Two weeks living in Gokulam

I must have tried writing this blog post at least half a dozen times before realizing what the problem was—I was trying to write this as a continuation of the “getting re-acquainted with India” post, but that post really did not need a “part 2”—the getting “re-acquainted” was getting sick, lol.

What I have been trying to figure out exactly how to share is what I have been doing with my time here and what my life has been like during these first couple of weeks living here in India—well, aside from getting sick and trying to get well, lol.  On that note, I have been feeling much better after seeing an Ayurvedic doctor, Dr Anil Kumar this past Tuesday.  Dr. Kumar came highly recommended by a couple of people and, so far, I can say that the praise is well deserved!  He determined that I have a throat/upper respiratory infection and gave me some powdered herbs and spices to mix with honey for the cough (every time I take it, I hear that Mary Poppins song in my head, "just a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down...") and some Ayurvedic medicine tablets to treat the infection (along with, of course, some dietary guidelines since Ayurveda views food as medicine).  I started feeling better the next day and the cough has almost completely subsided.  My energy has started to return too and I am starting to get a little restless, eager to continue to go out and explore; which, between moving to 3 different housing locations, lol, was what I was doing a lot of until the infection made me slow down and take it easy, lol.

I would go out on what I like to call my “neighborhood meanderings,” where I would just set out without any destination in mind or on any schedule and just wander around the streets of my new neighborhood.  These meanderings were not just important in giving me a chance to find where I could buy my groceries, household items, water, clothing, books, and where some of the places are that many of the yoga students like to congregate, but there were crucial in giving me a sense of feeling grounded in a new environment that often felt like it was spinning with activity and new sensory stimuli.  They gave me time to engage my inner-compass (since the street signs are in another language—don’t worry, I do have a small map, though I rarely look at it now) and to casually explore whatever intrigued or just simply amused me.  It has also been important in giving me a chance to interact more with the locals here.  It was intimidating at first because I did not want to unknowingly say or do something rude and because I just thought that I wouldn’t be capable of communicating with people, but the more I let myself do it, the easier it gets.  Interacting with the people who live here is one of my favorite things to do because I love learning about and seeing how other people live, and they seem to enjoy sharing it with me.

Life itself here in Gokulam is….well, I’m not exactly sure what it is yet, lol.  Between getting sick and moving to different housing locations, I haven’t really had much of a chance to establish any routines yet, lol.  I do have a few though: I go to yoga in the morning, obviously, and then either casually linger around outside the shala, drinking a freshly chopped open coconut and soaking in the sunshine, or I slowly walk the long way home and just enjoy not having to rush off to work in the morning.  Now that I have set housing and have finally acquired some basic necessities for cooking, I get to enjoy eating all of my meals at home, prepared fresh—no storage containers, no re-heating, no eating my meals while waiting for the bus, or on the bus, or at work, or on the subway home.  I do my laundry by hand now, via a bucket and the faucet in the shower or, if it is a lot, I use the faucet outside my room.   But I have quickly learned not to go for more than a couple of days without doing the laundry.

~SIDE NOTE: do not wash any new colored Indian-made clothing or towels in the same bucket as your other clothes, unless you are going for the tie-dyed look, lol.  I swear they must add extra ink to everything, lol.  Another note: only use as much soap as you are willing to spend the time to rinse and wring out—you don’t need as much as you think you do and bending down over a bucket will get tiring really quick ;-) 

Having to bend over a bucket and wash, rinse and wring out my clothes by hand has given me a totally new appreciation for the labor that actually goes into washing clothes, and I actually enjoy it more because of that: because I have to put more work/effort into what I am doing.  There is something about actually being connected to the labor/effort that goes into doing or making something that makes it so much more valuable, such as washing clothes by hand, or cooking your own meals, mending your own clothes or walking to places instead of driving or taking a rickshaw.  Or even just simply being more connected to where the labor comes from, such as how seeing the lady who cleans my apartment cleaning the floors with a hand towel instead of a mop makes me appreciate her efforts even more and makes me more conscious of cleaning up after myself and my roommates.  Or how seeing the people digging up the streets with nothing but metal hand tools and carrying away the rocks via a plate that they balance on their head or the construction workers building houses with simple tools turns these creations into works of art in my mind and leaves me in awe of their strength and abilities.  I was waiting in line at a popular vendor the other day and a Western lady was trying to buy some milk and when the vendor came back with the milk in a clear plastic bag, the lady asked where the certificate was, validating it as organic.  The vendor told her that, “this is India, there is no certificate.  This milk comes from an organic farm 10km away, it is fresh.”  In a place like this where you are more connected to the community and to the people who directly provide your goods and services, you quickly learn that someone’s word and reputation become the “certificate” of authenticity or purity.

