A day at yoga school

Since Dave and I split up our blogging skills have severely diminished, as I'm sure you've noticed. My excuse is I've been very busy learning to bend and twist, I'm not sure what Dave's excuse is-based on my experience of him around beaches, he has no excuses and is just being lazy.

Here's what an average day looks like for me:

5:30 am- I get up, yank on running clothes and head up the road. It's dark, so I don't run on the beach, I stick to the road where there's a few street lights to illuminate the semi-wild dogs who get a big kick out of barking at me and chasing me down the road. I yell at them to leave me alone, but all I get is weird looks from the local people who stand at the ends of their driveways brushing their teeth and waiting for the man who sells vegetables from his bicycle basket.

7:00-8:00 am- After a frantic shower in which I worry about whether my roomate will one day slit my throat in my sleep for showering every morning right when she wants to brush her teeth, I rush to meditation. As most of you know, I am notorious for being late- another constant worry as I try to shower quickly- but, or perhaps because I am so afraid of coming in late, knocking something over and interrupting everyone meditating, I haven't been late yet (fingers crossed this continues).

Meditation isn't my strong point. My problem isn't, as you may assume, clearing my head of thoughts. No, my problem is I can't stay awake. It's as if my body has an automatic switch, if I sit still, doing nothing, for more than 10 minutes, I fall asleep. So everyday is a struggle, not to clear my mind, but to stay sitting upright at least look awake. Even on days I don't run this is a problem, so I don't think getting up too early is the issue.

8:00-10:00 am- After my generally unsuccessful meditation practice, we have two hours of asana class. In the first two weeks we were guided by various instructors, but since Monday, we have had to lead our own self practice. Initially I thought "oh god.... two hours of yoga... I'll get so bored!!!!" But the time actually flies by, and I've really enjoyed practicing on my own.

10:00-11:00 am- When 10:00 am arrives, it's finally time for breakfast. Everyday we're given fruit salad, porridge, yogurt, museli, toast and juice. I can't eat porridge or yogurt, and I don't particularily like museli, so my options at breakfast are limited to tropical fruit salad and toast. This morning during meditation I wrote this blog in head (it really helped to keep me awake) and when I got to the part about the fruit salad, I thought I would say I was about to go mental if I ate another bowl of papaya, pineapple, banana, apple, orange and some awful brown fruit I always pick out- BUT, luckily, they added strawberries and pomegranite to the usual mix- so I haven't gone mental, and I'll live to eat another bowl. (It was madness this morning when people caught on that there were strawberries- people were hiding around corners ready to bounce when the staff put a fresh bowl out- everyone wanted to be the first to pick through and make off with the strawberries).

11:00 am-1:50 pm- Breakfast is followed by one or two classes; this week we've done teaching practice everyday immediately after eating (which always makes me feel like I'm going to have to see the fruit salad all over again) but last week we mainly had anatomy or learning to teach classes. Practice teaching involves us splitting into groups of 3 and each taking a turn to "teach" for 20 minutes to half an hour, then sharing feedback with each other. Over the last couple days we were evaluated by our instructors, a process some people found nerve racking.

1:50-2:10pm- After our morning classes we are given twenty minutes before lunch to meditate, swim, run, walk, dance or do whatever we want that doesn't involve too much thinking (no reading, writing, talking). After sitting around all morning or patiently enduring teaching practice, I generally do handstands.

2:10-4:30pm- After our little meditation/celebration time we eat lunch. Lunch is always a salad of cucumber, carrot, tomato and occasionally avocado and lettuce, all cut into geometric shapes. You may be thinking, oh how nice, I'd like a salad for lunch everyday too! But, I urge you to think for a moment about raw carrots cut into geometric shapes and what that would be like to eat, day after day, mixed with nice soft cucumber and lettuce. After a while, it becomes all you can think about- will they grate the carrot, will I have a pleasant lunch, or will they cube the carrot, causing me to chew like a rabbit for half an hour? In addition to salad we get rice, dal and curried vegetables. Unlike the geometric salad, the dal and vegetables are prepared differently everyday.

After lunch we have a break until 4:30 pm. I usually eat quickly (as is possible given the shape of the carrots) and go to the beach to swim and lay in the sun. Sometimes though, I make the arduous journey 200 meters up the road to use the internet, which generally doesn't work, before returning to the Ashiyana bubble.

