despite the temperature being about 35, to walk the entire gallery. Near the other end there is a section that you can walk behind the main wall and see a very small portion of the other wall still standing. You get a glimpse of “the Death Strip”. It ended at another large train station anyway, so our need to walk back from where we started was not needed and took us to parts of the city we would not have otherwise visited.
In the next, and last entry of Berlin, I will share some of the modern activities we did during our stay, parts of the trip that didn’t include the dark past of the 20th century.

Mosquitoes

2010-01-07T00:52:00.000-08:00

This is a short entry, but I just wanted to talk about the Mosquitoes here in the area. I didn’t talk about them on my blog the last time I was here, at least not in depth, so this time I think I will share with you what it is like.
This part of India does not have any reported cases of Malaria and other diseases that we should worry about contracting from the mosquito so that is a good thing. This trip however, there seems to be an abundance of them. There are several possible reasons for this; First - I didn’t arrive until January last time which is one of the driest months here in Kovalam so there are fewer during that time. The other possible reason; Talking to some of the people, they say that this year the government didn’t spray for the mosquito like they have in the past. I’m not going to talk about weather that is good or bad to spray, and what they use, and what it does for the environment, but just to say that possibly in years past the government has sprayed and this year they did not. This is something that I have been unable to confirm, so I just leave it as a possibility...
Each part of the world has a claim to fame about the size of an insect or something of nature that the rest of the world thinks is amazing. Such as the size of cockroaches in the dessert are far bigger than the ones say east of the Rocky Mountains. As one of my co-workers said about seeing one; after realizing she was looking at an insect and not a small animal, she gasped and screamed. The cockroach looked at her, stood up and screamed as well. Both completely terrified of each other!
Growing up in Southern Utah we had mosquitoes, not a huge problem, but at night when it was cool, they would come out. If you were lucky you would see one every now and then, and sometimes you were lucky enough to actually see it land on you and “WHAM”, you got it!!!
If the mosquitoes here actually existed in the US, they would need clearance from Air Traffic Control to fly around. With the exception that they fly in a different manner, you can sometimes confuse them with the common house fly. They don’t make that really high pitched buzz sound that I know, but something more along the lines of an Apache helicopter. Now keep in mind they are not all this big, there are baby ones out there, I’m just talking about the granddads, the ones you take cover from when you see them heading toward you, salivating, with that stare in their eye’s that say food!
Lucky for us, the days are usually to hot for them, so night is the only time you really need to take any action against them. That can be either a net over the bed, or bug spray and make sure you have at least a sheet over your body while you sleep. If for any reason, you slept with a foot or leg outside of the sheet, then the next morning you get to play the game of connect the dots, seeing how many places they got you during the night. My only reaction to them is the small read mark and that “itch” that usually goes away in about 12 hours. Daren on the other hand gets welts about the size of a 50 cent piece. There have been a few mornings I’m surprised he has been able to move based on the way his skin looks after several attacks. If anybody ever comes to India for a time, and during their stay they become ill and suffer from what would look like anemia, they shouldn’t worry. After several days of being away from here and their body has the chance to recover from the blood loss, they will feel as good as new. Some of these mosquitoes could put vampires to shame!
One morning during practice there was one lucky mosquito that I’m sure thought he had found the best buffet on earth. Of course he would have never had the chance to visit Las Vegas, now would he? We practice on the roof top of a hotel which is basically the 4th floor. The place we practice is covered with a roof and does have screens around it to keep many things out, such as birds and bugs. Because we are at least 40 feet from the ground mosquitoes are usually not a problem for us in the morning there during practice, but every once in a while one makes it up there. In the mornings, you have within 3 hours, about 150 people sweating and of all things holding still - perfect for the mosquito!
I’m not sure it if was because I was in the middle of my yoga practice and very aware of my body and what was going on or because of the sheer size of the mosquitoes, but while I was in trikonasana, breathing, feeling good about my bandas, I watched a mosquito land on my leg. Then believe this or not, I could actually FEEL the mosquito stick his needle in me! It felt just like when you go and have a shot from the doctor. Of course at that point in time I lost my yoga concentration and focused on one thing, and one thing only, that was to kill this insect that was sucking the life blood out of me. This is a very un-yoga thought, but it did happen. Its amazing how fast your mind can work when you stop and think about how fast things can happen and how much faster your mind can process information. During that split second that my hand was moving toward my leg at lightning speed with every intention to kill the vampire, my mind had that chance to contemplate what is going to happen once I actually hit this blood sucker. Based on its size, I had the image in my head that immediately after my hand make contact with him, that blood, mine and I’m sure several other students, would not only be smeared up my entire leg, as my hand was headed in an upward direction to make contact, but that it most likely would splash over onto the lady next to me! God only knows how much of her would be covered by the time this killing ended. So, keeping in mind, that during this whole thought process my hand was moving at full speed toward the object of my frustration, I decided to slow my hand down and not actually kill the insect, but scare it away from me. Not only was this solution going to be much cleaner for me and my neighbor, but it was also a better thought considering I was in the middle of my yoga practice.
I must admit that after this revelation I got a case of the giggles because of the visual I had. This lasted for most of the practice. After seeing the hole that it left in my leg, all I can say is I’m quite sure that Dracula would have been proud of his spawn!

Panchakarma III

2010-01-04T00:21:00.000-08:00

So day seven has come around. This is the time of the internal cleanse. The idea behind the massage, and the herbs and oil being put on the body in different fashions for the last week was to get the toxins out of the cells in the body and either bring them to the surface, the skin, or into the blood system where the body would then place them into the only other way out; the digestive tract.
For what ever reason, Daren was one day ahead of me with this part of the treatment, perhaps because of the extreme heat that I was building they needed to cool me off, or maybe he was more responsive to the treatments. I’m not sure why, but I got to see what he was going through before I did mine. Not sure if that was a good thing or not.
This cleanse is very simple. To drink a bottle of castor oil. Now depending on who you talk to, you will get different answers about how much castor oil you need to take. Daren says that the bottle of oil was 3 - 4 oz. I’m quite certain that my bottle of castor oil, which of course was the same size, was about a gallon and a half. The doctor said it was best to drink with a glass of warm milk. It goes down easier that way. Daren was smart and actually had chocolate milk! So off to one of the restaurants I go to get myself a glass of warm milk to mix with my gallon of caster oil.
Now, castor oil has no smell what so ever! You open the bottle, sniff? Sniff again? Nothing! This isn’t going to be bad at all. I begin to pour the bottle of oil into the milk and it’s GREEN!!! And not a pretty green either. Its the kind of green that people made carpet out of in the 70’s, the same stuff we had in our house. In this century it’s not a color of green you would ever want to use for any reason what so ever!
Hey, no smell, close your eyes and this will be a piece of cake. Oil and water do no mix, and I’m here to tell you that castor oil and milk don’t mix either. I have this small glass of warm milk with this green stuff floating on top, something that looks toxic and could only come out of Dr. Seuss - Green milk and ham! I stir the tonic up really fast to mix as much as possible, close my eyes and drink up.
OH!!! DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN, WHAT ON EARTH HAVE I EVER DONE TO DESERVE SOMETHING THAT COULD EVEN POSSIBLY TASTE THIS BAD!!! People, there are not words in any language, English or other, that can describe what that tasted like. It took me a moment, after I stopped snorting, and cleared the tears from my eyes, to realize that I had fallen out of the chair and was sitting on the floor in absolute shock over what had just transpired. I think I was still gasping for air when I got back up and sat back down for some composure. For those of you out there that know and understand what paregoric is, I would much rather drink an entire bottle of that stuff as to suffer the taste of castor oil and warm milk - EVER AGAIN!
Since Daren has taken this stuff before, many times, the lunatic, he wanted to take it during the day so that his sleep would not be interrupted. However, he was also nauseous all day after drinking it so I decided to do what the doc said and take it at bed time. I know why he was nauseous as I would be too after drinking that. There was a table with a couple of guys having dinner next to mine watching me drink the toxic mix, and one of them had also been through this before, so he smiled, and with great sympathy told me to go for it. We have since become very good friends on this trip.
After getting it all down, I must admit that I didn’t feel nauseous at all and was able to get back to the hotel room on my own two feet, and even at this point in time felt pretty good, and the warm milk helped me fall asleep that evening.
The next event happened about 6 hours later. I don’t really need to talk about this one much, other than to say I’m quite certain I lost about 10 pounds in a matter of, Oh I don’t know, maybe 30 seconds. I’m not going to mention that it was green either! :)
So, the next step was to go and have breakfast at the doc’s place. Needless to say, I did not do any practice that morning as I would have been afraid that there might be something still left over in me that decided to work its way out during a twist or a backbend. Of course after thinking about it a little more, there could not have possibly been anything left! Anyway, breakfast was very simple; a small amount of rice, and I mean small amount, in lightly salted warm water. At this point in time I realize that I’m actually paying someone to put me through this torture; I mean process. Breakfast wasn’t bad tasting actually, there just wasn’t much to eat. They want your system to slowly get used to food again. My body is in such shock at this moment I don’t think it really matters what I did with it.
I would then have my regular session at noon, massage, then something new, an oil bath, and the oil on the forehead. After that, I had the pleasure of eating that uh, incredible rice soup again. Then they gave me permission to go somewhere and eat some boiled vegetables. Boiled Vegetables?!?!? We are in India, full of incredible curries, sauces, spices, chai tea, and sweet rice desserts. I’m to eat plain boiled vegetables. Even Canyon Ranch would tell me to prepare them some other way! They can’t be raw for two reasons, one we are in India and things like this should be cooked, and two, raw veggies are hard for the body to digest when it has been put into shock. So off I go looking for boiled veggies. I must admit that those were the best boiled veggies I have ever had in my entire life!!!
Part four will be coming soon to talk about the last week of the treatment.

Panchakarma II

2009-12-26T03:31:00.001-08:00

Day three of the treatment changes the process just a little. Before I tell of the change, I must report about something that happened, and the results during my treatment. It was something that wasn’t expected, however ended in great joy!
The left side of my neck goes out every once in a while due to a car accident about 15 years ago. Normally, at home, I would go to a chiropractor and they take care of it, and off I go about my usual day. Well, my neck went out on me during the day after the second treatment. Now I’m not saying at all the treatment did it, I think it was playing in the ocean that somehow did it. Anyway, for the rest of the day and during practice the next morning I was unable to move my head very far to the right and left. I was concerned because during the massage you lay on the floor, not on a table, so your head is turned to one side or the other. It’s not rested in a nice little hole like back home.
When I got to the treatment I told my therapist that my neck was hurting and that it was hard for me to turn my head all the way. Now, I had faith in my therapist, but his English wasn’t to the point where we could have a conversation so I wasn’t sure how much of it he understood. He did acknowledge that he knew what I was saying and I felt that he did understand. Usually when you explain pain somewhere in your body, the corresponding result from the therapist is to apply easy, simple pressure in that area and to make sure that it feels comfortable to you and to not make it worse.
The the treatment begins as usual, sitting on the stool and he does this stuff to my head and neck. There was no change in the way he did this, except he may have stayed a little longer on my left side which was the sore side. Then he had me lay down on the mat as usual. I slowly put my head down on the mat and was able to get it turned all the way without any pain. He then placed a towel on my back, and I’m still not quite sure how he did it, but with just a simple press of his hands he was able to pop every vertebrae in my back! It was truly amazing how he did it. There was very little pressure but I think it was the movement of his hands in an upward motion that just put everything in its place.
So he begins the massage, and once again I’m expecting him to go lightly on me, or at least my neck area. He changed the massage around a little so I knew he did completely understand me and about my neck. However, going easy must not be in is ability. He had me clasping my hands and placing my arms underneath me, and at one point he was actually using my back as a treadmill! That is no joke. He was walking down my back, right foot then left foot, using his toes to press into my neck and all the way down my spine, walking just like you would on a treadmill.
There was many other things that he did during this treatment that was so different from the previous days, and it was in no way easier, in fact the pressure today was extreme. At one point of the massage I started to laugh to myself, because I pictured myself coming out of this massage with bruises and two black eyes!
However, I must admit that once the massage was over, the neck pain, gone! I could turn my head both directions and I felt as good as new! After this, the treatment changed as I have mentioned earlier.
The basting was over, and they started me off with the rub. After the massage I stood up and they wiped off all the excess oil from the massage, had me get up on the table and start the rub like they did in days past.
After the rub was complete, they once again had me off the table, one wiped me down, and the other therapist cleaned the table. Then it was back onto the table for what I’m calling the marinade.
This was made of warmed oil infused with herbs, and the smell was so good I think I could have eaten the oil as a soup. They began to pound and rub the herbs into my body. As with the rub, this was applied in a certain way and since there was a therapist on both sides of the table, they did the same thing on both sides at the same time, so it felt very uniform. I could have laid here for days letting them do this, it was truly amazing! The warm oil, the pounding and rubbing of the herbs; nice! When I talk about pounding, it wasn’t a hard pound but was much more than a tap. They would dunk what looked like cheese cloth wound up into a ball into the warm oil, then pound your body three or four times then rub that body several times, before dunking the cloth again.
After this was done, it was off the table and and wiped me down again and sent me on my way. This treatment was to be done until it was time for the purge, however after two days they needed to change my treatment. The idea, based on my dosha, was to create fire within my body which would bring all the toxins out into the blood, then into the digestive track and out of the body it would go.
By the time this treatment started, using the marinade, I was feeling very hot all the time and was attributing it to the weather and the humidity. After the first day of the marinade my arms broke out in a heat rash. Once again I thought it had to do with being in southern India, not the treatments. Daren made sure that I showed Dr. Unui on the next day.
When I sat down next to him, he looked at me and said “Do you feel okay?”, and my reply was; “feeling a little warm.” He smiled and said; “I can actually feel the heat coming off of you!” I showed him the rash and he said I was hot enough and that he was going to change the treatments to hold the fire, but not build anymore heat.
So that day, the massage first, and it didn’t change at all, but after that they put me into a steam box. This would be just like a steam room, but your head is not in the steam so you can breathe regular air, and your head is allowed to give off heat. The idea behind this is that you sweat out many of the toxins by doing this, and with external heat, your body doesn’t try to hold it in as much. I was only in the box about 15 minutes which I thought was perfect. After it was back to the table, only this time for something quite unique. Something that is show often in pictures of ayurvedic treatments.
They put me back onto the table face up, and placed a large bowl of warmed oil over my forehead. After placing a protective cloth over my eyes, they begin to pour this oil out of a small hole in the pot, over my forehead moving in smooth even strokes from ear to ear. It’s hard to explain this feeling, other that is was one of the most restful feelings I have ever had. It’s like your mind just simply shuts off and you wander out into space. Truly a heavenly experience! I will admit that I did fall asleep during this because it felt so good and was so relaxing.
The idea behind this treatment is the oil is to bring the fire up and out of the body without shutting down the detox process. Well, they were welcome to give me that treatment for the rest of my life and I would be happy.
The doctor had also give me some herbs (of course he had) to turn into a paste and shower with for the heat rash. The first day I’m sure I looked like a circus clown trying to make this paste in the shower and then applying it to my body, but after several days I had it down like a pro. Did it work? Of course it did. Based on what we are used to in the west we think their treatments to be very primitive, but let me tell you, they know what they are doing, and everything, and I mean everything, they use is 100% all natural, as they don’t know anything else. No patented drugs here, everything comes from nature.
I will admit I was still feeling very hot all the time, maybe something like a hot flash, but one that lasted for days! Plus I was very tired. We were doing the yoga practice as well, but wasn’t moving about much besides that. I went into the ocean once after my neck for about 20 minutes but after that I was tired and needed to rest. I also didn’t like going out into the sun! Me, of all people, didn’t want to be in the direct sun. When has that EVER happened before?
Next comes the purge, which I will talk about in the next update. I’m writing this part the day after the purge, and will write about the purge soon, but let me just say WOW! The difference is amazing.