Anyways, once the clothes are as rinsed out as I can get them, I head up to the roof to hang them up on a clothesline to dry in the sun, and take the time to enjoy being up above the streets and the sounds, just taking in the sight of the neighborhood stretched out in front of me.

Speaking of sounds, you know what sound I don’t hear out here?  Sirens.  That was one of the things that I never really felt like I re-adjusted to when I came back from India the first time.  They drove me crazy because they made me feel like I was living in a constant state of emergency.  It seemed like every 10 minutes or so an ambulance, fire truck or police vehicle would come careening down the streets, screaming, “EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY!!!  EVERYONE GET OUT OF THE WAY NOW!!!!  EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY!!!!!”  Really?!  That often?  Every day?!   Here--no sirens, even though there is a hospital just around the corner from where I live.  I don’t doubt that there are life and death situations happening here every day—how could there not be with the way people drive, lol?  But, for some reason, there are no sirens here announcing every single situation at every moment of the day.  Do you know what sound I hear more of out here (besides horns and motors, lol)?  Birds.  So many new bird sounds.  I hear them when I wake up in the morning and throughout the day.  Mix that with morning calls to prayer for people of the Islamic faith and the sounds of water running in the morning for laundry or cleaning and it’s like getting to hear some sort of sweet new music.

Other things I have not been missing from back home:  chairs, cell phones and television/movies.  Coming from a job where I spent a large majority of my day sitting at a desk, no one needs to convince me of the damaging effects of sitting in chairs on the body.  Or, rather, the position you typically sit in while on a chair.  Now that I am sitting cross-legged on the floor for the majority of the times that I need to sit down, my knees hurt less and my hips are no where near as tight as they used to be.  I have a cell phone here but I rarely use it and have only a couple of contacts in it; most of the time, I leave it at home.  I can’t even begin to describe how nice it feels to not be tethered to a phone and constantly hearing that thing go off, demanding immediate attention.  Television and movies?  I was surprised to see how little I missed being able to watch them.  They are just something to keep the mind entertained and there is plenty going on here that is just as engaging, if not more.  I even don't listen to my MP3 player as much.

So, that is what my days have been like here right now: yoga, chanting class 3 days/week, conference (discussion) at the Shala with Sharath on Sundays with the rest of the time filled up with neighborhood wandering, laundry by hand, cooking at home, a couple of hours on the internet every other day or so down at the “Net Corner” internet box (I can’t call it a café, there are no food or drinks, just computer booths in a room on the second floor of a building, it’s a box, lol), reading and journaling whenever I manage to make myself stop moving (it’s a stubborn habit to break, this feeling like I always have to be doing something) and doing my best to not over-exert myself while my body is recovering from being sick.  Occasionally I go out and socialize with fellow students, but most of the time right now I prefer less socializing and more time to myself to just be in my new surroundings.  I do have plenty of photos to share with all of you, but the internet is slow right now and I have to go, so I will post some photos later :-)

Getting Re-acquainted with India, part 1

Hello All!

Yes, I know, it has been a week since I last posted something…bad blogger lady!  So, what have I been up to?  And why the absence?

