Howdy friends. Today I’d like to update all of you about an adventure we went on for a four day weekend a few weeks back that our trip leaders referred to as “the pilgrimage.” It wasn’t a pilgrimage in the sense of having a particular objective or destination. For many of us it was more a break of routine and a chance to get outside our academic minds for a while. But it was certainly a pilgrimage in the sense of a journey with a variety of experiences; some significant and others insignificant, some exciting and others boring, and so on.

In the spirit of that kind of pilgrimage, I am going to make a couple of stops in this post by splitting it up into two, because there’s a lot to say. So without any further stalling, here we go!

Once upon a time I went to Japan with my parents, and we went to a whole lot of temples. As a kid it was a little exhausting, and I’m sure there was much complaining. On this trip we also visited a lot of temples, but as an adult they were much more interesting. The first non-food or restroom related stop of our journey was Tashi Jong, one of the first Tibetan refugee communities established in India. I was carsick during this stop, so although I guarantee there was a temple my memory is mostly of digestive crackers and some cute puppies that were running around so I don’t have a lot to say about that.

Our second stop was a monastery called the Deer Par Institute, In Bir. This particular site was created in order to allow for balanced and friendly practice of all the different sects of Buddhism and Indian thought. It had a temple where I never had a chance to take photos, but we did have two really nice meditation sessions there. Both times a bird somehow wiggled its way through the wall and then just sat inside chirping loudly until someone got up and opened the door. I’m sure there is something very Buddhist that I should say about that, but mostly it was just a little distracting and a lot funny.

We had to work for the privilege of seeing our next destination. The walk wasn’t terribly difficult, but we did get to see some more of the beautiful Indian countryside, which really is hard to get enough of:

Our hiking destination was the Palpung Sherabling Monastery. I hope my lack of descriptions of the temples so far hasn’t made you think that they are not spectacularly impressive in every way. They are, even though the photos I have are not particularly impressive (they tend to be dark inside, which makes things a bit more difficult. At a later date I will see if I can get some better ones, but for now these will have to suffice:

Those last sculptures are made out of butter that is dyed different colors and then carved/sculpted into some pretty amazing shapes. Alright folks, that’s all for this time. Light on text and heavy on pictures, as usual. Don’t worry though, part 2 will be coming up shortly! For now, look at these last two photos from the excellent walking we did during this portion of the trip:

A few weekends ago I had one of the most fun day trips of my journey so far, and not only do I have a few interesting things to share, I actually have photos too. Hooray!

But first, here is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle that I read. Editor's note: this is foreshadowing for the events of this post. "Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God."

One of the program coordinators here suggested that there were two good sites within reasonably taxi ride distance from where we are staying: the Masroor rock cut temple and a nameless wildlife preservation that was supposedly hosting a large flock of rare Russian birds for the Winter. Naturally, we couldn’t pass up that opportunity, so we called a taxi and departed on our journey.

After a nice drive through the mountains we arrived at our first destination: a temple carved straight into the sandstone rock at the top of a mountain. The site had experienced an earthquake that partially destroyed it and was being renovated, but it was still fascinating to see the intricate carving:

It wasn’t a terribly large temple, but there were still some pretty fascinating structures to look at. Like many sites here, there are some basic shapes that are replicated at all the levels of the design. So for example, if you look at the carvings you will see the same steep dome shape that makes up these big pillars, which you can also see in the structure of the whole temple itself:

Because it was relatively small, we didn’t end up spending as much time here as we expected, so we returned to our taxi and headed for our next destination. We had a hard time communicating with the driver about where we wanted to go, but eventually we thought that we had basically gotten the point across. We got a little uneasy when the drive lasted longer than we had expected, but we didn’t feel strongly enough to suspect that we might be going the wrong way.

Then, something rather unexpected and utterly confusing happened. In all the photos you’ve seen up to this point, the terrain is mountainous and covered in all kinds of trees. But somehow we ended up driving endlessly across a perfectly flat plain. Check out this photo I took out of the car:

This was some of the most open terrain that we have seen on the trip, and despite our uncertainty about exactly what was happening or where the driver was taking us, we felt immensely relaxed and just enjoyed the view for a while. But then, something even more unexpected happened: we drove over a little hill and all of a sudden we were at the edge of this:

Somehow we just stumbled across a completely amazing lake, complete with still water, rocky shorelines, and rowboats gliding around all over the place. What did we do to take advantage of this beautiful location? We asked one of the boats to take us out for a ride, of course!