Panchakarma

2009-12-21T04:21:00.001-08:00

Panchakarma is an ayurvedic way of cleansing the body, similar to a detox. There are many different ways to receive panchakarma as they base your treatment on the dosha that you are. There are three major doshas in ayruveda; Pitta, Vata and Kapha.
They have an entire system based on the doshas from what you should and shouldn’t eat, to how much exercise someone should have. It can get quite complicated, and people to go school to study this and earn degrees.
I am considered Vata, so I’m going to go through the details of what they did to me during the treatment. Remember that people go through different treatments. Daren is a Kapha and so talking to him about his treatments, they were sometimes similar and sometimes completely different.
Panchakarma can last from one week up to a total of 53 days or about 2 months. It depends on how much time (and money) you have. The perfect world would be 53 days.
Each and every day starts with a massage. Now how does that sound every time you go to the doctor - a massage right off the bat! This is not quite the massage you are thinking of like back in the states. This massage is a foot massage, meaning the therapist uses his/her feet to give you the massage.
You start by sitting down on a stool and they give you a scalp, neck and shoulder massage using their hands. They breath a certain way over your head and make some unusual sounds with their hands while they are doing this. This part of the treatment lasts about 5 min.
Then they have you lie down, face down, on a large pad on the floor. The pad is made of vinyl, similar to the material they use to cover the seats and benches in a weight room. Then they literally pour oil all over your body. I’m not quite sure what kind of oil, but I think it is sesame oil or a blend of oils. It’s very thick, slick, and has been infused with herbs. When I say pour, I mean pour. I’m guessing that each time, they use at least 2 quarts of oil on just me. Not sure if this is a base for everyone, or if they use different oils for the different doshas. It has almost a rusty color to it, and just a faint smell of herbs.
While we are on the subject of herbs. In the states the spas, and homeopathic treatments seem to always include some kind of floral oil such as lavender or orange blossom. Here in India they use lots of spices, but the same ones that you cook with, so the center smells more like a kitchen than what we would think of as a spa or healing center.
There are ropes hanging above you attached to the ceiling, and after pouring the oil over you (in large quantities), they hold on to the ropes and begin to give you a massage using the souls of their feet. They use very large strokes that will cover say your arms and mid section or legs and midsection. Based on the way they massage you, it couldn’t be done on a table using just hands. When they are done with your back they turn you over and do the same thing to your front side.
Once the massage is over they allow you to rest for a time just laying there relaxing. I’m not sure how long they let you lay there, I’m thinking 5 or ten minutes. It’s amazing how good you feel after the massage and its very easy to almost fall asleep as your body absorbs the herbs and the oil.
Next, they put me up on a table face down again, and then began to rub what I think was an herb infused warm water onto my body. In my mind I called this the baste, like when you baste a turkey. That is what it felt like. I’m really not sure what the liquid was, but it looked like muddy water. However the smell was that of herbs, not pleasant, but didn’t smell bad in any way. At this point in time there were two therapists there one standing on each side of the table to baste you!
Then after the baste, came the rub. They had me get off the table and while one cleaned and dried the table, the other one cleaned and dried me off! Back onto the table I went, face down again, they they sprinkled me with some kind of brown powder. Once again, the powder was a plethora of different herbs all ground together. Once I was covered in this powder, using similar strokes, they pressed the powder into my skin. Starting at my feet and working all the way up to the head. Once they were done with my back side, I turned over they they did the front side.
After that it was off the table again and they brushed me off and sent me on my way for the day. This whole process takes about two hours each day. The powder was a rusty color as well, so it looked like I’d been playing in orange sand or something. Then once back at the room you showered really, really well, because the powder can and will stain any fabric it comes in contact with. At the beginning of your treatments they give you a lunghi (basically a large piece of cloth that you wrap around your self like a towel to go to and from the clinic).
They did this for the first two days of the treatment, then the process changed just a little, which I will write about soon. Remember that this is not the same process that Daren had. The only thing that was similar was the massage, and I’m not sure if it was the same kind of oil or not.

Berlin

2009-12-17T03:31:00.001-08:00

Let me start off by saying that anybody who has lived in Germany or Berlin over the last 100 years deserves to be acknowledged as a true hero on a personal level. When ever you get a little down after watching the news, reading the paper, or on the internet and wonder why the world is the way it is, and can there ever be a bright day; my answer to that is yes. All you need to do is look at a bright and shinning star - Berlin.
We learn in the history books about great and powerful cities. Cities full of wealth and power, greed and misfortune. These cities come and go, sometimes quickly like a storm, others stand for a while, but always fall.
In only the last century has the world seen some of the most horrific events known to man. Both World Wars, terrorist attacks all around the globe and of course the religious wars currently going on right now. Just by looking at the things man has done for power and greed in just the last 100 years is sometimes hard to swallow when you look at it in this light. Cities after falling from war usually take decades if not centuries to recover.
Berlin has been the center of two of the most horrific events in only the last 80 years; World War II and The Cold War dividing East and West Germany and Berlin. I admit that during school we learned about WWII, Hitler, the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union, etc., but how much does the average 14 year old really understand? We see pictures and hear the stories always coming from the side that is winning. We hear of the things Hitler did, and just like watching a movie our minds don’t register that this isn’t something Hollywood has created, but actual events happening.
After spending a very short 5 days in the city of Berlin, I have come to think of Berlin as that shinning star off in the distance. The light in the darkness. Not just the hope, but the reality that people are resilliant and may suffer, but will always come back stronger than before. Here is a city that was almost completely destroyed by WW II not just the buildings but the people as well. Then to add salt to the wound, the Berlin Wall went up because of the cold war, separating east and west, not just the country, but the city itself. If you lived in West Berlin, it was like living on an island.
The Berlin wall fell in 1989, I was a senior in hight school, and although I knew what was happening, I didn’t understand the impact it had on not just the people of Germany, but of the world. Berlin is now full of memorials and plaza’s and museums that share this story, so hopefully we don’t forget and repeat the mistakes of the past.
Our time was short for a city with history like this, plus trying to recover from jet lag doesn’t help. Getting around the city is very easy with the use of the train system. One ticket will get you on the underground, the elevated, the trams, and the buses. You can get anywhere in Berlin using the train system. More on this in a minute.
One of our first stops was the Reichstag’s futuristic cupola. This is what we would all parliament, or the Capital Building. This is where the German Government happens. The building was built in the 1700’s and housed the government from that time on until it was burned to the ground by Hitler in around 1936. The only thing left standing was the stone walls. During the cold war is was in West Berlin, but sat empty to my knowledge. It was after the fall of the Berlin Wall (BW) that the govenment decided to rebuild it and use it again for its purpose; the government for the people.
During the rebuild They put a huge glass done on top of the building. Think of the US capitol building but with a glass top not copper. This is a walkway that winds around and up to the top of the glass dome and then back down. From there, you can see all of Berlin and is a great way to get familiar with the city before you begin touring the rest of the city.
They even have a head set that you put on and listen to the commentary as you walk up and around inside the dome. The amazing thing about the headsets is that you have our own little box with you like many museums have, but it can tell where you are in the dome and it goes along and talks about the things you can see from that point. If you are walking to fast it will tell you to stop for a minute. Once it gets done telling you about the view then it says to continue walking.
The next stop on our tour was the Brandenburg Gate. This was also built centuries ago, and somehow managed to survive everything that has happened to Berlin. It has needed repair, but has stood the test of time. All the buildings around the Gate, including many embassies, are all new buildings. Most of the buildings in that area were destroyed during WWII and after the Cold War they began rebuilding them to look like they did before the war.
Next on the tour was the Holocaust Memorial. It is a concrete labyrinth of upright stone slabs that seem to move in each direction forever with no end. Each slab is slightly a different height and the ground is not level so at some points the slabs are maybe 3 feet off the ground and at other points they stand over 15 feet high. This “walkable” monument is to commemorate the murdered Jews and other minorities of Europe.
More to come very soon about this incredible city!

Airports

2009-12-07T23:33:00.000-08:00

About Airports;

You should never be surprised about what you find or run into when traveling between airports, especially large and international airports. I was curious about the airports we traveled through and where they ranked in size, etc.
We left Chicago’s O’Hare International and changed planes in London’s Heathrow International before finishing in Berlin’s Tegal. Based on the most recent information on the web (google), O’Hare is the second largest airport in the world, just behind Atlanta, and Heathrow is right behind O’Hare.
The major differences between the two is that O’Hare is a very large airport, however the majority of its traffic is domestic. The international terminal for O’Hare is not huge, and if you don’t need to change terminals or O’Hare is your originating airport then getting through O’Hare is relatively easy. The international terminal has 21 gates for about a dozen different carriers throughout the world.
Our gate was right past security which only took about 10 minutes to get through. Very simple and easy. The challenge with that terminal is that aside from snacks and bottled beverages there are no restaurants or real food vendors past security. Translation: No Starbucks!!!
After getting halfway through security and being told that, be backed out of the line to find coffee, only to realize after getting out of line that the only place that sold coffee had drip coffee only. Then we laughed because you can’t take drinks through security so back in line we went.
The average flight time from Chicago to London is about 8 hours and we did it in 6:55. That was a great flight time, which only meant we had a longer layover at the airport. The last time I passed through Heathrow for a transfer only was two years ago and we went through Terminal 4. There was much talk of British Airways new Terminal 5 that was being built. Because we were passing through, and on British Airways, through terminal 5 we went. Let me share with you what passing through this city was like.
I do use the word city, because that is what it felt like. Terminal five is huge - kind of to Las Vegas standards when it comes to hotels. There are currently two buildings that are part of T5, and a third one us under construction. Between the two buildings currently open, there are 60 gates. 60! We are not talking about the entire airport, just T5. While we were having breakfast, I counted eleven 747s lined up on only one side of the building. All gates are capable of handling the A380, which is the largest passenger plane in the world, so yes, city is the right word. They had over 30 million people in T5 alone in its first year of service.
For some reason, even though you have been through security at the airport that you left from, they make you go through again, even if you are simply changing planes. The reason I come up with is that they fly to airports that places like the United States don’t approve of. So they need the extra security to fly their planes in/out of the US.

The next airport was Berlin, Germany. The simple way to describe this airport, especially after coming from the two we just did is; baby. Even our taxi driver called it a baby airport. I think there are 10 maybe 12 gates total, and only one level. I can’t remember the last time I was in an airport that did require you to travel on at least two sets of escalators! It was however very simple. We exited the plane and at the end of the jetway was Immigrations, they simply pass scan and stamp your passport, welcome you to Germany, and send you on to luggage. Perhaps because we were all coming from London, I don’t know, but there was no Customs. We picked up our luggage in the same area as we got our passports stamped, then walked outside and picked up a cab to the hotel. The simplicity of getting into Germany was amazing. Its like they simply trust everyone and don’t worry about anything. Going to every country I have been to, there is that nice long form you need to fill out asking you all sorts of information, and then you have the travel visa, some countries like India require you to have one in your passport, other countries simply issue you one when you enter, but they almost always give you a time on your length of stay. We filled out no forms, they gave us no limits on our stay in Germany, they only said welcome! Actually they said “Willkommen!”
On the way out, each gate has its own security and once you pass through you are put in a large room to wait for the plane to board. I don’t know if they are all like this, but ours had a duty free shop and a small cafe so we could get some coffee while we waited. However, because of this setup, you could only shop or eat at those two places if you had passed through that security for this gate. I don’t know what they do when there are no planes using the gate. Close up, or sit around?

On our way to India we once again had the extreme pleasure of passing through T5, this time arriving on a small 737, and moving into a 747 for the flight to India. The airport in Bangalore is a new one from the last time that I arrived there two years ago. It is a beautiful airport, very modern and up to the most recent standards. The only thing that really stood out about this airport, especially since we were in India was that the gate we parked at had two jetways to service the 747. First class and World Plus passengers exited the first jet way, and Business and World traveler took the second jet way. British Airways uses the words World Traveler for economy and Traveler Plus for an upgrade between economy and business. World Traveler Plus is the same as domestic first class seats. They are larger with more leg room. Business class on BA has seats that recline all the way into a level bed. First class, you get your own cabin. (I wish!)
If you read my blog two years ago about when we left Bangalore and how short the runway was, well, we shall see if they improved that at all. To read it, just go back to the entry; India - Goodbye.
I will be writing about Berlin in the next day or two...

On My Way!

2009-11-30T11:25:00.000-08:00

Its hard to believe that it was on year ago today that I last wrote on the blog, and I was some where in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on the Queen Mary II. So this entry is just to give you the highlights of this trip, where and how I'll be getting there, and then over the next several months I will write about my adventures this go around. Travel plans are as follows:

Chicago - London, layover only.
London - Berlin 5 days in Berlin with friend. Touring the city.
Berlin - London, layover only
London - Bangalore, India
Bangalore - Mysore by taxi 4 days in Mysore going to a Hindu wedding.
Mysore - Bangalore by train
Bangalore - Trivundrum 6 weeks practicing Ashtanga yoga
Trivundrum - Bangalore travel means to be determined.
Bangalore - London, layover only.
London - Chicago, do laundry and change out clothes!
Chicago - Seattle, layover
Seattle - Vancouver, Canada. tickets to Opening Ceremony, XXI Olympic Winter Games
Vancouver - Seattle by train, seeing friends
Seattle - Denver, seeing friends
Denver - Chicago, my god we are home!!!! Time to go to work.

I plan on writing as often as I can about this journey, please keep in touch via facebook, and I wish everyone a Happy Holiday Season!

namaste

About the Queen Mary 2

2008-11-30T08:29:00.000-08:00

The RMS Queen Mary 2

Here are some fun facts about the QM2, most of which can be seen along with great pictures at the web site www.cunard.com

The QM2 is the grandest, most magnificent ocean liner ever built. She's a true heir to the timeless elegance, legacy and inspiration of the great Cunard liners of legend. Facts:

Length: 1,132 feet (a football field is 300 feet, that’s almost four football fields!)
Beam: 135 feet
Height (Keel to Funnel): 236.2 feet (a 23 story building!)
Gross Tonnage: Approximately 151,400 gross tones
Guest Capacity: 2,592 lower berths 3,056 maximum capacity
Crew: 1,253
Strength: Extra thick steel hull for strength and stability for Transatlantic Crossings
QM2 is more than twice as long as the Washington Monument is tall (550 ft.)
QM2 is 147 feet longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall (984 ft.)
QM2 is more than 3½ times as long as Westminster Tower (Big Ben) is high (310 ft.)
Canyon Ranch SpaClub® Queen Mary 2's 20,000-square foot health club, offers a wide array of pampering possibilities, as the sensational AquaTherapy Centre and well-equipped Fitness Centre.
Empire Casino The Monte Carlo-inspired Empire Casino offers a full variety of opportunities to tempt Lady Luck - 13 Gaming Tables, over 120 slot machines, even video poker. Also, there is the convenient Casino Bar.
Swimming Pools There are a total of five swimming pools onboard Queen Mary 2, including the Terrace Pool on Deck 8, The Minnows Pool especially for children on Deck 9, the Sun Deck Splash Pool on the top of the ship, and our most popular Pavilion Pool on Deck 12, which features a retractable dome for any weather!
So here’s the questions everyone always asks:
How many life boats are there and is that enough – after all, we do transatlantic crossings.
There are 22 life boats each able to hold 150 passengers. That’s 3,300 people on the life boats. There are then 60 inflatable life rafts. 30 of them are specifically for the crew, and the other 30 are extra, just in case. So yes, we have plenty of life boats/rafts on board.

The RMS Queen Mary 2

2008-11-13T18:34:00.000-08:00

Just a quick welcome back to the blog. Its Thursday night, and I'm ready to head to the airport in the morning. My flight will take me to London via Chicago, and once in London, transfer to train to Southampton where I board the RMS Queen Mary 2 for my six weeks voyage with Canyon Ranch. I'll update soon about the trip.

India - Goodbye

2008-03-08T11:48:00.001-08:00

I'm now back home, have found a new place to live, and begin work next week! Coming back to the US was anticlimactic. I was thankful for being back home, but because it was home, not because it was the US or something along those lines. My time spent in India was incredible, I had a great time and the friends I met and the things I learned about the different cultures was inspiring. There are parts of India I already miss, however there are parts that I would prefer never to see or hear again. The most notable was the noise (honking) of the cars in the cities - never ending. The cab ride from the airport here in the US was amazing because it was completely quiet! I could handle the dirt, and spending that much time in a 3rd World country, poverty is in the eye of the beholder. The people in India are in poverty if you compare them to us. However, they live full, complete, happy lives, and don't feel the need to go in debt to get the latest fashions or to put the pool in their yard because the neighbours did. They don't feel the need to compete with their friends and don't need the latest of whatever it may be. They are content with what they have.