Well, there are a few reasons for not posting something sooner.  The first of which is not always reliable internet connection where I was staying.  During the first 6 days of being in Mysore, I lived in 3 different places.  The first was with a friend of a friend at a place called Rashinkar’s Mansion.  I crashed on her couch from Saturday through Monday evening.  It was a very nice place, close to the KPJAYI shala, in a relatively quiet neighborhood (except for when the neighboring school’s marching band was out practicing in the morning, lol) and the internet was good, which is where the first two blogs were posted from.   But, I could stay with her past Monday evening and, in typical Indian fashion, I did not know where I was going to be staying that night until just a few hours before I moved.  Just about everything here happens on a much more casual and relaxed time frame—which is why the time at the shala is 15 minutes fast (“shala time”).  Anyways, I ran into a teacher who used to teach in Boston on Sunday and she was able to talk with her landlord and he let me stay there for the remaining 3 nights before I could move into my housing for the rest of the time that I am here.  I liked the set-up of that apartment, having my own room and my own key, so I could come and go on my own schedule instead of having to maneuver around another person’s, and getting to stay with someone that I already knew.  One of my favorite things about that apartment was that the back of the building faced east, so when I went outside to use the bathroom in the morning, I got to see the sun come up (see new blog cover picture).  Yes, you read that correctly, the bathrooms were outside (only one of the bedrooms in the apartment had a bathroom attached to it).  They were not porter-potties, just bathroom stalls (toilet, shower, and sink) separate from the individual apartment.  But, the internet connection was touch and go.  In the morning and early afternoon, no internet connection, same for at night sometimes.  During the day time, internet worked fine.  So, why no blogging during that time?  Well, there are a couple of reasons, the first of which I am hesitant to admit because I don’t want people to worry, but no posting about my experience here thus far would be complete without it, because it is affecting everything right now; and that is that I am already sick.

It started Tuesday morning with the ominous sore throat.  The prelude to this was a night of almost no sleep due to where the second apartment that I stayed at was located.  It was located on a main road of Mysore and my room happened to be on the street side.  I swear the motors from all the cars, scooters, auto-rickshaws, motorcycles and trucks are either designed to be twice as loud as the vehicles back in the States, or that Indian vehicles lack mufflers.  Or maybe it is just that all sounds seem amplified here, as though they seem to just carry further on the air?  Whatever it is, I barely slept at all that night and when I did, it was fitful, full of tossing and turning from one side of my body to the other.  That first morning after moving in, I woke up with a sore throat.  No sleep + air pollution + sensory overload = perfect recipe for getting sick.  The second night, still not much sleep and the sore throat progressed to general sinus pressure that quickly focused to mostly near my ears.  Fatigue was also setting in along with an increasingly wimpy digestion and the hint of a cough and increased mucus.  I started recognizing the pattern—this was almost exactly the same way I got sick the first time that I was here.  And not just the pattern of symptoms, but also the things leading up to it: poor sleep, increased air pollution and an increase of “noise pollution.”  I started using Echinacea and the nasal spray as soon as I felt the sore throat, but this seemed to be progressing too quickly to rely solely on homeopathic remedies.  So I have also been taking the Mucinex and Sudafed that I brought with me from home.  I also have some cough medicine and cough drops that I picked up the Ayurvedic chemist (that’s “pharmacy” back in the States).  All of those help to mitigate the worst of the symptoms, but we all know that it does not treat the thing causing them.  By my own diagnosis, I am pretty sure that I have a sinus infection.  So how I am I treating it?  I have acquired a neti pot and have cleaned out the nasal cavity (don’t worry, I use bottled water and boil it first—of course I let it cool down before I use it, lol) and am steaming with tea tree oil (a strong natural antibacterial) and eucalyptus oil (because it helps me breathe easier).  I am also drinking a lot of fluids including ginger, lemon and honey tea.  I have noticed some small improvements during the last couple of days, so hopefully this direction continues.  If not, rest assured that there is help here if I need it, both of the modern and homeopathic variety.  It has been almost a full week since the first sign of all this and I barely have a voice at this point, courtesy of all the coughing (don’t worry, it does not seem to be coming from my lungs, it seems to be just my body’s attempt to clear the gunk out from my throat).  My back muscles are also very tired and sore from all the coughing and there is a general sense of fatigue.  So, with all that going on, I have not really felt like blogging, though there is definitely much to talk about, almost too much…which leads me to point number 2 regarding the absence in posting.