So that happened. We had a picnic lunch on a rowboat with a gentlemen whose name we could never find out on a lake we didn’t know existed at a place that may or may not have been the reservation we were looking for in a country where clearly there are much things you can do than get lost and confused. All in all, it was awesome.

Hello again friends. Our resident photographer Tyler Sit just gave us access to some spectacular photos, so I would just like to leave these here for your enjoyment. All of the following are photos from the first few days of the trip when we were staying in Delhi. The beauty and scale of some of the places we have visited it truly amazing, I think you'll agree:

Thanks for checking in! More to come soon.

Hello everyone! So I just realized that I have been extremely greedy by not sharing any of the wonderful knowledge that I am accumulating here, so I would like to take this opportunity to teach you all some Tibetan. It’s super straightforward, particularly for English speakers, so just follow along and I’m sure it will make perfect sense right away. Buckle up, here we go!

Let’s learn how to say hello first, because basic greetings are always a good way to start. Here’s the Tibetan for hello:

བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས

Doesn’t look too bad, right? Ok, so let’s get started by spelling it out. Each set of characters, separated by a dot, makes one sound. That sound is determined by which letter is the main letter and whether there are any prefixes, suffixes, second suffixes, vowels, head letters, or subscribed letters present in the syllable as well. Lucky for you, this phrase doesn’t have any head letters, so you can ignore that for now.

The first thing you should know is that all the consonants have an inherent “a” vowel sound attached to them, except when that is overridden by the presence of another vowel written above or below the character, or sometimes by a suffix or second suffix to the main letter which can change it to an umlaut or do other stuff, depending. So the first letter of the first syllable is a “ba.” The second letter is a “ka,” not to be confused with “kha,” “ca,” or “cha,” of course. But it also has a subscribed “ra,” which for our purposes doesn’t alter the sound enough to explain here. Now because the “ka” has the subscribed letter we know that’s the main letter, so the “ba” doesn’t matter and the first syllable would be transliterated (using Wylie) as “bkra.” We are on our way!

Now to save some time, I’m just going to spell out the rest—I’m sure you could figure this out on your own without too much trouble. The second syllable would begin “sha,” but there’s a vowel “gi gu” over the top which changes it into a “shi” sound and also tells us that is the main letter, and then the suffix is a “sa.” So the second syllable is “shis.” Make sense? The third syllable is “ba,” just like before, followed by “da” but with a “’greng bo” which makes it a “de,” and the third syllable is therefore a “bde.” Finally, The last syllable is “la,” “’greng bo” which makes it “le,” “ga,” “sa” to become “legs.” You drop the inherent “a” vowel sound because there is a vowel above the main letter.

See how easy it is! Now you have learned some Tibetan! Transliterating from the Tibetan script to Wylie, we get “bkra shis bde legs.” Now of course, that’s just the transliteration—there isn’t any phonetic spelling systems because there are too many sounds that are so similar to Western ears that they are indistinguishable. Plus, there are tons of words that sound exactly the same way, but are spelled differently, which means that most of the letters are actually silent anyway. You just have to know which ones they are, and then memorize the pronunciation. Since you all are just getting started, I will go ahead and tell you how to pronounce this phrase. It should sound something like “tashi delek,” with maybe a little bit of a “g” or “h” sound in place of the “k” at the end than you would expect.

See how easy that was? བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས becomes bkra shis bde legs which is pronounced tashi delek. It’s like learning a bike really, you might fall down a couple times but if you’re willing to memorize letters and rules until you are blue in the face just to get the pronunciation right and then what the words actually mean on top of that you won’t have any trouble at all. Best of luck! That’s all for now, I will be back later for a less sarcastic post.

So far I have not been accurately representing the extent to which I am travelling with a most excellent group of human beings who are really making this trip amazing. Here we are in all our glory: (Photo credit and many thanks to Tyler Sit)