While there I was reading a fiction book that was based around India and there was a paragraph in the book that I felt was perfect to explain India. It seemed like the right way to sum up my trip to India, and at the same time compare the two different worlds; ours and theirs.
"The US embodies for me what I have come to call the Western mindset, restless, driven, pushing toward some unknown future which is always assumed to be better than anything that has gone before. No one pauses even a moment to reflect on the usefulness of this ceaseless striving. India's cities are timeless, self-absorbed, rooted in a glorious past, long faded, that is presumed lost forever. Indian society paused to reflect on the process of striving and never got around to striving again. India engages in ceaseless introspection without effective action. Western society is linear, goal-oriented. Indian society is circular, inward-oriented. The West values the new, the young, the innovative. India treasures the very old, the traditional, the way things have been for millennia. Both perspectives have value. Neither in isolation adequately reflects the full potential of humanity."
This was the third time I have read this book and after being in India that paragraph couldn't have said it better - the differences between the two worlds. It took me being in India to really get what that paragraph was trying to say!

Two last adventures I would like to share. They say you always remember the first and last things you do either on a trip, or a meeting, etc. I will never forget the last few moments I was on the ground in India. We left Bangalore on schedule, Feb 20th. The airport in Bangalore is not very big, in fact is has 3 domestic gates and 1 international gate! For the most part, turbo props and planes the size of a 727 are normal there in Bangalore. We left as we arrived, on a 747-400. As the plane rolled town the taxi way I was watching outside thinking to myself, good bye for now. As the plane pulled out onto the runway, it didn't turn to face the length of the runway, but continued maybe another 100 feet to the very end of the runway, and then the pilot made a U turn! From my window, as I was on the outside of the U turn, we were at the very end, meaning dirt was under the wing as he turned that plane around. Image for a second, a 747 making a U turn. I'm almost sure if he could have put the plane in reverse he would have backed up to the edge of the pavement!
Once the plan was lined up with the runway again, with the brakes fully applied, he opened the engines up completely. This went on for about 10 seconds. So stop and count to ten. That is actually a long time to sit still and listen to the engines increase to full power. The the brakes were released. If you have ever been on a roller coaster that uses propulsion to get the train moving you know the feeling. We were all pressed back into our seats like we were headed for space. A 747 needs to be traveling about 170 mph to get off the ground. We were seated over the wing, therefore right over the back landing gear. Just as we felt the wheels lift off the ground I looked out the window and the runway ended! I am not a nervous flyer, but that was one take off I will never forget.

When I got home the last thing I wanted to do was eat at a restaurant. I didn't care what I was eating as long as it was at home and I cooked it. I would say that must have been the one thing I really longed for, was my own cooking. To just be able to eat something that was siting around and not having to go to a restaurant or order room service and wait for the food. I found it interesting during my stay in India the things that you think about most. How you compare things from the country you are in to the way it is done at home. If you have read the entire blog my comparisons seemed to follow a specific thought. I compared the taxi ride to one in New York vs Its A Small World. The rickshaws reminded me of the Doom Buggies at the Haunted Mansion, and the lights at the Mysore Palace of course reminded me of Main Street U.S.A. Once you get back from a trip of this size you want to tell the world everything, and at the same time you feel like you have nothing to say. The number one question I got from friends, family and even coworkers once I returned was; "Lance, you just spent two months in India, what are you going to do next?" ... and so I did! :)

"The Happiest Place On Earth!" is only a 3 1/2 hour drive from here, so maybe I did need a taste of good old America! Mickey says "Hi!"

McDonalds - India

2008-02-23T17:37:00.000-08:00

When I went to Australia I know that there would be much American influence including watching the ABC nightly news with Peter Jennings, but I didn’t expect so much influence here in India, at least not yet. If you turn the TV on, they do have their own stations, and usually they will have a Hindu station, a Muslim station, and a Christian station, however they also have CNN India, and the most common channels are Discovery, Travel, and National Geographic.

Looking out the window of the hotel, and we can’t see very far in either direction, but I can see Music World, Van Heusen, Domino’s Pizza, Subway, and those famous golden arches that seem to be everywhere but the moon! Of course the bottled water I’m drinking is called Kinley – a product of The Coca-Cola Company, and I can see advertisements from ING, MetLife, and Merrill Lynch. This main intersection reminds me of a very small Times Square.

So those of you that know me well, make sure you are sitting down before you go on reading this…are you down? Take a wild guess where I ate for lunch? It would be the last place you would ever see me!!! Okay, so I just had to try a McVeggie! Of course I got the meal with fries and a drink, but I didn’t get a soft drink, instead I got an iced coffee. The McVeggie actually tasted really good. Of course it did, I don’t think we can count high enough to list all the chemicals that were in it, so it goes without saying it better taste good. The fries were, well, what can I say – McDonald’s. And the coffee was incredible which leads me to believe that there wasn’t even real coffee in it!

The menu was extremely limited. They had four sandwiches to choose from. Remember, we are in India where cows are considered Holy, so they had the McChicken Big Mac, which was two all chicken patties (Yeah, right!), special sauces, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun – are you singing yet? They also had the regular McChicken Sandwich, a McSalad Sandwich, which was literally just lettuce, tomato, and mayo on a bun, and the one I had which was the McVeggie. Not really sure what they thought was in the veggie, but it did taste good. They did have a large selection of ice cream. Indians love ice cream, not only because it’s sweet but also because it comes from a cow.

We had thought about going to a Subway as well, but we have ran out of time, so McDonalds was the only American restaurant we went to. We are only in the city of Bangalore for a day and a half, so not much time, plus our dinners were at restaurants that had been time tested, local and very good. One is the Taj hotel which is an Indian chain of up scale hotels, and the restaurants are upscale as well, and the other one called Olive Beach is a local art deco type restaurant that is completely western. When I refer to upscale, in the US the food would be about 20-30 dollars a plate, here 8-10 dollars a plate. Both of these restaurants had great food, but by this time because I know I’ll be home in a day or two I can’t help but think about food back home, and so I’m getting tired of this food and being careful about what I can eat and what I should think about before eating! I have been sick 4 times now on this entire trip which isn’t that bad considering how sick some people get. I have no complaints and all four times it was very minor, and lasted only a day or less. Airline food at this time is starting to sound good!

PS – you should try to write something about McDonald’s, using all the words that begin with Mc, and then have spell check try and fix it! That was a project in itself!

The Mall

2008-02-22T03:38:00.000-08:00

We are spending our last day and a half in the city of Bangalore, or Bangaluru by traditional name. This is our port city so we decided to come one day early so that we could tour this city, one of the largest in India, and be ready for our 7 am flight back to London then home.

We are staying at a hotel called The Monarch which is not a bad hotel at all and it is located right in the heart of the city. The two main roads here in Bangalore are Brigade and M.G. road. It seems that every city/town in India has an M.G. road, which stands for Mahatma Gandhi. This area is where most of the shopping is both for local middle class and the tourists. Here in the city of Bangalore they have at least two malls that we know of. They are very western in thought, and are similar to what we would call a mall, however their size for the whole mall is what we would think of as just one department store, say Macy*s.

The one we visited yesterday afternoon actually had 5 floors and half of the top floor was a movie theatre, very new, and appeared to be very clean. They had the electronic signs telling you the movies, show times, and even if the movie was selling fast, or sold out. There were 6 theatres and they were showing 2 American movies, Rambo 4 (please!), and Enchanted. The other side of the 5th floor was Staples. What else would you put next to a movie theatre but an office supply store? On the directories for the mall, they only put down the stores located on the floor you were on. So if you don’t know which floor the store you want is on, good luck, and head for each floor!

Here in India they number things a little different than we do in the states. This goes for hotels, office buildings, etc. The ground floor is just that, the ground floor. The next floor up, which we would consider the 2nd floor is the 1st floor. In the elevators the ground floor is 0, not ground or Lobby, but 0. Plus, our hotel has a parking garage underneath so our elevator has the buttons for -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. No parking level or Lobby here, just -1 and 0. This means that if you are staying in room 103, you are on the second floor, room 3. We are in room 312, on the 4th floor.

In the middle of this mall we were in was an atrium that went all the way up to a glass ceiling. Right above the ground floor was a huge net across the whole atrium. Daren and I joked that it was to catch people who are trying to commit suicide, but then came to the conclusion that because there are no doors at the entrances to the mall that it was to keep birds from coming in and flying up to the upper levels. For kicks and giggles we asked a security guard what the net was for. His answer, and I quote, “to catch children falling from the upper floors.” My questions is how many times did that happen before they thought of putting up the net? We won’t even go into where the parents are.

As you entered the mall we were required to go through metal detectors. If the system went off you were asked to step aside and they would then wand you. They were not set very high as I got through with my camera, belt, etc and it didn’t go off. Not sure of the reason, other than fundamentalists don’t like the western ideas coming to India so these places could be targets.

While we were in the mall the power went out several times. The first thing that came to mind was, “Oh, the palace lights must have been turned on!” This makes sense if you read the blog; Mysore. However, business went on as if nothing had happened. The employees continued to work and not even miss a beat, and so did most of the customers, they didn’t even stop to look around. This happens often here in India, and even in Kovalam Beach the power was actually scheduled to go off once a day for an hour (not because of the palace, that is in a different state), so they don’t even think about it.

The last thing that was fun to watch was the people, especially the mid to older ones. I’m talking about 40 and up. The main source of attraction for me was the escalator! When we were in the airport in Trivundrum heading to the Maldives, we needed to take an escalator down to the ground floor, sorry, the Zero floor, and many of the locals, especially women stopped, looked at the escalators, and would walk over to the stairs to walk down. This mall didn’t have stairs so they needed to use the escalators! I really hate to say this, but to watch them, watch the steps go by and try to calculate stepping onto the stairs was funny, and just think what went through their heads when getting off, because they can’t stop and think about it! I know this is mean, but I guess if they want to be more like westerners then they must ride escalators!

Some places are very western in thought and practice and others try to be, but just don’t quite make it! There were a few places that if you were just placed there, it would be difficult to say you were in another country, and others would take long at all. My favorite example is a coffee shop called Coffee Day. This would be our version of Starbucks. It truly is a knock off of Starbucks, right down to selling whole bean coffee. However, they don’t open until 9 a.m.! Explain that to me please? Plus, we were one of the first customers of the day and both ordered drinks. We only had a 500 Rupee bill, that is what the ATMs give out, and our bill was over 200 Rupees, but they didn’t have change. This would be like us spending about $12 at Starbucks and trying to use a $20. No change - They sent one of the workers out somewhere to find change! This happened several times in the mom & pop stores, which I can understand, but this should be a western thinking place, with change!

By this time in the trip we stopped asking the questions why or how come, and just smiled, bobbled our head and laughed! The head bobble is something Indians so to each other while they are talking. A waiter will bobble his head when you place an order, or you are asking for directions, etc. However, this head bobble does not mean anything! It doesn’t mean yes, no, maybe, okay, anything. It’s just a head bobble. There were several times I would be somewhere watching two guys talking and bobbling, and I would just break out laughing!

Pictures

2008-02-21T14:57:00.001-08:00

Just a quick FYI, pictures are being organized on Flickr, and will be ready soon to view. I'm putting about 100 of the 500+ pictures I took while on the trip. I'll let you know as soon as it is ready!

Mysore

2008-02-21T14:08:00.000-08:00

The town of Mysore is about a 3-hour car ride from Bangalore which is the city with the closest airport, and also our port city to leave India. The car ride from the airport to Mysore was not as bad as all the other rides because once we were out of the city, the new highway is actually a divided highway with two lanes in each direction. I didn’t think this was possible. This however didn’t stop all the honking, as I found out that it’s a law that you honk your horn when you pass someone. Plus they don’t have drive on the right; pass on the left or any kind or organization like that. And you still need to deal with everything including carts being pulled by ox.

When you pass through the small towns, in the states we always lower the speed limit on the highways to something like 30 while you drive through town and then pick speed back up. Even though they have limits posted on the road I’m not sure the people know what those mean, so slowing down to go through a village is not something they would normally do. The way they get the cars to slow down is they put up barricades in the road. They use three barricades, two placed in one lane, and one in the other lane between the other two so it forces all the traffic down to one lane and you must zigzag through the barricades. They put these up right before the crosswalks, usually only one per village. Crosswalks by the way are called Zebra’s because of the white strips. They also like to use speed bumps, and these speed bumps are more like mountains than bumps and if you hit one very fast, not only would your car or rickshaw be wiped out completely, it could kill you, as we read in the paper about a guy on a motor bike that hit a speed bump going to fast!

Mysore is considered the birthplace of Ashtanga Yoga, the place where Sri K. Pattabhi Jois started his studio. He is the one that taught our teacher, Lino Miele. The town itself has about 80,000 people and is growing fast as people are moving there to get away from the city of Bangalore. There is not much to do in Mysore; it’s not really a place you would visit as a tourist unless you were there for yoga or passing through. We had a teacher named Ajay (AH-jay) while we were in Mysore who I felt was an incredible teacher and I would like to come back to Mysore and study with him over going to Kovalam with Lino. Both are great teachers, but Ajay I felt had a better connection to his students. In support for Lino however, Ajay had 24 students, Lino, 150. Lino has been doing this for almost 2 decades, where Ajay only several years, however I can say that he will go far.

We did travel to several temples while in Mysore, including one on tip of Chamundi Hill, which is one of the 8 sacred hills in India. On the way up the hill they have large signs that say “No plastic Zone” meaning they are trying to reduce the amount of trash being thrown around on the hill. Indians don’t understand the concept of trash cans – partly because disposable products/packaging is relatively new to them, and they don’t have the money to pay for someone to go around and empty the garbage cans. When we got to the top of the hill, almost ALL the vendors that were there selling product were selling at least one type of plastic toy! Some vendors that is all they had was plastic! Of course not only was the item plastic, but of course it came in a plastic bag of some kind as well.
The market was another place we went to while in Mysore. This would be similar to what we would call a farmers market, only this place went on for blocks and was the main course of food for the entire city, weather for families, restaurants or hotels. It was truly something to see. All the fruit and vegetables all of course in season and nothing is out of season. They don’t ship fruits and veggies around the country like we do. You eat what is grown locally or you don’t eat it! Flowers are very big here, and not for vases in your living room, but flower necklaces and the likes for the temple gods. The flowers at the market were incredible, and since they string them, they don’t have stems, so there would be piles of just flowers. They use a lot of Marigolds and I seen 50-gallon burlap bags full of just marigold flowers. Jasmine was the only other flower that I could name, but the displays were incredible.

The main tourist attraction for Mysore is the Mysore Palace, which is actually famous, and often it is pictured books about India. The Palace was built for the Maharajh of Mysore back at the turn of the century. (I guess now we need to be more specific about which century. The 19th century.) The building is huge, and does fit in with what we would consider a palace. It’s a cross of Indian and English architecture, and sits on about 40 acres. On the grounds are three Hindu Temples, which we visited and they still have elephants and camels on the grounds for festivals. I have some great pictures of the grounds and outside of the Palace, but of course no cameras allowed inside the palace or temples, sorry!

The Palace, on Sunday evenings for one-hour only turn on lights, which outline the palace, three main gates, and temples. This is the type of picture one would usually find of the palace in books. Think Christmas lights, or Main Street USA at a Disney park, but about 10 fold. Not really sure how many lights they use, but it is completely breath taking to see it all lit up. It brings thousands to the palace every Sunday night. Families come and just sit on the ground, no grass, just dirt, and look at the lights for the one-hour they are turned on. To get onto the grounds you need to go through a metal detector, and they have only one at each of the three gates. That means three detectors for thousands of people! Lets just say it takes awhile to get in.

We are in India, so get this. There is a local village near by, who for whatever reason they were chosen, lose their power for one hour, every Sunday night while the palace lights are on! There is not enough power to go around as it is, so that is the reason they only turn the lights on once a week for an hour, so these small villages nearby don’t lose theirs. Those of you who live in Salt Lake, imagine loosing your power once per week so that Temple Square could light up! That is just what they do.

We board a train tomorrow back to Bangalore for a day and a half before returning home. I might blog about the train ride, we shall see what its like. We do have first class tickets because that way we actually have a seat assignment, and the coach is air-conditioned. The tickets were only 600 Rupees each ($15 US). The train ride will be 3 hours just like the car but hoping the trip will be less stressful, and quite. Lets cross our fingers!

Scuba Diving

2008-02-13T21:58:00.000-08:00

Diving is something you really need to experience to get the full effect, kind of like jumping from an airplane. The feeling of weightlessness, being able to breath under water and moving with the schools of fish is things that just really can’t be described.