4:30-7:00pm- Following our break we have another one or two classes. Apart from anatomy and teaching practice, we study philosophy, the subtle body, bhakti and practice karma yoga. Philosophy is lead by our instructor, and owner of Ashiyana, Chris. The classes are based on Patanjali's sutras as interpreted by someone else. I find the classes interesting, and I don't worry too much about things I don't understand or agree with. Other people, however, get quite heated when they don't agree or understand what Chris is saying. It doesn't help that in response to nearly every question Chris says "I want you to examine where your question is coming from. You may find that when you do, you'll find it is only your disturbed mind talking, and the question becomes unimportant." A bit of an easy way out for him I'd say.

7:00-8:00pm- Once we've all been told we have disturbed minds, we're given dinner. The geometric salad makes a reappearance, along with more rice, dal and curried vegetables. In addition, we usually get something a bit more "non-Indian" like pasta, grated potatoes with spinach puree, chicken or fish or sometimes, if we're very lucky, pizza. We also get dessert, something we all look forward to all day. It generally doesn't live up to expectations, but, like pizza days, sometimes we're lucky and it's something delicious like chocolate balls.

8:00-9:30pm- Dinner is followed by a final activity, usually a sharing circle, chanting, dancing, or a movie. When we finish this activity we're not supposed to speak until 11:00 am the following day, so we all slip of to bed in silence, ready to do everything again the next day.

I hope this helps explain why I haven't written in so long! I have to rush now, to make it back for Karma yoga. Today I might have to do beach cleaning, since I put off doing it the last few sessions.

Love Alice

ps. I saw Dave on Sunday, we spent the afternoon together on the beach, but maybe he'll tell you all about it.

Surviving the Post-Alice Apocalypse

Dear faithful readers,

Some of the previous blog posts may have led you to believe that I am an incompetent invalid who couldn't possibly survive the dangers of traveling without a certain Alice Muirhead to manage my affairs. I thought this too. I mean, I get lost all the time, I'm a huge sucker when it comes to getting scammed, I speak with everyone on the street who says hello, and I have barely looked in the travel guide over the past 4.5 months. However, like a bird violently pushed from its nest in order to learn how to fly, Alice's abandonment has pushed me to new limits.

While Alice has been living it up in the lap of luxury, working on her bendy skills, I have been having solo adventures, meeting old friends, making new ones, and defying death at every turn.

Alice and I split up in Agra, with her going to Goa and me going to Pushkar. I took a bus from Agra to Pushkar and narrowly avoided an accidental trip to Delhi which would have added a handful of hours to the overall amount of travel to Rajastan (I didn't look at a map and thought that Delhi was where I wanted to make a connection to Pushkar but it would have meant going from Agra to Delhi and back again).

There wasn't much going on in Pushkar. It is mainly known for shopping and a camel festival, but I didn't shop and left town before the festival started because the cost of accommodation quadruples during the two week event. It was dusty and I sneezed a lot because of the mix of dirt in the air and the camels walking around in the streets. I met a really great guy from California named Peter who let me share a room with him for 3 nights so I could stay at the same guest house as Noy and Ira from Minali/Rishikesh.

In Pushkar there is a sacred and ancient lake associated with the legend of Shiva. I was given a handful of 'free' flowers to put in the lake for good luck, but when I went down to put them in I was grabbed my a Brahman who recited a blessing for me, my friends and family. He prayed to four different gods, asking for health and happiness for seven people. Afterward, he did some math and multiplied the number of people prayed for by the number of gods prayed to and told me I had to make a 'donation' of 3000 rupees (70 dollars). I told him I only had 300 rupees and he told me it wasn't possible to give so little. I was annoyed. It smacked of extortion combined with some old school Medieval absolution vending. The good thing about making a 'donation' at the lake temple was that afterward a string is tied to your wrist which indicates that you have made an offering - this string tells the many beggars on the street to leave you alone. I don't know if the string system is actually an effective deterrent because the string was tied so loosely that it came off the next day and I received plenty o' hassles...

