hello!
i'm back, finally.
i guess we have a lot of catching up to do. don't worry. i haven't forgotten about you. I did some writing in my journals over the past month that i will share with you.
Northern India is marvelously quiet and cool in the winter.
I have been at Santosh Puri Ashram since November 9th. I took a clinical yoga and ayurveda course for the first 20 days, then some other studies of chakras and the ancient text the Bhagavad Gita and 10 days cooking course of Indian and ayurvedic cooking, which was marvelous. I also spent the month of December observing silence. So everyone had to put up with me not talking. What am i saying, they probably enjoyed it. ha ha
I learned many many things from this ancient spiritual exercise.
The ashram is situated on the river Ganga, halfway between Rishikesh and the holy city of Haridwar. The village is a place lost in time where a foreigner still draws a crowd just by the simple act of stopping to buy a toque. At times, this is magical, that the place is so untouched by tourism, by mass consumerism, by worldly concerns. At other times it is maddening, if you are looking for something or just would like to have a simple..... what am i saying, there is nothing "simple" here. Nothing that i take for granted at home is simple here. It is like a different planet altogether. When I go out for a walk, there is nothing to buy. The biggest indulgences i can find in the village are a bag of stale chips or a papaya or Indian sweets made from boiled milk which I acquired a taste for, out of necessity. The rest is all eggplants and zucchinis, lentils and sugar.
I attempted to take money out of the one bank machine in town. The fact that the screen was DUCT TAPED should have been my first clue of what would happen next. One of my worst fears travelling overseas is that some Indian ATM will suck up my bank card and it will be gone forever and ever, along with every penny in my name, leaving me to selling fresh roasted papadams on the roadside for my living.
Anyhow, on with the tail....
The ATM took my card and its sweet time counting out the equivalent of $500 CAD in rupees.. The screen said (yes, the duct taped one) "please take your cash" ok, easy enough, but i must have stood there 4 or 5 minutes while the machine clunked and croaked and made sounds like it was readying itself for a moon launch. All the time i'm sweating about my card being deep in the belly of the beast. Finally all sounds stopped and it regretted to inform me that my request had been declined, like an RSVP to a summer garden party. I deduced that this was probably due to the fact that the amount that i had requested was more than what the average Indian spends in 6 months (according to the India Times the average Indian lives on about one dollar a day!)
I doubted whether the machine was even stocked with that much currency as no tourists frequent this bank, only local villagers, and all the time spent clunking was probably it trying to count and extract non-existent bills. No harm, no foul, i was just glad that it was so gracious as to spit my card back at me at the end. phew!
more stories to come
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