I started with a course called “Discover Scuba Diving” This is the first thing they put you through for you to decide after that weather you want to continue with the training or not. We spent about an hour learning the basics as to how water and air behave together, which is completely different that what I thought, and how your scuba gear works. By the way scuba stands for self contained underwater breathing apparatus.

So we lean how the scuba equipment works and head over to the beach. Sounds easy, but the scuba equipment on land weights at least 30 pounds, very awkward, and we had to walk through sand. The walk from the school to the beach was about 100 yards, and the whole time I felt like I was going to fall backwards with all that stuff attached to my back.

Getting into the water was fun in that the area we entered there were small sharks swimming around looking for food. These guys were tan and brown in color and about a foot to 18 inches long. They are completely harmless but stepping into the water having 6 or 7 of these guys swimming near by was interesting. They looked just like a great white, only smaller and we would laugh and either make the Jaws music, or scream shark every time we saw them! They would swim so close to the shore and to the surface that their dorsal fin would stick out of the water.

Once in the water up to about our chest the scuba equipment became very buoyant and we would start to float. Because of the equipment, we actually have to wear weight belts that allow us to descend under water. So here we are, water up to our chests and the instructor tells us to put our masks on, place the regulator in our mouth and look under water and here’s the important part – breathe! As easy as that sounds, getting your mind and your lungs to actually want to attempt to breathe under water is actually hard. It took some self-control and will power to inhale knowing your face is under water.

Once that excitement was over, knowing we could now breathe down there, we needed to go through some simple exercises in the event something happened. First we needed to flood our mask half way and clear it by breathing out the nose, then we needed to remove our regulator from our mouth and replace it, and third we needed to remove our regulator and take our buddies extra regulator and breathe from it. You always have two regulators attached to you. One for you and one for your buddy in case he/she runs out of air or something.

Then we got to swim around for a few minutes looking at the fish and other life at the bottom of the lagoon. This first dive we were only in water about 3 meters (9 feet) deep, so it wasn’t extra ordinary, but there was life down there. After the dive they then ask you if you are interested in going on with the course, or you can say you took part in Discover Scuba Diving and leave it from there. Now, I will say, that if you did this, say in Las Vegas, of course 90% of the time this course is offered in a swimming pool with no sea life, then you would think do I really want to go on with the training? Flooding your own mask and removing the regulator takes will power and its just more training that you need to do. However, there’s a catch when you learn to do this in an actual lagoon, with fish and sharks and tides and salt water and the list goes on, how in the world can you say No Thanks, I’m done! Of course you say, “Yes!” So the instructor hands you a very large textbook and says your next dive is tomorrow afternoon at 2, read chapters 1-3 before then! They always seem to forget to tell you this part in the beginning. So, off for a cappuccino I go, and forget about the rest of the days activities, as I need to study.

The next afternoon was great. I had finished reading the 3 chapters like a good boy, and because at the time I was the only person going through the course that spoke English, there were mostly Germans here on vacation at the time, I had my very own instructor for the next dive. Also, because I had been a good boy and read all three chapters like I was instructed to, the instructor decided that we would do dive 2 and 3 together. Usually you do three dives for the training, but the instructor needs to get to several people, up to 8, for each exercise and we can only stay under water for so long, so they limit the number of exercises per dive. Since it was only he and I and I had read the chapters and knew what was expected of me we went through both dives two and three. The main exercises were completely flooding my mask and clearing it. Removing my regulator and letting it go, then finding it again and replacing it. Taking my mask off and swimming around for one minute then replacing and clearing the mask. Completely removing the scuba gear both on the ground, about 3 meters down and at the surface, and putting it back on again. Learning how to release your weight belt and replacing it on the ground and at the surface. There were many more but you get the idea. All of the training is for “in case”. Diving itself is really very simple, pressurize your sinus cavity (ears), and breathe! The hard part is learning the “what ifs.”

Dive three was the next morning and it took me out into open water with the instructor on a boat with other more experienced divers. We were of course placed in groups, but I kept thinking we are in open water! One thing you learn in a swimming pool is how to get into the water with your gear on by jumping into the pool. You can’t learn that on a beach and just have to go for in from the boat! Very easy actually – hang on to your mask and regulator and breathe! Have you caught on to something yet? The number one and most important rule in diving is breathe. I know this makes sense, but when you go through the course and understand what can happen if you don’t breath, injuries may result including death, and it has nothing to do with drowning.

So, once we were all in the water, the dive master made sure we were all okay, and then gave the signal to descend. Panic would be a very correct word that I think most of us went through that first time, as you begin to go down, and realize that the bottom isn’t 3 meters below you, but you can’t see the bottom. Two of the students couldn’t get past that part and went back up to the boat. I hung out at about 4 meters for quite some time before the panic subsided and I was able to descend lower. I also had trouble pressurizing my ears so for that dive I stayed at about 10 meters (33 feet).

This dive, three, and dive five were very similar in experience as far as aquatic life with the exception that in dive five I was able to clear my ears and actually went to a depth of 29 meters (96 feet) under water. To actually see Sea Turtles and more than one, getting within a couple of feet of them while they are eating, and swimming through schools of fish that when you look around you in any direction all you see is fish is something words just can’t describe. Several differences that I noticed with each dive comparing to aquariums is that; first, light is absorbed by the water so actually in aquariums the colors are more vivid because the water is not as deep and many aquariums use black lights to help improve the color of the coral, so that part was disappointing, second however, in aquariums the schools of fish are in the hundreds, in the open water, thousands is an under statement. You can get lost in the schools! To see eels, and stingrays, and of course Nemo (clown fish), and even a Dory or two, is simply incredible.

Dive 5 took place the following morning after dive three. Dive 4 that was the afternoon of dive 3 however was by far the most incredible and the one I will be talking about for years to come. With this time I was able to clear my ears for the first time with comfort and we only went to a depth of 20 meters (66 feet), but the location we went to was spectacular! The descend and first portion of the dive was very similar to dive 3 and 5, lots of fish and breath taking coral even without the vivid colors. However, near the end of the dive we entered into a channel between the Atolls (Islands), and lets just say it was feeding time. There was a small coral reef that crossed the channel and the current was strong enough that our dive master had us go below the reef so the current wouldn’t take us out to sea and swim over to the other side. We needed to get to the other side because there were about 30 other divers in the same place as us. Once we found a spot with no other divers with came up to the reef top and held onto the reef facing the current so we looked like flags blowing in the wind. Imagine 30 divers or so holding on to this reef blowing in the current, like a string of flags at a stadium. The reason we held on to the reef is so we could relax and use less oxygen so we could stay and watch the show longer. The show – feeding time. In front of us was countless forms of aquatic life far to many to tell you about here, but schools of fish and sharks were the main attraction. The sharks would swim within feet of us, only to turn and swim another direction, the schools of fish would swim around us, and then away, and so on and so forth.

Because of the current flowing through this channel it was the perfect place for the food chain to be. Algae were floating through the channel that attracted small fish, which attracted bigger fish, etc. We stayed in this one location for about 20 minutes and just watch in awe of what was going on. We would have staying longer but air was running low so we needed to finish the dive and head back to the boat. After we had surfaced, the first person of our group was getting back onto the boat and our dive instructor yelled “mask on and dive!” so like good students we did what she said and down in the water were at least 6 Manta Rays, about 10 meters down (33 feet), just hanging out on the bottom. Only 5 of us were still in a position to dive, so down we went, and I came within about 5 feet of one of the Manta Rays. These are such incredible creatures and the best way to describe them is to think of UFO’s that just hover above the bottom, very calm and graceful. They didn’t seem very alarmed that we were heading form them, but once we got with the 5 feet or so, they just slowly moved forward, not far, just enough to stay away from us. The sad part was we could only stay about 2 minutes, because our air was by this time running very low so we needed to surface again.

Once back on the boat we realized many of the divers that were already on the boat had grabbed their mask and snorkel and had jumped into the water just to see down below to get a look at the manta rays! Of course that was the subject of conversation on the ride back to the island, and all of the sudden our instructor yelled “starboard!” and off the side of the boat were three dolphins swimming along side!

We had dinner with the instructor the following night and she said it took her over 800 dives to get that close to a manta ray, and to see the feeding show like we did with sharks that close, the manta rays, and the dolphins in one dive was almost impossible – so of course it happened on only my 4th dive. It will be hard to live up to, but I’m sure going to try and out do that one sometime in the near future!

The Maldives

2008-02-12T04:03:00.000-08:00

So the last week in Kovalam we decided to go to the Maldives for about a week. Daren has been certified a scuba diver for years and wanted me to get certified as well. We had purchased our airline tickets during our last trip up to Trivundrum. Then the internet went down and we had no way of confirming reservations with a hotel in the Maldives so we just went and found a place when we got there.

So, trying to get airline tickets to the Maldives. The only airline to fly from Trivundrum to the Maldives is Indian Air. This is actually a government run company, and for years there were two different companies. There was Indian Air which was the domestic company and then Air India which was the international company. About a year ago the government decided to merge the two so there would only be one company to make it easier to travel. The new company is called Indian Air – creative, don’t you think? So we have the taxi driver take us to the Air Indian office (which had a sign next to the building advertising the new Indian Air company, but the signs on the door still said Air Indian. Of course we got there at lunch so the office was closed (remember where we are.) We wanted to visit a local Ashram so we went there while the office was at lunch. Once we returned to the Air Indian office, we were told that they don’t fly to the Maldives, we would need to go to the Indian Air office. Are you following? The international division doesn’t fly to the Maldives, which is another country, the domestic division flies to that country, and even though it’s the same company we couldn’t make an international flight reservation at the international flight division because we needed the domestic division!?! India!!! Don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense because I’m still not sure how we did it. And just for icing, the domestic division only issues e tickets for flights – we were at the domestic office, but received paper tickets!

It was a 50 min flight from Trivundrum to Male (Mal Lay), the capital city of the Maldives. We were served a beverage before takeoff and a complete hot meal during the flight, plus tea or coffee after the mean before landing. The flight attendant was very nice, but when it came time to serve us we had a choice of vegetarian or chicken, and she looked at us, knowing we are westerners and said “chicken” and we both said “no” vegetarian. I think we confused her for the rest of the flight!

Once at the airport we talked to two different travel agents about hotels here in the Maldives and finally picked one called the Blue Lagoon. You can visit the web site at www.kuramathi.com There are three hotels on this island, and the island is smaller in space that the space the Bellagio, Ceasars and Mirage sit on. The highest point of the island is 6 feet! Pray for no tsunamis! We took a boat ride from the international airport to the island. It was about 60 kilometers away, and took about an hour and 15 min to reach. Everything here is on an island. The airport is an island by itself, etc Most of the islands only have one hotel on it, but because ours is so big they have three. They are however owned by the same company so its really like one big resort. We plan to take an air taxi back to the airport so it will only take 15 min. If your idea of paradise is a tropical island with perfectly blue water, palm trees, cocktails, and white sand then this without any doubt what so ever, paradise!

When we arrived at the island, there were about 16 of us on the boat, they were waiting for us with fresh fruit juices. They then shuttled us to our hotel, which was on the other side of the island. Being here is very similar to a cruise ship as there are coffee shops at each hotel, then there are four very fancy restaurants on the island as well. You have your choice to have bed and breakfast, room and half board, or room and full board. We choose the bed and breakfast because the majority of the meals are served buffet style and they tack on $70 per person per day for full board. This does not include drinking water as you must buy bottled. The water for the showers, etc is desalinated seawater and not suitable for drinking. Plus you eat when they tell you with full board, this way we eat in the coffee shops when we want to.

There are mostly Germans here at this resort. We are not sure why, but we think it’s a large group that all came together. The Maldives does have their own currency, but all the resorts only take US currency, so for the Europeans right now this is great for them. Just like on a ship, they don’t take actual cash except for tips, anything and everything you do is charged to your room.

The majority of our time has been spent diving which will be the next blog, but one of the neatest things for me here on the island is the nighttime bug control. It would be correct to say they have bats on the island. However, bats are small flying rodents, something similar to a mouse or maybe a small rat. (Just in case you didn’t know, they actually are mammals and are related to rodents.) What we have flying around here at sunset and during the night fit more closely to something along the lines of a tyradactle. I have been able to get some good pictures both of them hanging in the trees and of them in mid air!

The next blog will tell you about diving! That entire world that exists just below the surface. Pictures, TV, and aquariums don’t even come close to the experience you have when you are down there in the middle of a school of fish – not 40 or 50 fish, but thousands! I was very excited because they offer underwater cameras here, but the limit was 10 meters and most of my dives were between 20-30m meters (60-100 feet). So sorry to say I have not pictures of the sharks, manta rays, eels, etc that I seen while I was underwater.

Homework!

2008-02-07T05:19:00.002-08:00

Hello all, Sorry for the delay in putting a new message up. India's internet went down for almost a week and we didn't have the chance to do anything. We are taking a vacation from our vacation and are spending 7 days here in the Maldives. The reason for the title is we have been here three days and I have had my face in a book almost the whole time reading and taking tests... However, tomorrow I take my final test and my final open water dive and I will be certified as a scuba diver!

We head back to India up to Mysore on Monday and continue with the yoga. Mysore is where Ashtanga Yoga was started. Our instructor there is named Ajay. (AH-jay). Not sure what the internet will be like once back in india, however, at the very least I will update this as often as I can, and will finish it up when I get back to the states.

I hope all is well with all of you, and look forward to seeing everyone when I get home.

The Practice

2008-02-07T05:19:00.001-08:00

I'm now in my fourth week of the practice, and sad to say this is the last week for the practice with Lino. The type of practice that we have been doing does not come easy and even as an instructor I find myself doing the same things that students do all the time. That is think I can do it all and push myself sometimes harder than I should. In my classes I'm always saying "Its all about the journey, not the destination." So I keep telling myself to practice what I preach!

For the first several weeks one day I would feel really good, warm and loose so I could go very deep into the poses, then of course I would be sore from that practice so the next day I'm tight and hurt, so that practice wouldn't be as good. Week three I learned to take advantage of the journey, and not worry about the destination. Getting to that thought process has helped me move farther into the practice sometimes without thinking about it.

In Ahstanga Yoga practice, there are four parts to the practice. Surya Namaskara A & B (Sun Salutations) In the west we consider these the warm up for many of the yoga classes. We preform A five times, then B from 3 - 10 times depending on how you feel and how cold/warm it is. Because of the temperature 3 or 4 is usually enough. Next come the standing asanas (poses). There are several of these asanas that are coming along great. The hardest one for me is reversed side angle. (Utthita Parsvakonasana B)

After the standing asanas, you move into the seated asanas - I am practicing the primary series. There are actually 6 different series in Ashtanga yoga. Getting through the second series takes years and actually getting to 6 is a lifetime. The seated asanas is what changes as you progress through Ashtanga Yoga. It wasn't until the third week that I was able to go all the way through the seated asanas. The way Ashtanga is taught is you go to the point where you can no longer do the asanas, then you move onto the finishing asanas. I was so happy the day I went through the entire series by myself I felt like I was walking on water. My personal greatest accomplishment in the asanas is Marichyasana C, (seated, bound spinal twist). I just never thought that pose would come as fast as it did. Now, I still need help getting into it, but once there I am comfortable. I'll continue to work on that one so I can get into it by my self, hopefully before I return home.

The finishing sequence is designed to restore you. Shoulder stand, head stand, and several other inverted asanas. The finishing sequence is just as hard as the seated because you do about 60% of the asanas upside down! The majority of these asanas are not taught often in western classes because of risk of injury if not done correctly. However, they are very beneficial once you learn how to do them.

The last pose of the seated sequence is Urdva Dhanurasana (wheel pose, or full backbend) In the perfect series you go into the back bend from a standing position and return to a standing position. As you are learning this pose you go in and out of it from laying on your back on the floor. After taking my third back bend, as you do the asana three times, 5 breaths each, Lino came over and told me I was ready to try the standing portion, assisted by him. So I was able to do Urdva Dhanursana with the help of Lino, but from standing and back to standing!

Friday's are a led class by Lino, very western in thought as we all go through the asanas as Lino leads us. During the whole practice we have been doing half vinyasas between the poses. Basically going through up-dog down-dog asanas. This Friday is a full vinyasa class, which means between every pose we do a full vinyasa or Surya Namaskara. The practice will take about 2 1/2 hours to go through and I think we will all head back to bed after that!