The good karma from the lake actually carried forward because I nearly lost a silver spoon eagle ring (from Haida Gwaii) to a henna making gypsy, but in the end I got it back (my never ending faith in the goodness of people validated despite the nay saying of others)... I was walking in the market when I was grabbed by two women who started doing henna on my hand before I could say no. I figured "this is happening" and allowed them to drag me into a chai shop where they told me their life stories and covered me in swirls and squiggles. Despite my better judgment I allowed one of them to pull of my ring so that she could henna my middle finger. She slipped the ring onto her finger and I cringed anticipating some sort of problem. It quickly slipped my mind and off I went to meet up with people for breakfast. When I went to wash up before eating I realized that I left without the ring. The people I talked to on my way back to the market (to essentially find a needle in a hay stack) all assured me it was a scam and that the women are thieves etc... I didn't believe them because the women were so sweet, and hoped in my heart that it was all just a mistake. I looked and looked and after 30 minutes gave up the search. As soon as I gave up they appeared bright eyed and smiling. It seemed as though they were looking for me with the same enthusiasm with which I was looking for them. They gladly gave me my ring and I was touched my their inherent goodness. Yippee!

The only other interesting things that happened in Pushkar involve near death experiences. The first notable event was an earthquake that shook the city one night. I was asleep, but I spoke with people who said that things were really moving - but there didn't seem to be any death or destruction which is really lucky. The other nearly fatal story involves an Israeli pizza bread called a ziva. I had a ziva and went into anaphylactic shock. My throat closed up, my eyes and face puffed, I couldn't breath and I was super itchy all over my body. The Israelis I was hanging with immediately tapped into their army training and laid me out, elevated my feet, gave me a bunch of stuff to drink and went by motorbike to get some antihistamine pills from the pharmacy. I was better in no time, but it was really scary an totally lame. I asked for the ingredients in the ziva and there wasn't anything out of the ordinary so this may be an experience I'll have to repeat until I hone in on what it is I'm allergic to.

To sum up, I'm still alive, and doing fine without my old friend Bad Alice. I miss her, but know that she is off bending somewhere and that makes me happy because I know it makes her happy.

I'm lazing about on the beaches of Goa. Got here from Pushkar by train - 35 hours. Longest train ride of my life, but it went really quickly because I was traveling with great people. When we arrived in Arambol we rented an apartment overlooking the ocean for 5 bucks a person. It was a sweet pad with a humongous patio but I couldn't take anymore Hebrew and have settled into my own bamboo hut on the beach at the whopping price of 150 rupees a night - just over 3 dollars.

Sorry I didn't take any photos over the week. My camera was out of batteries and I am a lazy bastard. I've snapped a few photos here in Goa and will upload whenever I get sick of splashing around (yeah right...).

Comments?
xoxoxoox

Taj to Goa

Dave and I have written every post together (me correcting his half French half English spelling and grammar and him making me less boring) so it's a little difficult to write this without him... but maybe you'd like to know what I've been doing?

First, the Taj Mahal. Unfortunately the sky wasn't clear- a combination of dust, pollution and post-Diwali fireworks- but we went anyway and took the required 5000 photos. Here are a few...

So as you can see, we have seen the Taj Mahal.

After seeing the Taj, I left Dave sitting forlornly on his bed and began my long journey to Goa. I have been doing yoga off and on since I was about 14, and the idea to do a teacher training course had crossed my mind. However, I always put the idea away, thinking that I wasn't good enough, that there wasn't time to do a course, that I couldn't afford it or that I'd be a terrible teacher. Over the last few months though, Dave and I have been doing yoga whenever we can with lots of different teachers (some good, some named Dilip....) and Dave asked whether I had considered becoming a teacher. I explained my issues with the idea and he destroyed them all. So I was stuck- I wanted to do it, my reasons for not doing had been destroyed- I had to do it! I spent hours and hours googling places (whenever I would give up Dave would send me back to the computer to look more) and finally found a few places that looked good. Unfortunately, they were full (I guess people usually think about this more than a week before). However, fate intervened and the centre I liked the most emailed me to say they had a cancellation, the spot was mine if I wanted it. One plane, one rickshaw, two taxis, one train later and one night in the wrong hotel, I arrived at Ashiyana.