As many people know, India is a place where all the senses are almost instantly assaulted with large amounts of information, all at once.  The air (as I mentioned) tends to be polluted even in the best of cities (Mysore is supposed to be on the lower end)—exhaust from diesel-powered vehicles, dust, smoke from trash fires (a lot of people here use small, controlled fires as a trash disposal method), new plant allergens all mixed with the smells of spices, animals and poorly disposed of trash (that was not burned).  That is a lot of information just in one sense!  Then there are the sounds—the loud vehicle motors, people calling out to each other in languages that are foreign to the ears, ringing bells from temples, barking dogs, new bird sounds, and the never-ending honking of horns.  For those of you who do not know, people use their horns here as a general form of communication when driving: “Hello!  I’m coming up behind you and am going to pass you!” “Hello!  I am coming out from this side street!” “Hello!  I am making a turn across traffic!” “Hi there!  I know you!” “Hello!  I’m coming out from this blind spot!” and, of course, “Hey!  Watch where you are going!”  It takes a while to recognize that not every honk of the horn is meant to be aggressive.  But, until that settles in, it still makes me tense up against the sound.  The sight also has a plethora of information coming at it: new buildings, bright colors, new trees, new fruits and vegetables, street traffic that seems to have no sense of order—with motor vehicles sharing roads with bicycles, pedestrians, cows and dogs plus human and animal-drawn carts.  I read in one of the guidebooks that my dad got me that there are only 2 rules to driving in India: “fill/use every possible space and the largest vehicle has the right of way.”  I would amend that last portion to, “the fastest vehicle has the right of way.”  You know who doesn’t have the right of way?  Pedestrians.  This is not Boston—the cars here will not stop for you to cross the street.  It is more like a game of Frogger, you jump/hurry across the street as soon as you see an opening.  And even when you see an opening, you have to look in all 4 directions (ahead of you, behind you and to both sides) as you cross to make sure that no one is going to run you over.  Sometimes it feels like vehicles materialize out of nowhere!  Then there is the paradox of modern technology and living mixed with still rural ways of life.  There are “internet cafes,” new cars, big beautiful houses, American junk food, such as Domino’s, Pizza Hut and Lays Potato chips (with flavor varieties never seen in the States!) and there are also people who still walk barefoot, carry packages on their head, construct buildings using bamboo scaffolding, use the bush on the side of the road as a toilet, dig a ditch in a street using nothing but a large hoe (and most of the people I have seen doing this work are women—working in their sarees or skirts, wearing no shoes or gloves.  It is sad to see but I also marvel at their strength), cows walking freely through the streets (which I actually love to see), vendors and stalls for specific items (such as the stainless steel vendor who calculated the price of my new cooking pot using an old-fashioned scale and weights), holy men walking the street asking for alms (offerings), temples that seem to come straight out of “old world,” and that you have probably only seen in movies or documentaries…there is so much to take in that it often feels impossible to try and describe it without having spent a significant amount of time just absorbing it—even though this is my second trip to India!

So, in addition to not really having the energy to blog because I am not feeling well (half the time it doesn't even feel like my brain is working enough to form sentences, lol), I just have not really been able to put words to my experiences just yet.  Each day feels so very different from the last, and the things that I wanted to blog about one day no longer feel relevant or important the next (or even at different parts of the same day).  Whatever this cold/sinus infection is that I am fighting is definitely affecting how I am feeling about being in India right now--being sick is hard, being sick in a foreign country is even harder and there are many times that I miss home right now.  But, with all that being said, there are still so many things here that I marvel at and love seeing.  I have spent a few hours hours each day (before I started feeling too drained from fighting this cold) going outside and just wandering around the streets for a while, exploring my surroundings, and taking some pictures, but that gets its own blog post ;-)  For now, I am tired and need to give my eyes a rest from the computer.  So, I will talk with you all later; to tide you over, here are a few pictures:

My current practice home: the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (shala is on first floor, Sharath and family live in upper levels)

Me sitting in what has become my post-practice perch outside the shala in the mornings...with, of course, a coconut in hand ;-)

Building under construction with old-school style scaffolding

"Spanish Tomato Tango!" "India's Magic Masala!" "American Cream & Onion!" and, on the second shelf, "Naughty Tomato" snack sticks

Gorgeous hand-painted elephant on the wall of the Krishna Temple in Gokulam

Cows enjoy coconuts too :-)

Strong ladies

One of the all-important coconut stands...18 rupees/coconut here (about 30 cents)

The palm trees here are not solely for decoration, watch out for falling coconuts ;-)

What are these odd-looking fruits you ask?  These are jack fruits!  And they are HUGE--picture 2 human heads next to each other and you'll get an idea of how big they are.  Can you imagine the explosion they make when they fall?!