I have learned much from this practice that I can't wait to bring back to the states not only for myself, but for my classes! It seems like its been a very long time since I was the student, and being assisted into asanas, and not having to think about what everyone is doing in each pose has been very beneficial to me. I am however, looking forward to teaching once again!

Symphony!

2008-01-27T21:12:00.000-08:00

Okay, so this entry has nothing to do with India, but those of you who know me well, will understand completely. Tuesday is the release of Sarah Brightman's new album "Symphony". I find this funny, only because the last album she released, "Harem", I was in Australia at the time. I was very lucky in that she releases things usually one continent at a time, and that time, Australia was the first continent to get Harem, so I had the album before all my friends back home did. In fact I was home before it was released to North America. This time however, North America gets it first! Thank god for itunes! So for me, around noon my time, midnight Eastern Standard Time I will be downloading the new album, and will probably hold up in my room for the next few days listening to the album. There is a great promo video at her web site; www.sarah-brightman.com then click on new releases.
So Susan, let me know what you think as soon as you listen to it!!!

The Jungle

2008-01-27T00:33:00.001-08:00

If you have not read Ponmudi first, I suggest you read that blog before this one. The trip through the jungle to get to the mountain top was a drive that for many reasons, I will not forget! It really began with the hike up to the water fall as that was the last time we drove through any kind of village. We did pass small areas where people lived, especially near the tea plantations, but for the most part we left civilization.

As we went up the read and climbed higher and higher, the road continued to get narrower and narrower. Long before we reached the top it was only one lane wide at best, and of course this is a two lane road. Passing other cars, and tour buses for that matter were sometimes a little hairy! One side is a dirt wall, the other side, nothing except maybe a 300 foot drop. They don't know what guard rails are and at places the hill/road was slowly washing away. When ever I get into these situations I always think to myself - Discovery Channel! I'm here with a camera and by God I'm going to make it! Seems to work so far. The road has 22 hairpin curves on the ascent, and we know this for a fact because they actually number them. 1/22, 2/22, etc. with signs so you know how many more to go. This would be something we would call a switchback, and yes there were 22 of them! There were places that the pavement was no longer pavement and other places they looked like it was brand new.

From here on out, nothing will go in order, because it was so overwhelming that I can't remember what was when - so here it goes. On our way up there were trees that first off looked like they have been planted because they were all in perfect rows, then the other thing that stood out was they didn't have any leaves on them. I'm going to look up what the tress do, like if they have a winter cycle even here in the tropics, because technically it is winter here. We soon realized that they were rubber tree plantations. When the road got closer to the trees you could see the little buckets on each of the trees to collect the sap so they can transport it somewhere to make rubber. (Once again, now I'm interested in this so I'm going to google it later.) The trees don't look very pretty, but being mixed within the jungle gave them a unique contrast. I figure this is what a maple tree farm looks like as well, only the maple trees are so much more beautiful.

The main industry for this part of India is tea, and that is what we ran into next. As we wound our way up the mountain side, the tea plantations were everywhere. The bushes are kept very small and not allowed to grow very tall at all. I would say that they were cut at a maximum of about 3 feet high and maybe four feet in diameter. This makes it very simple for the works to reach the entire bush and get all the leaves from it. Keeping the plant pruned also promotes growth in the leaves to keep the plant alive instead of wanting to grow higher, so the leaves are bigger and I would assume full of more flavor. The same reason they keep orchard trees pruned small, and even grape vineyards for the making of wine.

As we climbed higher, the tea plants continued for most of the trip as that is the perfect growing conditions for the tea. As we climbed however, other harvested plants started to show up within the tea, and along the road. The first thing I noticed was coffee trees! Of course these really are not trees either, but large bushes that like the shade of a type of palm that was growing in the area, but not sure what kind. It was fun to see the coffee trees like this, only because I've only seen pictures of this. It was not the right time of year for there to be flowers on the trees or beans for that matter, but we did manage to buy some coffee beans that had been grown in that area, harvested, and roasted! Can't wait to get home and try it out. Coffee is not a strong industry in this part of the world. The climate is perfect for the trees, but the soil is not the best as coffee enjoys very acidic soil like the sides of volcanos. Tea also likes the acidic soil, but is not as fussy about it like coffee.

After rounding one of those hairpin turns, somewhere in the teens, the driver started pointing out the different plants in the area, mentioning tea, coffee, cinnamon, cardamom and pepper. Just was went went around yet another hairpin turn Daren and I both looked at each other and yelled cloves! The air was literally scented with cloves! Have you ever put some cloves into a tea kettle and just let it slowly simmer on the stove, especially during the holidays, and your entire house has that wonderful warm smelling feeling? Imagine an entire mountain side smelling like this! We couldn't get over what we were smelling, and here on the mountain side. The driver then stopped, got out, walked over to a plant and picked several leaves and the seed pod and brought it over to us, which was of course the reason for this incredible smell - an actual clove plant. I thought they grew in small glass jars and just showed up at the grocery store all packaged and ready to buy! Incidentally, the four main spices used to flavor chai tea is pepper, cinnamon, cardamom and clove. The combination of these spices together are called Masala spices. If you are in a restaurant and it mentions masala, like masala curry, or masala tea, etc then this is the flavor you are going to get. Heaven on Earth!

Often, the road would wind into a small canyon like area that could not be planted for harvest as the ground was so steep. These are the areas where the jungle came out in full force. The size of the plants where something to behold. There was ferns, that looked similar to palm tree leaves, but were ground plants and the leaves would easily by 20 feet long! Some the the single fern plants would be the size of small houses. (Single lever houses in the states, not here in India.) The trees were so thick that to say you were in the shade was an understatement. It was very dark in some parts and I even took some pictures that didn't turn out very well because of how dark it was, in the middle of the day, with no clouds. The flowers came in every color of the rainbow and then some. Most of the flowering plants were in the area not affected by the heavy growth of the trees, so the sun would shine on them and they would almost glow they were so vibrant. The type of flowers growing this time of year, remember winter, were usually small, but there would be stalks of them, so even though the flower itself was small the overall impression they gave was of grandeur. The whole time was thinking to myself, this is something you would read about in one of J R R Tolkien's books, perhaps Rivendale or something. Then the cab driver said one thing and Daren and I both completely agreed the minute he said it - "Jurassic Park" At any moment a T Rex could come right out of the jungle! Okay, maybe not a T Rex, but the driver said that there were a few tigers in the area, and they actually had problems with wild elephants in the area. He showed us the type of plant that is their favorite to eat and then he showed us areas where they would walk through the jungle and mash down all the growth. It certainly looked like a T Rex had gone through there. We stopped several times to take pictures, and the sounds coming from the jungle were incredible. Insects that I'm sure we have never seen before, making sounds that gave the jungle a musical life all its own. There were birds of all kinds, including ones that we only see in cages like parakeets. This truly was God's country, and Mother Nature at her very best.

The last surprise for the trip, which we seen both going up and coming back was real live, uncaged, wild and happy monkeys! Now I've seen monkeys before, in Costa Rica, and if the truth be know these were not cute, but because they were small an in the wild, they were so cute! They were on the side of the road just hanging around, so Daren threw some crackers out the window to see what they would do and of course we got the response we wanted. They came over in droves. Grabbing the crackers and eating them and wanting more. We didn't hang out for long, but enough to get some good pictures of them very close up. There were even young ones in the trees watching us. On the way back down, we think the same group, but in a different place were once again hanging out, and we of course gave them more crackers and they were happy! They were kind of grey in color and perhaps just a little small than a Chimp. They didn't make much noise while we were there, but was happy to play in the trees for us.

I'm having so many challenges with uploading pictures, that I'm going to put a slide show together on flickr. When I get that going, I will post the web address and you will be able to see some of the great pictures in slide show format. We are entering out last week of practice here in Kovalam, and are not sure what we plan to do next weekend. We wanted to spend about 4 days in an ashram, but the one near by is full until the middle of March. I'll let you know when we figure it out!

Ponmudi

2008-01-26T21:58:00.001-08:00

It seems like every weekend we go somewhere and somehow the experience seems like its simply out of this world, and I just can't imagine anything getting better or at least living up to the last weekend, but every weekend seems to do just that. Yesterday we traveled to Ponmudi, which the destination itself is nice, but the journey there and back is what made this trip so memorable.

The journey of course begins in a taxi and on these roads! Its actually getting hard for me to want to get into the taxi. At the same time however when a bus is only 6 inches from our car moving towards us and what seems like break neck speeds I no longer flinch or tense up or even gasp for that matter. We drove through Trivundrum on our way to Ponmudi and we stopped at a super market. The local super market was going to be a blog entry, and still will be, but now I will be able to compare the difference between here in Kovalam, and one in the city. Very big difference.

Ponmudi is basically a mountain top at about 4500 feet in elevation. Its about 60 km from Kovalam, but takes over two hours to get there because of, well, the road! After leaving the city, going through the smaller towns, what we would call suburbs, life is so different in each and every one of the little towns. You can always see what their main industry is, by what is on the street. Weather they are farmers, or mechanics, or masons - everything of course being done by hand. Just outside of the city, the main highway to Ponmudi they were in the process of widening the road. They were tearing down brick fences and wall of homes. Now if you lived in one of these homes, this doesn't mean you are going to move or even need to. It simply means that if your main room in the house was 10 feet long, its now only going to be say 6 feet long! We widen streets, not force people to move. Now there were some housed that were coming down completely because they were so small, and we were afraid to ask what happens to those families.

On our way, as we were traveling through one of these small villages, there was a motor bike heading our direction and the sight caught me off guard, as I could see the driver, and sticking out from both sides of him I could see hooves! As the bike passes us, sure enough, there was the driver up front, then not one, but two goats side by side facing opposite directions on the bike, then another man in the back holding onto the goats. The very strange thing was that the goats did not seem at all upset, and were just sitting there like this is an everyday occurrence. Had we been going the same direction I would have taken a picture, but it was over before I realized how strange it was. After that, only several minuets later, a rickshaw was driving by with a baby cow riding along in the rickshaw. Once again, just like this was the everyday think and enjoying the ride since it didn't need to walk anywhere. Now, just to move forward to the trip home, near the same place as these two scenes occurred, we were riding along and in front of us this time was a small truck with an adult cow in the back. This really in itself was not unusual or strange, but as the drive began to pass the truck the cow decided it was time to use the restroom and since the driver and I were on the other side of the vehicle, Daren go a full view of what the cow was up to, and both the river and I found this to be funny and laughed!

We stopped at some waterfalls on the way up. This required a short hike on our part off the main road. We started into the jungle in search for this water fall - of course following a well designated path. The hike itself was beautiful. By this time, I'm not sure what the elevation was, but the coconut trees were gone, and in their place was another kind of palm, one of which I haven't seen before. Plus there were a variety of other trees, huge vines that grew up into the trees and the vines themselves in some places were wider than the trees themselves, and of course the underbrush with large leaves to catch what little sun they could get. On our way, there was a school field trip up to the water falls, and the student were in high school. One of the teachers came over to us and started talking to us, and we instantly became his best friend. At first all the students were shy to talk to us and just smiled, but over time they did warm up to us. There are three main questions that Indians like to ask westerners, and there are the same three no matter where you go. 1-whats your name? 2-Where are you from? 3-What do you do? Then depending on how good their English is and how well the conversation goes they want to know what religion you are.

Right after meeting this large group of students the path came to the river which required us to cross using a rope to hold on to while you cross over the rocks. So, off the shoes went and across the river we go! It was quite simple, and we then go ahead of the group and there were about 30 or so of them, and of course the teachers needed to make sure the students got across okay. This is a trip that would never have happened in the states, because of this part of the trip alone! Even the girls where crossing, dressed up! The falls were beautiful, and must have cascaded about 80 or so feet from up above into a crystal clear pool of water before going down the river. The Jungle was so thick in this part that you couldn't see more than about 10 feet into it. There were a few of the guys in the water wadding, and we went in to wade as well. Soon the school group caught up with us, and since the teachers, two by now had talked to us, were talking to us, the students that could speak English started coming over that talking as well. Already at the pool was another large group of people, not sure if they were school or family or what, because there were varying ages.

Of course they all asked us the same three questions, and then I got out the camera and you would think I had just struck gold! At that point everyone that could get around us did, and we started taking pictures of them and us and the groups, then the teachers started taking pictures with us and them and it was a good old photo shoot! We even had this really young boy who wanted to say Hi to us, but was very shy and every time we looked at time he would hide behind his mother and we would all laugh. However, once I pointed the camera at him, he came out from behind her and posed! We all started laughing at that one. Shortly after that it was time for the group to leave so they all came over and shook our hands and said goodbye, and even the ladies came over to shake our hands - and they would all laugh every time we finished shaking their hands. Once it quieted down again, Daren wanted to go for a swim. So he went into the pool, and there were four other guys there that were not part of the group and three of them followed Daren in, while myself and one other guy stayed just up to our knees in the water. It was very cold water.

Soon after, we headed back towards the main road to pick up our taxi and continue on to Ponmudi. Of course passing the group on more time as a party that large tends to move slowly. This of course meant shaking hands again, and talking again, but it was very enjoyable to talk to these students. The teachers invited us to have lunch with them at the restaurant on the way up there, but we missed it, and didn't see this group again.

I will talk about the rest of the car ride up and down in my next blog; the Jungle, because it is worth its own entry. We made it to this government hotel very near the to of Ponmudi, and was excited to get there because by this time we were really hungry and really needed to get out of the car, as you will understand in the next blog - just remember we go to 4500 feet starting from sea lever! Of course we are in India and this place was run by the government, so lunch was from 12 - 2, and we were there about 2:30 - so that meant no lunch! Lucky for us there was what we would call a convenience store in the area and so we raided it for some food. Crackers, mango juice (in a box like we have in the states for lunches), and a candy bar. Doesn't that sound like a great lunch?

We ate our crackers on the way to the top of the mountain. Once we got to the end of the road there was about another 40 feet or so we needed to hike to get to the top. There were lots of people around looking out in the various directions, of course being smarter than us, having picnics that they had packed, laughing and enjoying the day. At the top, even with the elevation it was still very comfortable temperature wise, but because of the humidity there is not much to see. The mountain tops in the distance were covered by mist (fog). The sky was not cloudy, but that high up is air was very moist. It was a different type of humidity that happens down here on the cost. Even though there was water in the air, it didn't feel heavy as it does here down by the ocean. It also didn't feel muggy - like just standing there you would sweat. It was rather comfortable, but I'm sure the nights can get very cold there.

Once again, several young guys, about high school age, came over and started talking to us, and slowly but surely we had a very large crowd of people around us. All wanting the shake our hands, ask us the three standard questions and practice their English on people who actually speak English. The group that was talking to us was a Christian Church group up there on a little outing. All of the sudden one of the Fathers came over with some biscuits, that were similar to corn, but they don't have corn here so we are not sure what it was, then they brought over my favorite desert here, payasam. The best way to describe this desert which is offered in almost every restaurant is imagine combining warm rice pudding and the spices of chai tea! Its truly incredible and I can guarantee you that I will be working on making this when I get home! Payasam can be made several different ways. Some places use rice, you can also use rice noodles/pasta or tapioca. Most restaurants use rice, but this was homemade and was made of both rice noodles and tapioca. It was incredible and every time I finished mine they would bring me more! I had three helpings! We talked to everyone including the Father of the group, and of course I got the camera out and the excitement of the crowd went crazy. After taking several pictures of them, us, us and them it was time to go. We must have spent at least 10 minutes trying to leave as once again they all wanted to shake our hands, give us hugs, say good bye, over and over. At last we got away and headed towards our taxi. The feeling you get when this happens is that you are some huge Hollywood star and the crowds just want to be next to you and talk to you and take your picture. That truly is how it feels when you are in these groups - they are just so excited to be near you... A very strange feeling, and even though I enjoyed talking to everyone, it can get old quickly and I truly feel sorry for celebrities who deal with this everyday.

So the next entry will be of the Jungle. The state we are in is called Kerala, and their slogan for tourists is "God's own country" and after the trip through the jungle I can honestly say that I have to agree with them.

Practice

2008-01-24T23:14:00.001-08:00

The City

2008-01-24T23:09:00.001-08:00

I suggest you read "Trivundrum" before reading this post. After leaving the museum is was time for lunch. We went to a location named "Casa Bianca" or "The White House". The lady who owns this restaurant is a friend of the lady who owns "The German Bakery" and "Fusion" both of which we frequent in Kovalam. The main reason for visiting these two all the time is because they are run by westerners and the kitchens are always clean and their level of food expectations are higher than that of the locals.