I've been here one week and so far, the experience has been incredible. I get up around 5:30 am to go running (stupid early I know, the sun isn't even up), then we have breathing exercises and meditation from 7-8 am, an asana or yoga class from 8-10 am, then we're given breakfast. The rest of the day is a series of classes in anatomy, learning to teach, different forms of meditation, philosophy and chanting. We're given a break after lunch for a couple hours, which most of us use to run to the beach to fry ourselves in the sun. The teachers are incredible, the food is great, the centre itself is beautiful... in other words, everything has dramatically improved since I ditched Dave.

This is the beach....
This is my super awesome roomate Renee with her dry wafer cookie...

That's all for now... I don't know where Dave is or what he's doing, last I heard he was taking a 30 hour train ride from Pushcar to Goa.

Agra- Happy Diwali!!!!!

Vendors selling flowers for Diwali

Today we are in Agra, home of the famous Taj Mahal!

Unfortunately, it's Friday, so the Taj is closed.

We decided, after nearly two weeks of yoga, eating and lying around that it was time for us to leave Rishikesh. We knew it wasn't going to be easy- we'd heard all the rumors about trains and buses being fully booked with people traveling for Diwali- but we figured we're lucky people, things will work out for us...

Nearly 16 hours after leaving Haridwar (the closest city to Rishikesh) and 27 hours after leaving our hotel in Lakshman Jhula, we staggered, near death, off the "luxury sleeper" bus we had to take after learning all the trains were full. Dave is better at describing things, so I'll let him write about those 16 awful hours.

Boom, Diwali!!

Well, I'm actually going to take a little trip back in time and tell you about the preamble to the bus ride which included a whole day unexpectedly spent wandering around in Haridwar... We left Lakshman Jhula after an early breakfast because we wanted to get to Agra as soon as possible - but got stuck in Haridwar for 8 hours because there was no train available. I wasn't stoked because we could have been laying around in the cafes of Rishikesh instead of marching under the hot sun of Haridwar, but Alice persuaded me to see some sights and it actually turned out to be a great day. We tried to find this secret temple that you can only access by a secret tram...but it was all such a secret that we couldn't find the place, so being quitters, we gave up. We did however find a chain restaurant that offered the world's largest selection of Dosas (the whole WORLD). I didn't have one, but the one Alice had looked like a triangular piece of heaven. Anyway...in the evening we sat along the Ganges and watched people, young and very old, bathe away their sins in the sacred river - the whole while shoeing away children selling blessings and old men trying to collect donations for the maintenance of the river (both scams). As the sun set we took in the nightly Puja ceremony where Indians turn out in the thousands to launch flaming offerings into the river, sing, bathe, and cleanse themselves in holy flames. It was unbelievable to think that it happens every night because it is a real commotion, and the build up to the actually ceremony took several hours as the crowd grew bigger and bigger.




So the bus ride... We bought the tickets at a travel agency near the train station. We were assured that it was going to be a good bus, heading directly to Agra over night, and that we would have sleeper seats # 7 and 8. When we got to the bus we were a little confused because there weren't seat numbers at all, but letters! To add to this confusion people were screaming at each other inside the bus in a murderous tone, and one woman was even trying to choke a man to death over what we believe was a seating dispute. Not wanting to get choked out, or to have to choke someone ourselves, we asked where we were to sit and told that we could take sleepers C and D. Hearing this, I took sleeper C and Alice took sleeper A! Shortly afterwards a man approached Alice and said, "Is this your seat?". Alice, not wanting to give away any information that she did not have to responded with, "Is this your seat?". The two of them went back and forth until the man said "It is okay, I'll just sit with him" - meaning me, in Alice's spot which would have meant me having to spoon, or be spooned, by a total stranger for the entire bus ride. Thankfully Alice took pity on me and moved over to join me in our designated place.

All seemed well. We were in seats. Nobody was choking us. The bus started rolling. It did not take long however for things to go India. The bus broke down approximately 20 times, the first brake down occurring not 5 blocks from where we left. We just accepted the situation, trusting we'd get where we were going, and nodded off to sleep. The sleep was actually fairly restful, except for the fact that the window that I was smushed up against kept rattling open giving me a face full of dirt and dust. When dawn came we woke up expecting to be in Agra, instead the bus had got stuck in sand nearly two feet deep on the right hand side. This occured at a bottleneck on the highway and blocked traffic in both directions for more than an hour as we tried to push and pull the thing out. The bus was in danger of tipping over, so everyone got out, except for Alice. I assumed she stayed in because she hates doing anything that anyone tells her to do, but it turns out she was trapped inside and couldn't get passed the engine cover that was blocking her only escape. Eventually we got free, and we on the road again, more than 4 hours over due and with many hours of travel still ahead of us.

