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Squishy fuzzy yummy thoughts
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Friday, February 28, 2003
One thing that gives me an uneasy feeling in my stomach sometimes when I talk to Khyentse is the way he uses ethnicity to explain people's behavior, or his predictions for their behavior. If many of the things he is saying are true, then the parts of India that he has seen must be racist places.
It's disturbing to hear those things from him, but it is also disturbing to imagine what it means if what he is saying is true.
I do not feel as though I have experienced much overt racism during my travels so far. It might be because I am ethnically asian and have been travelling through ethnically asian countries -- maybe 40% of the people I met in South East Asia initially guessed that I was from their country. Or it might be that this kind of thing just doesn't register in my brain when I'm talking to people.
posted by wtanaka at 2/28/2003 02:52:00 AM
Thursday, February 27, 2003
First, a picture of some corn in China.
My friend has a cousin who lived in Lithang, Tibet until the age of 18. This cousin decided to leave Lithang for the Sera Monastery in south India, because he had heard of "Chinese cruelty," and he wanted to study Buddhism. He was apparently afraid that if he stayed in Lithang, he might be killed one day.
So one day, the cousin and a group of friends collected together their money, bought some food, and started walking. They walked for a bit more than two months, sometimes going for a few days without food, until they reached Nepal, more than 800 miles away, where some friendly Tibetan organization gave him enough money to reach the Sera Monestary by bus and train.
For a long time, my friend and his cousin did not know that they were related. Only after they both saw the same letter from a relative in Tibet did they realize that they were related. Since then, they have taken an oath in front of the Abbot at the monastery that they will treat each other as closer than brothers.
There are more than 6000 monks at Sera Monastery, so the Monastery is not able to pay for all of the medical services, books, clothes, and other things that the monks want and need. The Monastery suggests to all of the monks living there that they find their own personal sponsors so that they can afford these things. My friend's cousin asked my friend to help him find a sponsor, and my friend has asked me to share this story.
If you are able to and would like to help this monk, you can contact my friend sim_mk@hotmail.com. If not, I hope you found his story as interesting as I did.
posted by wtanaka at 2/27/2003 10:47:00 PM
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Perhaps I've seen enough when I'm not culture shocked by India.
posted by wtanaka at 2/26/2003 10:12:00 AM
On the road from Agra to Delhi:
lambs, 100 count, 5 flocks
camel rickshaw caravan, 2 strong
overturned busses, 2
men carrying gaudy ceremonial arcs of ribbons, or something, 6
birds feeding on roadkill, 2
pigs on median pulling up something, 1
tractors, 157
tourist busses, 17
bicycles, 526
autorickshaw, capacity 3, ferrying 9, 1
ox drawn carts, 49
people failing to flag down our driver to stop at a non bus stop, 12
blasts of bus horn, 120 pair
excessively loud hindi songs screeching on tinny bus speaker, 21
bicyclist hitching a ride by holding onto a truck, 1
ox herd, 200 strong, 1
sub-20cm high speed passes of other vehicles, 11
. . . of gas tankers, 1
number of times driver lets go of the wheel for 2 seconds at 60kph to pray, 1
posted by wtanaka at 2/26/2003 09:47:00 AM
I was stopped at the gate of the Taj Mahal. My offending posessions: two mini tripods and my palm pilot.
posted by wtanaka at 2/26/2003 09:42:00 AM
Taj Mahal:
pretty.
expensive.
indian citizens: 20INR
foreign tourists: 750INR
I'm not sure if it was even worth that much to see it, but if I were in Delhi and didn't go, I would need to spend a lot of time explaining why not to people. And saving that time is definitely worth it. ;)
posted by wtanaka at 2/26/2003 09:41:00 AM
we arrived in agra last night, late. khentse wanted to just walk to find a guesthouse. i wanted to figure out where the backpackers go. so we asked a man behind a food stand, and he gave us the name of a guesthouse and the approximate fare. he called us a rickshaw, whose driver was barely sober enough to speak clearly, and we were on our way...
to a different guesthouse costing 50% more than it should. I negotiated the price back down to 200 -- I think the driver had to reduce his commission in order to get us that rate.
posted by wtanaka at 2/26/2003 09:37:00 AM
the bus slows to a crawl. a police siren and then an ambulance siren whizz past. chattering in hindi. people stand up at their seats on tiptoes, leaning back and forth, looking out the windows. the bus drives, funeral procession speed, past a crowd of people, looking into an open space between them. in the space stand three policemen, hands on hips, looking down. on the ground is a bicycle between the legs of a prone man, face down, at the foot of a large truck's front grille. a stream of red flows slowly from below the man's head into a gutter, one meter away.
posted by wtanaka at 2/26/2003 09:33:00 AM
Monday, February 24, 2003
I landed at the airport in Delhi, after sending a mail to my monk friend here in India and not knowing if he got my email. In transit in Bangkok, security said that I could not take my swiss army knife onto the plane. Strange, since I had taken it onto the plane before. Different airports have different security levels, I suppose. I tried to send it home from the airport post office, but they would not accept parcels. Finally they let me check my backpack (with knife inside) as luggage.
I arrived in Delhi, and had to stand in line for about an hour at immigration. I picked the wrong line which was only being serviced by one immigration official instead of two. Plus some of the people ahead of me in line were having some kinds of problems. But the other lines looked like they were about twice as long as where I was standing in my line, so I didn't move. That turned out to be a mistake. I helped this vietnamese guy fill in his immigration card -- he didn't know much english at all, but through grunting and pointing, we figured out how to communicate.
I got to baggage claim right as one of the airport guards was carting away my backpacks. I took them from him. He said, "welcome to India."
I walked out into the meeting area to look for someone in monks robes, holding up a sign with my name (as that was his plan). None to be found. So I visited the tourist desk, found out how much I should be paying to get to the backpacker area, as well as how much the accomodations there should cost, and head outside to look for a bus. Several people hooked up with me, trying to give me information and figure out if they can con me out of some money. One of them said, the busses are over there, it is 50 rupees.
I said "50 rupees sounds reasonable." (that's how much the tourist desk said it should be)
He said, "where is your guidebook?"
I said, "what guidebook?"
He said, "you don't have a guidebook?!?!"
(at this point, you could sense the excitement in his voice, as he tried to figure out how to trick me into giving him some money)
I hear a voice:
"Wesley?"
I look up and see a baseball-cap-clad, denim-jacked wearing young man. Standing next to an older tibetan monk. After a second, I recognize him in his "civilian clothes." They both put a white Tibetan traditional scarf around my neck, and my previous company has disappeared, nowhere to be seen.
posted by wtanaka at 2/24/2003 09:33:00 PM
There's a monk here in Delhi. Apparently he came here from Nepal in an attempt to study here in India. At immigrations, even though he had all of the proper paperwork, he was arrested because he only speaks Nepalese and Tibetan and the immigration official could not understand his answers to the questions that were being asked. There are two monks here from Dharamsala now, who are trying to free this monk, who has been in prison for two months now.
posted by wtanaka at 2/24/2003 09:25:00 PM
2003-01-22 1749
I was just kissed on the forehead by a monk in Doi Suthep.
posted by wtanaka at 2/24/2003 09:23:00 PM
2003-02-08 1753
There's a man on the bus eating some kind of fluorescent yellow colored candied fruit. He is spitting pits out on the floor of the bus. The pits are landing about 30 centimeters away from the trash can in the bus. He sees me writing in my palm pilot and starts using the trash can.
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