Casa Bianca is literally a white house that was turned into a restaurant. On the main floor the kitchen is where the kitchen was, and the living room is a large sitting area. Upstairs there are two bedrooms which have also been turned into sitting areas. There are probably only ten tables in the whole place. We sat upstairs overlooking some neighbors garden, which was actually taken care of. The kitchen was closed from 3-6 and the only thing they could offer us, was the salads, sandwiches and pizza. Kitchen's closed between lunch and dinner, but they can make pizza? So I had pizza! Pineapple, and a mild chili pepper. I actually enjoyed the sweet and hot flavor the pizza had. We also had ice cream for dessert!

After a late lunch we headed down to the Central Train Station. (Of course we did!) The people coming and going from this place and the number and length of trains arriving here made Grand Central Station look deserted. It was packed with people. The majority of people here in India do not commute to or from work so these people for what ever reason were traveling. We read in the paper, just this morning, that India wants to have 20 new airports by the end of next year. The only airports this country has, for the most part are international airports into the cities. For a country the size of the United States, or most of Europe, thats not many. The people here in India for the most part can't afford to fly. For those of you that remember, When I bought my ticket from Bangalore to Trivundrum the ticket itself was $35.00. Taxes on that ticket were $42.50. Everyone travels here by train or bus. I could have spent hours at the train station, but was only there about 20 min. I did get some good photos of the place, and some of the unusual practices they have. They are allowed to cross the tracks, even though there is the sky bridge that will get them safely to each platform, and they stand in between trains while boarding! Just amazing.

We then headed to the main Hindu Temple of Trivundrum. This temple stands about 60-70 feet high, and is about 1000 years old so not only is it made of stone, but is also shaped like a pyramid, with Hindu carvings covering the outside instead of step-like. This is the temple that is closed to the general public because of the fundamentalist Muslims. They have had threats on the temple in the past. So here is their thinking; We will close the temple to anyone who is not Hindu. Now, they don't have cards or ID's that say "Hindu in good standing" so they literally take everyones word that they are Hindu. The catch is, because you cannot by tradition, convert to Hinduism, you must be born into it, they do not allow any westerners into the Temple. If you have white skin basically you're out. So, people like us can't go into the temple, people who would completely appreciate the place. This does not however stop a fundamentalist Muslim from acting like he is Hindu and walking in with bombs around their legs. Remember from our last temple visit, men can't wear shirts in the temples. Now, my thinking is that if a fundamentalist Muslim is going to high-jack a plane and ram it into the side of a building, then he would most likely walk into a Hindu temple with a bomb and blow it up. Indians however, don't think this way. (okay, off my soapbox now.) So we walked around the outside and sat on the steps for sometime and talked to a few of the natives. They truly are incredible people.

On our way back we stopped at another smaller temple and they were just starting some chanting for one of the gods - sorry not sure which one is was. I stepped back and watched while Daren, knowing what was going on, took part in the process. They would go up to different shrines, that had the doors closed and would begin to chant something in Sanskrit. After a time the doors would open to reveal the god inside, and then a man would take a lantern (with fire), and move it around the god, so the god could bless the fire, then would walk out into the crowd and the people would reach over and figuratively pull the fire into them as to cleanse their spirits. They did this with about 5 gods inside the temple. The temple walls were covered in ceramic tiles with mantras written on them in what I could tell was at least 5 different languages. This was a modern temple with steal beams for the ceiling so not very old, and didn't have the feel like the older temples do, but was non the less, Holy. After that was over several of the men talked to Daren for a moment and gave him some blessed food (several banana slices) and then waved me over and gave me some as well, just for being there. This truly amazes me, for they know that I'm not Hindu because I can't be, and even Daren, but yet they welcomed us with open arms, had no problems with us being in their temple, and evening wishing us well for the evening. The last man we saw as we were leaving the temple said "Namaste!"

Each temple is a little different on how it is run. We stopped at one more, and could have gone in, but we were not wearing the right clothes. Men are only allowed to wear a lungi, basically a piece of cloth about the size of a towel wrapped around their wast, like a dress. Women wear something similar, but of course, covers the top of their body as well. Had we been able to go into the main temple we would have needed a lungi as well. The temple we had just come from where we were treated so warmly, they didn't care! I'm trying to post the pictures still, but remember that cameras are not allowed into any of the temples - thats the one thing that is consistent, so sorry about that.

By this time is was almost 7:30 and we wanted to get back to the hotel as Friday mornings are the led class which means Lino instructs us through the whole series, and you are not be be late for this practice which starts at 7. Not early, but when you have been in the city for the whole day, especially one like this, its easy to sleep in. Needless to say we were at class on time, but did also get 10 hours of sleep that night. If you are reading this Bruce I thought about you several times and remembering our first trip to NY. The comment you kept making about how dirty the city was. After spending a day here in Trivundrum, I would eat scrambled eggs on the side walk in NY, compared to this place! Dirt was an understatement.

Trivundrum

2008-01-24T21:54:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we went into the city of Trivundrum. This is about 20 miles from Kovalam Beach and is the city that we fly into to get here to Kovalam. This was the first time after being here three weeks that we went into the city. Trivumdrum has the population of about 1 million people, and the best way to describe this city, is the same way that I described the roads - organized chaos! We decided to take the bus to get into the city. First off, I wanted to experience the bus here in India, and second much cheaper. The cab fare into the city is 300 Rupees, the bus, 17. And that is for both of us! Riding the bus isn't as bad as I thought. However, because it was in the middle of the day, the bus was not busy. If you travel at peak times - we would call it rush hour- the buses look more like cans of sardines than buses. So we got a seat and everything. In fact, nobody was standing on our bus into the city. Riding the bus is very similar to riding in a taxi on the roads, however the advantage is that the bus is usually the biggest thing on the road so other vehicles tend to move out of your way...nice.

In the states, because we are such a lawsuit happy country, and god forbid that we take responsibility for our own actions, buses are only allowed to drop you off and pick you up at the designated bus stops, and no other place. You know, in case you fall or something and you are not at the bus stop then you will own the buses! Anyway, here, the bus is cruising down the road at a good pace and you decide you want on that bus - just wave your hand! If you have seen the movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix, the bus ride he takes in the begining of the book, yeah, thats what its like. The driver will just slam on the brakes to stop for you, and hope there is not a taxi, or better yet, a rickshaw right behind the bus, because then the rickshaw would be up the exhaust pipe. Same goes for if you are in the bus and just ring the little bell, and its a real bell, not some bell like sound from a speaker. On go the brakes! And lets just talk about those brakes - they do work really well, however they need to work on the sound of them. Daren's comment would be "I would rather here nails running down a chalk board than the brakes!" and I couldn't agree more.

Arriving in Trivundrum, we get off the bus at the main bus terminal for the city. Our first stop is to be the main city market - where if we want, we can do some shopping. The nice thing, is the market is simply across the street from the bus stop. The challenging part is the market is simply on the other side of this very big, very busy, chaotic, unorganized street! Now, I think to myself, I've been in New York City, and I can cross a very busy street! No traffic lights (unless you count the traffic cop who only about 10% of the drivers actually see him. Remembering there are no lanes per say, and we are at at intersection! So the best thing that comes to mind is the very old video game "Frogger". Across the street we go and for some reason, I think a bus, teh intersection became congested for a moment at traffic came to a stand still. There were about 40 people who took advantage of that pause in the traffic and went for it. We made it with no problems. Of course we were in the big city so we didn't need to watch out for ox, cows, elephants, or other forms of wild life.

The market really wasn't anything spectacular, or funny to write home about. It was a very long street, and someone at some point in time had the brilliant idea to make the road only one way, so you only needed to watch traffic coming from one direction. A good example of what the marked was like is think "China town" in San Francisco. Very busy with tons of people moving everywhere, and some cars but mostly motor bikes and rickshaws moving through the street. Shop after shop after shop of stuff. Sometimes I wonder what some of these shops are thinking, and if they really do sell anything, but I guess they do or they wouldn't be there. The majority of the locals are buying their fruits, vegetables, and flowers for the day. The Indians like gold, considering it the best investment, so there were lots of jewelry stores, and lots of shoe stores as well.

We went into a hotel to get some bottled water, (hotel here in India can be used for restaurant as well. There is a sign here in Kovalam that says Hotel and Accomidations.) and really confused the man because he wanted to get us a soft drink of some kind. Coke, sprite, etc. It took him a moment to realize we wanted water. Daren made a very good observation about the Indians, at least here in this part of the country. They don't drink soft drinks. Now, there are everywhere you go, but the only people you see drinking them are the westerners. Indians drink tea and coffee most of the time. While we were looking around, a place that sold items for school children, pens, bags, etc was selling a poster about healthy food. It wasn't simple as there were about 18 different things, or pictures, on the poster. They did include things like meat (for non Hindu's), milk, rice, wheat, fruit, vegetables, sweets, I really can't remember everything. This was given to school children, similar to when we had the four basic food groups, now the food pyramid. One of the items listed was PEPSI!!!!!! Soft drinks were apart of that list! Daren and I started to laugh really hard and pointing to the picture. The man asked was was so funny in broken English, and we told him in America we are working at getting soft drinks banned from schools because they are not good for you. You could tell he thought we were crazy, because this poster said Pepsi, it must be okay! I wonder who paid for those posters to be made?!?

After the market, our next trip was to the Trivundrum museum. This meant riding in a rickshaw for the first time! Several things come to mind when seeing/riding in a rickshaw. First off, the sound they make. For those of you from Utah, or have even been to an amusement park (Lagoon) that has those little cars that you drive around on a track, well that is what they sound like. Enhanced lawn mower engines with bad mufflers! They don't go much faster, and when going up hills I'm ready to put my feet on the ground and help out, kind of like in the Flintstones! The way the rickshaws are designed, one wheel up front and the two in the back, they so remind me of "Doom Buggys" (These are the vehicles you get into at the Haunted Mansion at the Disney parks to go through the attraction.) Of course the Doom Buggys are not as scary to ride in - no pun intended! The trip to the museum wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, and our driver could speak English so he was good at pointing out things.

The museum was an incredible looking building that was built for the purpose of being a museum, unfortunatly the government can't keep up these kind of places so it is a bit run down. The cost per person into the museum was 6 Rupees (12.5 cents). Most of the items within were of statues of Hindu and Buddist figures and such dating back up to several thousand years. They even had a replica of some stone stamps showing people in specific yoga poses that date to 2500 B.C. Thats 4500 years ago. Everything was metal, wood or stone, and there were several pieces of cloth the Bali, and a few other odd things. It only took about 25 min to go through the whole place.

Time for lunch, I will continue with another post this afternoon! Hope you are all well.

massage

2008-01-22T23:50:00.001-08:00

Its been over a week now, but I had a foot massage at one of the ayurvedic centers here in Kovalam. I scheduled it on a day that I thought I was just really sore from the practice and just needed a good massage to relax the muscles for the next day. I ended up being sore because my immune system was going into hyperdrive as later that day I realized that it was from something I had eaten. I slept the rest of the afternoon, and was very happy to realize I was hungry for dinner that night. I slept through the whole night, and I did miss practice that morning - the only one I have missed so far. By that afternoon I was feeling myself again, so my body took care of it very fast, which I was grateful for.

So the foot massage is not what you are thinking of. I didn't sit in a chair and someone massaged by feet for an hour - which I would not complain about at all, but this is how it went;

After signing in, the therapist comes and greets you. Then we went up to the third floor into the massage room. This building, as most in Kovalam, is made on concrete. There are no trees in this area that are suitable to use for lumber, so everything is either built out of cement, brick or tin. The roofs of many places are palm leaves however. The leaves for the palm tress are the only thing usable for construction material. Each floor of this place is divided into small rooms by bamboo. The bamboo is woven together somehow, to it makes a good partition, but that would be the best way to describe it Once in the room there was a table off to the side, a large mattress on the floor, a small bamboo stool, and a diffuser on a table gently heating the oil. In ayurvedic medicine they use lots of oils and herbs, so the table and mattress on the floor were both made of vinyl so that the oil would not be absorbed by the mattress, and could easily be cleaned.

Once in the room, you remove your clothes and sit on the stool and the therapist asks you several questions about your health. Then he begins by giving you a scalp massage with some kind of oil that is infused heavily with herbs. The massage is not rough, but definitely not gentle. It works the oils into your hair, scalp, and neck. It really felt good even though the pressure was quit hard. This lasted 5 or so minutes. Then you lay down on the mattress on the floor, face down. He then pours, and I mean pours, warm oil all over your body. Legs, arms, and core. Then he holds onto ropes hanging from the ceiling and begins to massage you using his feet. The main reason they do it this way, instead of on a table with their hands, is they work at balancing your energy throughout your entire body, and they are able to run their foot starting from your foot all the way up your leg, body, and arm overhead to your hand, and back down again. So instead of massaging your core (back), leg, then arm, they get everything at once and this helps move the energy all the way through your body.

Its amazing at how well the therapist can feel where your tight spots are just like a therapist using his hands. He will often stop and work the places that you need it the most. I would not consider this massage similar to a Swedish massage, but closer to a very deep tissue massage, as they can use their entire body weight to work the muscles. If you are looking for something simple and relaxing, this is not the massage for you. He also changes the direction of your hands half way through. You start with palms down, and then he changes them to palms up, and it completely changes the way the massage feels.

When he is completed with the back he has you turn over and starts over on the front side. Pours the warm oil all over you and begins the massage. Unlike a Swedish massage, he also massages the abdomen really well. The intention is to keep everything moving, and to help to body flush out the toxins. It is always advisable not to eat at the very least two hours before this kind of massage, and even no liquids, and make sure you make a toilet break before having this done. He does the same thing with your hands, and also with your feet this time. They face out half the time and in the other half. Once the massage is done, he hands you a towel so you can wipe off the excess oil, but you still are very oily as you should be, and allow the oil to absorb into the body, and you smell like a great tasting stir fry! They use sesame oil and herbs for this massage!

I do plan on getting one more massage before I go. Not sure if I'm going to get a foot massage or something else as they do offer several different kinds, we shall see!

Daily Life

2008-01-22T21:55:00.001-08:00

Okay, so now lets talk about daily life! Nothing is really that hard around here, and as you can see the culture is very laid back with no stress about whats going to happen next. The locals will sit in front of their shops for hours and sometimes days before they will get a sale and this is all part of their world. The hotel sits at the end of the paved highway into Kovalam Beach, so there are lots of taxi's just sitting around here waiting for someone who needs a ride someplace. Most of the drivers now recognize us so they have stopped asking if we need to taxi or rickshaw - now they just say HI or Good Morning!

Practice is at 6:45 in the morning so we are up about 6:30. Just about the time that the sun is coming up. Practice runs about 2 hours give or take and then its off to breakfast. We almost always go to a place called "The Lonely Planet." The main reason we started going there is because the kitchen is clean! However, over the weeks the people know us very well now, even to the point that we no longer need to order, because they know what we want. Me - Chai Masala Tea and Banana Pancake. Daren - Lemon Ginger Tea and Vegetable Ottapham. The main server is a young guy that doesn't speak English, but can understand some. One day the "manager" was no where to be found when we were ready to leave so the server just said "tomorrow". Meaning we can pay for breakfast tomorrow when we come. That is how laid back it is. Just try to imagine that happening in the states! Its also very quite at the restaurant in the mornings which is another reason we like going there. Its off the beaten path so there are not many people. Often we will go with some other students from class, or we meet there. It comes and goes not everything the same day. They also have a great view of the jungle from the seating area, including a small pond with fish in it. Living around the pond are some geese, heron and something else that no one can name except it really looks like a cross between a duck and a goose!

Our days are spent doing various activities. Checking email, writing in the blog and making sure bills are paid are the next main focus, after a shower that is. Then, sometimes I head down to the beach, if I'm in the mood for some sun and if the waves are good. I have found I don't like the ocean unless I can play in the waves so if its calm I don't want to go down there. The one thing I completely dislike about the beach is the sand! I don't mind laying on it, or running in it, or anything while I'm there, but when I get back I'm covered in it, and for some reason that just drives my crazy. So now I only go when I know I'm going to have tons of fun in the ocean. You can rent boogie boards for 50 Rupees an hour ($1.00), and so I'm getting pretty good at that as well.