Breakdown!!!

The absolute worst part of the bus ride was that there was no toilet and after 12 hours of driving we hadn't been given the opportunity to go to the bathroom. I peed on the road when the bus got stuck, but poor Alice who was trapped inside had to endure 14 hours of urine welling up inside of her before she asked the driver, nearly in tears to "schtop da bash" to let her out for a wee. He refused, but eventually was persuaded by Alice's charms. It is a good thing too because Alice was getting desperate. She even tried to pee in a bottle, in full public view, but lost her nerve because she was physical unable to do so. In this period of intense madness Alice was blindly groping around a storage compartment for an empty bottle to pee in on the moving bus. She put her hand inside, got hold of a bottle and pulled it out only to find that it was already full of someone else's desperate urine. - Alice just informed me "That I was so desperate that I was considering sticking my butt out the window."

(To put Alice's pee story in context, and to not overly emBareAss (get it?) her, I will tell a bus pee story of my own from the trip to Minali. You see, it had been many hours since I had been to what passes for a toilet here in India, and I was in pain. It was the middle of the night, very dark, and the bus was rattling down one of the worst roads I have ever been on. Each jolt sent a dagger into my bladder, and I yearned for relief. Alice and I were 2 of only 7 passengers, and all was quiet on the bus. I figured "now or never", whipped my pants down and stuck myself out the ever open window (it wouldn't close). I tried to pee but the road was so bumpy that I hit my head on the storage compartment above me (it hurt) and decided that another blow might render me unconscious and I didn't want for Alice to have to deal with a half naked, unconscious Dave, covered in his own pee. I held it and eventually, thankfully, the bus broke down and I peed.)

To wrap up the bus story, it wasn't direct and we ended up having to take a public bus from outside Delhi to Agra. Alice and I have some disagreement about the distance we were from Delhi (whether or not "outside" may be appropriately used) but I'm sure nobody cares except for Alice. Carrying on, I stood most of the way, but we finally arrived dirty, stinky, hungry, and exhausted in Agra.

We postponed seeing the Taj Mahal upon arrival because of our weakened state. Unfortunately, the Taj is closed on Fridays (today) so we're going to have to spend an extra day in Agra to see the thing tomorrow. The day wasn't wasted however as we saw the Baby Taj, the Agra Fort, and an old Persian-style tomb. I am going to let Alice write about this because she is better at writing about the boring stuff...

The first thing we saw today was Chini-Ka-Rauza, the tomb of Allama Afzal Khan Mullah, poet who worked for Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and later served as his Prime Minister. The monument was once covered in beautiful glazed tiles, applied in a style unique to Chini-Ka-Rauza. Now however, the tiles have mostly fallen off and only the brown structure remains. From there we went to the Itimad-Ud-Daulah, or Baby Taj, a masoleum built by Nur Jahan, the wife of Jahangir, for her father Mirza Ghiyas Beg. Mirza Ghiyas Beg was the grandfather of Mumtaz Mahal, the wife of emperor Shah Jahan who built the Taj Mahal. Made of carved white marble and decorated with inlaid flowers and patterns, the Itimad-Ud-Daulah was really beautiful (though the French tourists were a little overwhelming). We went from there to Mehtab Bagh, a park across the Yamuna River from the Taj Mahal. The view would have been spectacular, but it is very hazy in Agra, making it difficult to see anything. Our last stop was the Agra Fort, a giant structure that was used as a base for governing India by many generations of Mughal leaders. The Fort was really spectacular, especially the areas made completely of marble.

Chini-Ka-Rauza


At the Itimad-Ud-Daulah

Itimad-Ud-Daulah

Agra Fort

Tomorrow Dave and I are going to see the Taj Mahal, then I will take a train to Delhi. From Dehli I'm flying to Goa to start a yoga teacher training course. It wasn't part of our original plan (not that we had a plan, other than eating mango's-which we're failing miserably at) but Dave convinced me I should take the opportunity while I have it (I think he's just trying to get rid of me). The course is a month long, but I doubt that's enough time for Dave to die, get lost or stolen- he'll probably still be sleeping when I find him again.