I have also been doing quite a bit of reading, and have several books going at the same time. I've have finished 3 books already and almost done with the fourth. The one I'm almost finished with was one that many of you had recommended I take along with me on the trip; Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I can't thank you guys enough, and for mom for letting me borrow it before you had the chance to read it! It is a book that I think everyone should read. I think there is a little of everybody in that book.

Every so many days I do laundry. Now that means putting my clothes in the sink with a little shampoo and washing them by hand. I'm sure this sounds just awful when you are on "vacation", but I'm only wearing a pair of shorts and sometimes a shirt, so I don't have baskets full of laundry. Besides, the alternative is this... take your laundry down to someone to do it for you! Simple enough. They beat the hell out of your clothes in water that we are not sure where it came from, and on rocks! Yeap, no wash board here, just the good old rocks. Now, I hang my clothes to dry over the railing of the porch as we are on the third floor. They lay your clothes out to dry on the very rocks they washed them on! Yeap, on the ground. If you are lucky the entire article of clothing will be on a large rock, otherwise parts of the article will be in the dirt.....you decide. Oh, and you pay them to do this! (the picture is of towels being laid out to dry on the rocks! If I can get it to load.) Yes, just in case you are wondering, this does include our towels and sheets. However we think that our hotel hangs them to dry on the roof of the hotel, but are not sure!

We have decided that eating dinner early is best for us all the way around. First, because in the restaurants the food is prepared per order, if you go with the regular dinner crown about 7 or so, the wait can be up to 2 hours for your food. If you go at say 5:30 you almost have the place to yourself, and the food is out in 20-30 min. Plus you get the table of choice and here in Kovalam most of the views are of the sunset! That is an interesting spectacle in itself. Because of the humidity in the air, the sun turns an incredible color of burnt orange, and then actually disappears BEFORE it gets below the horizon. It is swallowed by the atmosphere itself before the horizon can get to it... simply amazing! Last but not least, at least for me, I have found its much better to eat than to be eaten, and be back in the hotel before it begins to cool off because that is when the mosquitoes come out, They just treat me like a buffet at Circus Circus! Those little beer bellied, back woods mosquitoes just look at me and say check that feast out! I even think they wear little t'shirts that say "Westerners taste best!" At night, when everything is quiet you can even hear them flying around when they pass close to your head almost as if they are teasing you saying "You are trying to sleep and I'm going to have dinner with you as the main course!" So of course you swat and thrash in bed and they are up by the ceiling watching you act like a lunatic before you calm down again, then they strike! I think they do that on purpose because all that movement gets your heart going and blood pumping so there's more for them. They go to school to learnt his kind of stuff I'm quite certain. I do use spray, even with "deet" in it and I'm sure it works but there are the few out there that could really care less. My body however is getting used to them and I'm not swelling up like I did on the first week I was here. After about the third night, just for kicks and giggles, if we could have found a pen, Daren and I were going to play connect the dots on my body! Okay so really not that bad, much better than I thought, but when you come from someplace where they don't live, they sure can mess you up.

A tidbit I forgot to mention in the last post. This is about the town we were in with the temples over last weekend. The town itself is a small fishing town, its really not a tourist place at all, so only locals head there. Because the town itself is actually located on the Eastern side of the continent, the year of the tsunami the locals were amazed that day when all of the sudden the water started receding out into the ocean, only to come back moments later with vengeance. Many locals headed out onto the sandy base because lots of fish could be had all of the sudden and that is what they were thinking... fish! The village lost about 1000 people that day.

One last thing for this entry, and I've been meaning to put it in since the first entry when I got here to Kovalam, but I have forgotten with each post until just now. It was very funny to me at the time because first off I had just spent the last 22 hours in the air, but also because you realized you are no longer in the US. Below is the actual statement made on the boarding pass after arriving in Bangalore and getting ready for the last leg to Trivundrum:
Boarding gate closes 15 minutes prior to departure. Frisking of persons and checking of hand baggage is mandatory for all passengers. Please co-operate with security. After I finished laughing I said to myself, "Welcome to India!"

Hindu Temple

2008-01-18T22:36:00.000-08:00

Note: I suggest reading Shiva Temple before reading this entry. The next place we went to was a very old and famous Hindu Temple. The site which is located on the mainland - the most southern point without going over to the island, has been considered sacred for over 3000 years and the temple is about 1000 years old, and still used as it was the day it was built. The best way to describe it is think either Mayan or Egyptian temples. The entire building is made out of stone with carvings in the wall of the ancient sanskrit language but written in the Indian Alphabet which made it that much more interesting. Knowing that the locals now can't read it any better than we can, but scholars know exactly what it says. All the Pillars, and walls are carved with different symbols, monkeys and elephants are used often, as is statues of the different gods. This is the temple where I actually had to check my camera in, so there are no pictures what so ever of this event. Of course the shoes go off even before you get to the entrance. Once we got to the entrance (okay visual here. We are the ONLY two white men that can be seen for miles!) We were told by one of the brahmin priests that the wait (people in line to get into the temple) was over an hour long. I was so excited about being there that I really didn't care how long the wait was. Of course he had something up his sleeve and said to us for 100 Rupees he would personally guide us to the inner sanctum of the temple. (100 Rupees = about $2.50) Of course we said yes. So shoes off, camera check, and men are required to remove their shirts, we were ready to enter the temple. He basically took us up the way out all the way in to the inner temple where the worshipping was talking place.
As we entered the inner sanctum there was a stillness in the room, and it was very quite. The room itself was not very large, maybe about 20 X 20 feet. It was very warm in the room because of all the lamps that were lit for both light and specific meaning. The lanterns were on columns which were either of brass or something looking similar to gold. There were four columns with about four lanterns on each. In the middle of this four columns was a space of about 10 square feet that was left open, marble floor only. The line of people entered the room looking at this area and straight ahead on the other side was a small chamber with a Hindu god located on the inside of the chamber. At this point in time we got in line to move around to view into the chamber. Inside the chamber was more lanterns and a god at the back of the chamber. The god was Ayappa. This from google: Sri Ayappa is considered the third son of Lord Shiva, and the brethren of Ganesha and Murugan or Kartikeya. The deity is steeped in legend and is unique to Hinduism, particularly to Kerala. (Kerala is the state we are in) When we got to the front of the chamber there is a man sitting there with a tray of talik, a red powder which you place on your forehead between your eye brows or the third eye center, which allows you to see god. Unlike in the western world where we always think of symbols of god weather it be the cross, or a statue, or a picture, they are just that; symbols. Here in India, when inside this temple the statue of Ayappa is not a statue, but the god himself. They are seeing and bowing down to the God with no thought that this is just of symbol of him.
Once we were finished with the inner sanctum we then moved back out and walked around inside the temple for at least another half hour and Daren was pointing different things out to me. The large columns, the carvings on the walls, some of the statues, the designs in the floor, etc. Remember, think very old stone temple here - just amazing! At one point in the temple (of course for a small fee) you can lite a small oil lamp for a wish or blessing you would like. This is similar to the Catholics having candles at alters in the larger cathedrals. We did that as our final view of the temple before we left.
What am amazing place. People flock here 24/7 to pray to Ayappa, and will wait in line for hours, because they feel that it is god himself there listening to them.
Once outside the temple we walked over to this other priest who was covered in body markings - made from ash or some other powder and was watching over a shrine in the courtyard. Daren asked about the body art and then wanted to be painted as well. The priest said he couldn't do it, Daren had to by himself, but that he would show him how. It was very specific as to the order and how you did it. That is the picture - the only one of the area that is posted. I chose to watch the ordeal which was comical because Daren didn't listen very well and the priest would tell him very loudly not to do it that way, do it this way, then I would laugh and the priest would say don't laugh! Of course I would laugh harder!!!
I truly appreciated meeting the Saint Amma, and getting a hug from her, but being in this temple was by far one of the most amazing experiences of my life. The feeling you had when inside the temple, the feelings of the people all around you, and knowing that this has been going on for 1000's of years was simply amazing!

I forgot to mention something about the island. Under neath the large temple was a meditation room which the people were allowed to go into if they choose to meditate. The room was very dark, no light except for a back lit large symbol of OM. There were speakers and a very soft chant was playing all the time. The floor was made of marble so not comfortable, but we went in for about 10 min and meditated. Once again an amazing place only because this is exactly what the room was made for and its all that happens in the room. (Body Pump doesn't follow!)

To end the story of this little day trip - what a trip for one day! If you recall the entry about the taxi, and the roads and what we had to share the roads with - well I thought the ox and cart where amazing. I have several up on that one now. On our way we shared the road with cows. Now, keep in mind that cows are considered sacred here in India, so if a cow decides it wants to lay down in the middle of the road to sleep, then we find a detour because thats where the cow wants to lay. Just hope that a taxi driver never needs to make the decision between hitting you or a cow because the cow will ALWAYS win. However, on the way back, passing through a small village (it was dark by this time so no pictures) we needed to make way for an elephant! It was a pet, and seeing that it was much bigger than anything else on the road it had the right of way.....which we gave it! The funny thing about this however, is that Indian's don't think anything of this. It would be like us moving over for a fire truck or something. So not really sure what to think of the next trip we take that will involve a taxi!

Shiva Temple

2008-01-18T18:27:00.001-08:00

Friday we took a trip down to kanyakumari, the very southern tip of India/Asia. Looking out across the vast Indian Ocean, which is the smallest of the worlds oceans. In route we stopped at the last noble families palace to take a tour of the place. We arrived at 1:10 pm, and the box office is closed from 1-2 for lunch. The man was actually sitting in the box office eating his lunch, but would not have sold us a ticket to save our lives, because it was lunch time. This is how India works - they don't think about having someone else do the job for an hour, we just close the box office.... Welcome to India. We decided it was not worth the wait and so we left. What we think of palace and what they think of palace here are different. Yes, the place was very large, but there was nothing that would have been worth seeing with and hour wait.
The journey there was down back roads, not the main national highways; the only difference, no strip down the center of the road! We did pass however very large banana plantations, that went on for miles which were fun to see. In between the banana trees would be small rice fields and between properties would be coconut trees. Very low land with lots of small rivers and bridges that we would cross which are only wide enough for one vehicle at a time. Some of the scenes were so incredible. As we crossed over one bridge the river forked and you could only see the water in the middle for all the coconut trees. Very thick like the forests of the Pacific Northwest. the waters are very calm, and moving up the river was a small boat. It should have been a picture on the cover of some magazine. Alas, I didn't have my camera ready, and we could stop on the bridge.
Once we got to Kannvakumari, the taxi driver took us right up to the place where we were to get our tickets for the boat ride out to Shiva's temple. They treat westerners very different sometimes than Indians. If you were an Indian the taxi would have parked well before the ticket area and we would have needed to walk, but not us. There will be other points I will tell about being a westerner.
While waiting in line to get on the boat the building we were in was very nice and built specifically to hold the passengers, waiting for the boat, cool during the hot summer months. The way it was built and the way the que ran reminded me completely of Disney. It would be something they would do. The boat however was not very Disney! It was a little scary, and Daren told me that last year one of the boats capsized! Thanks! The waters on the ocean were a little rough and the boat ride was interesting to say the least.
Once you get to the island the first thing you do is buy a ticket to be on the island. Now, in the states, if you bought a ticket at the box office usually you could get a multi pass ticket that would get you on the boat and the island because that is the only place the boat takes you to. Nope! Not here - stand in another line and buy the ticket to get you onto the island you are already on! (Keep in mind, that saying get in "line" is also a figure of speech, they don't really know what lines are.)
The next thing you do after passing through the gates is take your shoes off. (I can't remember if I have mentioned this before or not, so just in case. Here in India, your shoes come off before entering anyplace expect restaurants. Shops, most hotels, ours is run by some British people so we don't take our shoes off until we get to the room, and the shoes stay outside the room.) So shoes off, we go up the steps to the visit the temple of Shiva first. This temple is very new, within the last 8 years. The reason for this temple is that on the rocks there is a foot print that the Indian's say is Shiva's. The foot print is not imprinted into the rock but sticks out like like a mold. And it really looks like a foot print, toes and all. When Daren first came to this island 9 years ago, you could sit next to the print or stand on it, or whatever, but now they have built a temple around it and encased the print itself in glass. The temple is small and made of a dark almost black marble. The picture is of Daren and I in front of the Temple. (Going forward, pictures are not allowed with in the temples and one we went into we had to check the camera in before we entered so no pictures of the insides!)
There was a group of men there all dressed in black that are Shiva Devotee's, and come to the temple almost to worship the footprint. We started talking to them, they wanted pictures of them with the "white men" so we all took turns taking pictures of groups of us. Many of them spoke broken English so we were able to communicate with them. We ended up on the boat ride back with them as well. They are very interested in westerners and always want to know where we are from. Its funny because sometimes the locals know where Chicago is, but so far everyone has smiled at the name Las Vegas!
The second temple on the island is of Vivakananda. This was actually not a temple to him as would the temple to Shiva, but it was a very large building, much bigger than the one for the Shiva footprint. Vivakananda was the man who has been credited for bringing yoga to the western world. He made a speech in Chicago in 1893 at the first international religion conference. (The next time that conference was held was in 1993.) Here is some info of him from Goggle:
Swami Vivakananda was a great saint of India . The unknown monk of India suddenly leapt into fame at the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893, where he represented Hinduism. His vast knowledge of Eastern and Western culture, as well as his, deep spiritual insight, eloquence, brilliant conversation, colourful personality and handsome figure inserted an irresistible appeal to people. He was born in 1863. He was spiritually inclined right from his childhood. He was pained at seeing the suffering of the people. He met Ramakrishna Paramhamsa and became his disciple. In 1893, Vivakananada went to Chicago to attend the World Parliament of Religions. With his brilliant speech, he impressed a great number of Americans. He was welcomed wherever he went in America . Many people Ramkrishna Mission. He wrote many books including ‘Hatha-Yoga’, Bhakti Yoga’, karma-Yoga’ and ‘Raja-Yoga’. He attained Samadhi in 1902.
After the visit there, we took to boat to another island only about 50 feet way. (Building a bridge would require years of talking with the Indian government and questions as to why build a bridge they have always used boats!) On the second island is a statue of Thiruvalluvar, a famous poet, and the best way to describe that is think "Statue of Liberty" (The whole time I was there I was thinking about Ellis Island and Liberty Island, almost the same thing. Here is a description from a web page:
Thiruvalluvar is built exactly of that of the statue of Liberty in America. The statue is 133 feet tall which symbolizes the 133 chapters in his Thirukkural. This statue is built on a rock which is near the Vivekananda Memorial. This was constructed by 5000 craftsmen. This a typical example of the modern Dravidian sculptures.
Besides being a different statue, the only main difference between him and Liberty, is that he is made of solid marble, so you can't climb up to the crown, or in this case turban. (This is where you are supposed to laugh!) Otherwise it is so similar to Liberty Park its amazing.
After which we took the boat back to the mainland and headed for the Hindu Temple which is a story all to itself....

Food!

2008-01-14T21:15:00.000-08:00

Most of you should have know this would be a subject at some point in time. The food here is not at all what I expected. Because we are in a very popular tourist location, food is easy to come by, and good (meaning safe to eat.) We do tend to eat at several places over and over because of their reputation, but the selections are great. The thought process in India at restaurants are completely different from that of the US and most other western countries. Lets talk about taking orders. Most places will prepare you anything they can if you just ask, weather it is on the menu or not. This comes in very handy when nothing on the menu looks good or you are not sure what it is. Most of the restaurants use the old fashion ticket books like they used in the diners, only here they always write your order down in at least duplicate and sometimes triplicate. Not really sure why they do that, except that the book comes with carbon paper so they must feel they need to use it. You might be thinking well, one copy is for the cooks, the other copy is for the cashier and one copy for us. Not the case at all, because when you ask for the bill (they don't know what the word check is), they come back over to your table and rewrite everything down that you ordered on another ticket to give you with prices on it. This is almost always consistent in every restaurant. The next thing that they do here which is actually very nice is they make everything to order - and I mean everything. If you order coffee they ask if you want a pot or a cup and they brew just a pot or a cup, and if two of you order the same thing, they would brew one cup or one pot at a time so you get them at different times. Food comes out the same way. They make one dish at a time, so if you are there and the restaurant is very busy, expect to wait up to 1 hour before your food comes out. Nothing is premade. They don't mass chop veggies or have large pots of curry waiting for the customer, everything is prepared per order. We ordered a starter one night, but there were several of us at the table so we ordered two, and they came out one at a time, and even the entrees come out usually one at a time. So everyone gets their food at a different time. They do focus on one table so usually things come out right after the other, but still not at the same time. The advantage is the food is always hot, usually to hot for me to start, and you know its fresh. They use a type of bread which would best be described as a tortillas here and of course I'm eating tons of those, they are great dunked in the curry sauces. They can have on the menu 6 different types of sauces and if you ask them what they are they always say gravy. Even if you point to different ones they say "gravy"! So far there is nothing I haven't tried that I didn't like, some I don't think I would order again, but I have been able to eat everything I order. I have stayed away from meat, except I have tasted when Daren orders fish, but that's the only meat he eats. The fish are caught here on a daily basis, so at dinner you know it is fresh. The catch is they put in on display at the front of the restaurant for you to see, and sometimes choose the fish you want to eat....yeah, I can't do that!
Fruit salads are very popular here, especially for breakfast and lunch, which usually is composed of pineapple, mango, banana, red banana and pomegranate. They also offer fruit juices and yes they are juiced to order with only fresh fruit.....nothing that was made in Brazil, pasteurized and shipped here six months ago!
So, unlike what I thought I was getting into, the food here is great and I'm eating plenty of it.
I was going through the blog yesterday and noticed a mistake on one of the pictures (Casey, you of all people should have caught the mistake!) The picture is of a plane that I said was taking me to India from Heathrow and it was a Qantas plane - on its way to Australia. I decided not to change the picture, but I do have one of the British Airways 747 that brought me here!

STARBUCKS!

2008-01-13T21:52:00.000-08:00

This post won't be any fun if I can't get the picture loaded so trust me I am trying! After arriving in Varkala we went looking for a hotel and decided to stay in the first one we came to. It was very nice, freshly painted, bright orange with paper lanterns hanging everywhere. The room was on the second floor and it had A/C. I'm realizing over here that they don't offer things, you must ask for everything. This includes soap, toilet paper - which the locals don't use. There are sprayers near every toilet, like the ones in our kitchen sinks and the locals use them to clean after using the restroom. We also had to ask for a blanket. They are always happy to get these things for you and as much as you want, but you must ask. After getting settled, we went for a walk along the cliff where all the shops and restaurants are, and came across an actual American style espresso bar. Being this is the first one I've seen since Heathrow Airport I just had to have a latte. Made just like back home and tasted almost as good. the cost in US$ was 1.10. If I can't get the picture uploaded, the reason for the headline is they actually use discarded Starbucks cups. The kind that go through the making process where to logo is upside down, or sideways, something like that. They are perfectly good cups, they just don't look right. We were using the holiday cups from this year. The next morning while Daren was still sleeping I went for a walk again and of course just happened to find myself at the bar. I know hard to believe. While I was walking around with the drink in my hand, many people came up and asked where I go that - as they could see the Starbucks logo.....It really is a small world.
The beach in Varkala is about 80 -100 feet below the cliff shops and the only way down are some nice concrete stairs. The beach itself is great, the waves were very strong and fun to play in. In Kovalam the beach is somewhat protected by a cove, but in Varkala the beach is wide open to the Indian Ocean so the waves are larger and stronger. Dinner that night was good. We ordered guacamole for starters and when we got it, it was only fresh salsa so we sent it back and it came back with very small chunks of avocado in it, but still looked like salsa. Shopping in Varkala is better than in Kovalam because they don't pester you as much, they let you actually look at things. I think if Varkala wasn't as far as it is, we would head up there more often, but alas, the taxi ride is way to much on the nervous system. After a late breakfast that morning, we found our driver and headed up to the ashram.

Taxi !?!?

2008-01-13T02:29:00.000-08:00

Okay, so lets talk about that taxi ride up to the ashram yesterday. First lets set up the picture in your head. The national highways here in India are at best two car widths wide. When you get into towns the roads do widen up, sometimes quite a bit, if you consider all the people walking along the sides as they don't know what sidewalks are. Then there is that white line that they paint down the middle of the road. In the US that little line weather stripped or solid tells you many things like what side of the road you should be on, weather its safe to pass or not, etc. The Indian government could says millions every year by not wasting time putting the lines down on the road because the only thing I could figure out about what that line is for here is that yes indeed that is the road. I'm quite certain that if you asked a taxi driver what the line in the middle of the road was for he would ask you "What line?" (Note to mother: for you to ride in a taxi here, we would need to blind fold you, put ear plugs in, place you in the back on the floor and then sedate you!) To compare riding in a taxi here vers the states, if you have ever been in a cab in New York (Las Vegas would be a close second) that would be compared to riding Its A Small World at Disneyland compared to the cab ride here. So the roads here are shared by everyone, and everything! Cars, trucks, buses, motorbikes, peddle bikes, rickshaws (motored ones), carts being pushed by ox, and yes carts being pushed by people. Of course everything is going at different speeds so everybody needs to pass everybody else and its always at the same time! I honestly think that out of the 3 hour ride we were on the right side of the line at least 40% of the time and thats the wrong side! They literally drive down the middle of the road unless something is approaching ahead then they move over. The best way to describe the roads here is complete and total controlled chaos!!! I must admit it was fun for the first 20 min, then when I realized that my hair was standing on end and I wasn't breathing I should maybe watch the scenery go by and not watch the road. Coming home that night was even worse because headlights don't tell you much about the object in front of you coming at you! For the rest of the week we will be walking every where we go!
We traveled to Varkala on Friday afternoon and spent the night there before going on to the ashram. I can't wait to share with you about Varkala only because of the headline I have picked, and hope I can get the picture loaded. When we planned the trip there were going to be 6 of us so we rented a taxi specifically for 6 people and that had A/C. By Friday morning it was just Daren and I - but we didn't care, and off we went. While we were in Varkala we ran into some ladies that were also doing the practice here and they said they traveled to Varkala by means of rickshaw. Daren and I both went "WHAT?" So imagine spending two hours (we didn't take that long) riding in something slightly larger that a go cart, open to the heat, dust, and pollution and on these roads! Needless to say, talking to them this morning at practice they took the train home.
Last but not least. So we rent the taxi here in Kovalam Beach, and the driver takes us to Varkala where we get in, find a hotel, play on the beach, go have dinner, sleep all night long, breakfast in the morning, and get ready to leave at noon for the ashram and yes the same taxi driver, with a smile is waiting for us......this is considered normal here in India!

AMMA - The "Hugging" Saint

2008-01-12T21:36:00.000-08:00

We traveled yesterday up to Saint Amma's Ashram about 3 hours north of here. This was an amazing experience, that everyone should be able to have. The ashram is not like what most of us think. I always picture some small, quiet meditative place similar to what monks live in. A place that is very tranquil, with ponds and maybe a fountain. Try again! Amma's ashram is quite literally a city within itself. There are many buildings one of which is about 15 stories high, and this is located in the middle of nowhere. There are two temples, one being small and not used anymore as a temple because of the crowds she receives daily, and the new temple is more like a convention center - huge! There are literally thousands of people, followers and travelers that come to the ashram, sometimes for just a night other times for months at a time. The walk ways are full of people at all times, from all over the world. She sits up on stage and people wait not only hours but sometimes days for receive a hug from Saint Amma. Because we were foreigners we were granted access to the Saint sooner than Indians. We waited in line about 2 hours before finally getting down on our knees in front of the Saint, and receiving a hug. What a woman, who hugs everybody she sees with the same look of intense sincerity weather it was the first hug of the day or the 1800! (Thats not an exaggeration!) While we were in line we chatted with an Indian family, and even a guy from England, comparing our journey's throughout India. After the hug we ate at the ashram and the food was not bad at all. We had a veggie burger with real fries! There is no meat allowed at the ashram. Here is her official website if you are curious about who Amma is. She builds hospitals, schools, and homes for the homeless - she helped out with Katrina, and even though her ashram ended up under 3 feet of water after the tsunami she sent aid to the locations hardest hit. The world truly needs more "Hugging" Saints. www.amritapuri.org

The Hotel

2008-01-09T21:44:00.000-08:00

We are staying at a place called Green Shores Apartments. It is located on the main road ( the one with cars and taxis and rickshaws). We are on the 3rd, top floor of the hotel. The room is very nice as we have marble floors, (this is actually more common than you think. They don't have vacuums here so your floor is either wood or marble and marble is found here locally so they use it all the time. If you find a place with carpet, the use a broom to clean the carpet anyway, so marble is good. We have windows on two sides of the room, one overlooking the main beach and the light house, and the other over looking the rocky shore which gives us the great ocean sounds at night to fall asleep to. We also have a balcony that wraps around in the shape of an L. The beds look nice, which are foam pads on a board, but the headboard is nicely painted/stained. One fitted sheet and one flat sheet and a pillow. We do have a ceiling fan in the room which is the life saver because there is no AC. We also have a small fridge in the room, similar to a bar fridge which of course we keep the peanut butter in! The bathroom is better than many hotels I've stayed at in the states. Nice clean shower, western toilet and sink. Marble floors and ceramic tile walls. We even have a television in the room that has yet to be turned on and don't think it will.
Here is the kicker about staying at this place. When we leave for the day, we turn the key back into the front desk, if you can call it that, and when you return, they give you your key for the room! The key itself is one of those really old skeleton type keys you see in old mystery movies! This is not the normal practice for hotels, it just depends on where you are staying and what part of town you are in. Some of our friends actually place locks on their doors, locks that they brought from the US.
Because we are near the shore and up on the third floor mosquitos are not a real problem at night. They are out there, but we don't need a net around the bed like some of the hotels down near the swamp area. During the day they are no problem at all which is very nice.
My next entry will be in several days as we are heading to an ashram tomorrow after practice to meet the "Hugging Saint". In the Hindu religion you don't need to be dead for centuries before you can become a saint - so we are going to meet one! I will enter about that trip, and about the way restaurants work here when we return.
Please remember, the internet is slow here and I have challenges uploading the pictures, so they are coming but I will continue with the posts, and put pictures on when I can....

Wonderful!

2008-01-08T02:57:00.003-08:00

So I'm here several days into the adventure and things are going great! The practice is very good, and I've even already been able to get into several poses I couldn't do prior to leaving and its only been 3 days. I am also sore, especially in the hamstrings which is my challenge spot. Today was the new moon, and in very strict Ashtanga practice one does not practice on new or full moons. That only means about 30 of the 150 didn't show up today. Also today was no time slots so you showed up when you wanted to. Thats not a big deal for me as my time slot is 830 anyway - a little late for me but the time will change next week.
I'm getting to know my way around Kovalam Beach. It's hard to explain because other than the main road into town which is Lighthouse Road there are no roads to speak of. You walk everywhere through places we would consider alleys. One such alley is the picture I have chosen to post today for you. Getting lost could be very easy as there is no rhyme or reason for the directions paths lead, and you are also in the jungle which can throw you off. Having been in other places similar to this (3rd world) I guess my expectations were very low, because its much cleaner than I thought it would be and the beggars, homeless, etc are not as much as I thought. Now, not saying its not dirty because it is, and I know there are probably other places with more homeless, etc, but Kovalam Beach is much better than expected. This seems to be one of the places that the British come to on holidays like we could go go Mexico or the Caribbean.
The food is not bad, I haven't had anything I didn't like. (That should come to no surprise!) But there are things that I won't order again. I found what I like best for breakfast and that is a banana pancake. Now the only thing thats similar to what you are thinking and what I eat is that it has bananas in it! But they put honey on them and served with some real chai tea is incredible! Okay all for now...We are traveling this weekend to an ashram north of here to see a living saint!

Welcome to Kovalam Beach!

2008-01-05T23:10:00.000-08:00

It's now Sunday late morning, we have finished practice, and have had breakfast. The trip down here us very long, but gratefully, uneventful. The picture I have posted today is of the 747-400 that brought me here to Bangalore, India. This picture was taken right before they announce boarding. When we touched town in London I said to my self with a slight laugh - "Hey this looks like Seattle!" I realized that the last 5 meals that I had eaten, before arriving here in India were all at about 40,000 feet and at about 700 miles per hour! Talk about fast food! (Okay, I know, bad joke.)
After getting to the hotel and getting a little settled we went for a walk along the beach front with all the shops and restaurants. In some ways its completely what I expected, and in others not even close. The landscape is very tropical with coconut trees almost being a weed here. Its warm and very humid, but not as bad as I thought it would be. We had a small dinner at a German cafe (they treat food closer to us westerners) and it was only soup. Toured a little more, when to a temple, and then headed back to the hotel. Went to bed about 9 and I slept through the whole night....very good.
I will have more pictures coming soon, but just wanted to get settled before I lug the camera around, but wanted to let you guys know what I think of the place! So far, incredible.
The internet is very slow here and sometimes I have problems getting the pics to upload, so they will show up, but not always when the post goes on line.

On My Way!

2008-01-03T10:13:00.000-08:00

Its January 3rd, I'm in Chicago now about 4 hours before leaving for the airport. The flight to Chicago was very smooth with no hold ups. That was the worst of my fears was getting to Chicago because of bad weather or something like that. The day here is perfect, not a cloud in the sky. Of course it's only 5 degrees outside, but at least no rain or snow. I had breakfast this morning at a place called Earwax. LOL - its a really good mom & pop type restaurant with good service and the food is great - plus they cook real food the way I like it!
Many of you asked how much do you take on a journey for two months. Here it is.....This is all I'm taking with me. hard to imagine isn't it. Much of the stuff in the large case is things like shampoo, vitamins, shave gel, yoga mat, etc. Oh and of course peanut butter! the large bag weights in at 35 lbs and the backpack 30 lbs!
The day before I left Las Vegas, Jan 1st, I came down with a minor case of food poisoning! Sorry to the friends that I had made plans with that night - I came home from work early, and after getting rid of what was in my stomach, I slept from about 5 pm until 6 am the next morning, the big day. I had an 8 a.m. massage at CR, then a haircut.....yeap, didn't want to deal with hair while I was gone so off it came! After that I took Gonk over to Edie's house who is taking care of her while I'm gone, and then off to the airport.
This is the last blog I will be able to enter until I reach my destination of Kovalam Beach, South India. I have 20 more hours of air time with a 5 hour layover in London and a 3 hour layover in Bangalore. I will enter a new blog when I arrive - I hope you are all well.......

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2007-12-27T22:22:00.001-08:00

2008 is upon us! I don't think I remember where 2007 went, but I know it was fun! Here is a picture of Gonk sitting on the bathroom sink- getting ready to party for the new year! New Years Day will be the last day at Canyon Ranch, then the morning of the second I go in for a massage and hair cut, then to the airport to begin the journey! I am packed and ready to go, just counting the days down now. Not sure what I plan to do yet for new years eve, but I'm sure it will be something fun - this is after all Las Vegas!!!! So Happy New Year to you all, and may the trip begin!

Out Of Apartment!

2007-12-21T18:33:00.000-08:00

The last post stated there were two pictures and only one went through. So here is the other picture. It is looking south from the 103 floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago.
Today I turned in my keys to my apt. This was the last and final large step in getting ready to leave for India. I'm currently living with mom now, and am counting the days until I leave. In case you are wondering that number would be 12! Gonk is living with me at mom's right now, but will be going over to her friends while I'm gone. I only have one day off between now and when I leave and that is the day after Christmas....never thought I would say that! I want to say that I won't be going shopping, however, its the beginning of the Half Yearly Sale for Men at Nordstrom, so, well, maybe I will find myself in a mall. :) I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season, and more to come very soon!

Trip to chicago

2007-12-02T16:35:00.000-08:00

I have just returned home from my scheduled trip to Chicago. During this trip I was able to see Daren's studios, Moksha Yoga Center. The website is mokshayoga.com. It was great seeing the studios and seeing what Daren has accomplished. We were able to attend several classes while I was there, one from Tias Little, an incredible teacher from the Santa Fe area. The two pictures are from my new camera that will be heading with me to India. The first pic is of Daren at the base of the Sears Tower, and the other is a view from the top looking south, on the 103rd floor. I'm counting 1 month to go........

Greetings to Family and Friends

2007-11-17T19:00:00.000-08:00

Entry one here is taking place, November 17th, 2007. I am currently packing up my apt. getting ready to put everything into storage for the months of January and February as I travel to India. At this point in time, the apt is about 60 % packed. The next entries coming up will be for my trip to Chicago, the last preparations take place before heading out to India.