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Dharamsala, India
32° 13' N 76° 18' E
Nov 07, 2007 10:51
Distance 0km

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Other entries in Dharamsala

Dr Ravi, Shopping for a Room, Buriat Culture

Text written in: English

My day started out a bit slow. I had stayed up too late talking with my Finnish friends and the hotel owner of the Ladies Venture talking about the greatest parts of universe while drinking Mongolian vodka and chain smoking and smoking.  There was a lot of smoking in India, but I am sure all of the compassionate Buddhists in Dharamsala are not quite the hard drug users that you might find on one of the beaches of Goa.

 

I spent an hour in the morning trying to catch up on blog entries and then the power went out for most of the day.  It happened often enough that some of the businesses had generators.  I had breakfast at the street side cafe which puts cornflakes as part of their breakfast set.   In most places cornflakes are by themselves which makes them kind of expensive.   For $2 the breakfast set includes eggs, cornflakes, fruit juice, milk tea, and buttered toast.  Its good.

 

I went looking for the volunteer coordinator to let me know if I was taking over the 4:00 class for beginner/intermediate students.   I would later find out that I was taking the class.  Its now my class for the two weeks I committed to staying here and teaching it.  It has about 8-10 students.  There is some varying levels of their abilities and they have high expectations from me.

 

While looking for the coordinator I ran into Dr. Ravi.  He is a yoga Dr., has the most expensive yoga course in India and claims to be an expert teacher of Hinduism.  We shared tea at the laundry women’s shop.  She was very nice and I learned about her business while talking to Dr. Ravi.   Dr. Ravi is exactly what you might expect of a stereo typical self fashioned Indian guru, he even dresses the part.  I met him in front of his studio while waiting for the Dalai Lama to return to Dharamsala after winning an award from the United States Congress.

 

In the course of tea and conversation he invited me to come with him for a lecture that he is giving in a town that is a 3 hour drive from here.  The lecture is about Hinduism, about Lord Krishna and other things that I don’t understand much about.  I know little about Hinduism. It seemed like an interesting social experience and I offered to take photographs of the even for him.  I also said that I would take pictures of him in different yoga positions.

 

Sadly all of this left me 6 minutes late to with my friend Jem who was a Tibetan musician who was trying to make a dvd but had little idea of how to go about making it.  I know little myself but with wikipedia and the right open source software, I am sure I could help him, but me being late, he went on his way.  I will find him again.

 

I had just enough time to upload a couple of journal entries, send one email and then confirm that I was teaching the 4:00 class.  I spent 5 minutes thinking of a couple of activities for the class and then I spent some time shopping for a place to stay. I went to a few low rent badly located hotels.  But they had silly rules like no washing your clothes in the room and didn’t seem to be what I was looking for.

 

I eventually found myself back at the apartment block that an English friend showed me. They were amenable to renting by the week; the place has a Spartan kitchen and a balcony with a view of the valley.  Its at least double the size of the small hotel room I had been staying in and seemed to have better natural lighting.  I spent about 5 minutes negotiating price.  They said the gas for the stove was included with no effort, but I was having trouble with price, until I said that I was thinking about it.  While I spent one minute trying to decide if I was going to cave in and take it for the price  or say that I would think about it and perhaps come back tomorrow, the price magically lowered by 10% and I decided that it was a fair price at 900 Rupees per week.  This works out to about $23 dollars.

 

I had to run back to make it in time for my English class.  Somehow I had become a makeshift teacher but I didn’t really know what I was going to teach.  For resources I had read a book on how to teach English and I kept thinking about to what my beginning classes in Spanish in high school were like.  Lucky for me one of my students from the day before suggested that she wanted a composition activity.  So I took some pens and blank paper to class and we did a composition activity.  It was also a chance for me to assess the writing ability of the students.  It should be noted that Tibetan alphabet is nothing like the latin one that we use for writing English.  I made the mistake of trying to read some of the compositions to the class, I think it only embarrassed the students and it was not very interesting and didn’t serve much purpose.    I ended up correcting the compositions after the class.

 

The other activity we did was role playing.  I put them in two groups of 4 trying to divide the strongest students evenly. They role played an accident between a motorbike and a car.  One group had a drunk driver and the police. The group with the teenage girls went pretty quickly to the hospital and then phoned family relations.  The students really enjoyed the activity and their was an incredible amount of laughing, but even though I told them to talk slowly, most of the English was not understandable and even when it was understandable it was nearly impossible to hear above all the laughing and chaos.  So I wasn’t sure if it was effective for learning.

 

After that I had 15 minutes left of my hour and wasn’t sure what to do, so I tried to lead the students in conversations about things that they like, we went to football and cricket at least twice and one of my students told me that they have another conversation class.  So to sum it up, its like a baptism by fire but I feel like I can get much better at it with some practice and more practical experience.   I hope I can live up to the expectations of the students.

 

One of my students is from Nepal, another is from Laos.  Three are younger Buddhist monks.  Two are Tibetan teenage girls, the only girls.  The other three are older men (30’s and 40’s) who I believe are refugees who fled Tibet.   I am sure they will teach me all sorts of things about life and the universe and of course Buddhism.

 

I also was doing a 6:00 conversation class which is much more informal and basically I just try to keep as much lively and interesting discussion going as possible.  As long as everyone participates and we don’t get bored talking, then its something of a success.  The demand around town for these conversation courses is spread over at least a few different schools and organizations.   But for this night I didn’t do the conversation class because there was a Performance of Buriat and Tuvan singers.  They were having a convention of Russian and Mongolian Buddhists in Dharamsala.  So there were ethnic Russian hippy Buddhist types, Asian ethnicity people from Russia, the largest group being Buriat.  Their ethnicity is similar to Mongolians.  Even more interestingly was that I had visted Buriata during my stay in Russia. 

 

Vika, my Buriat friend was very good to me when I visited her in Siberia, and after that her family took me in for a few days.  She is currently studying in the state of Ohio on a Fulbright scholarship.  I spent the first 12 years of my life living in Ohio.  I am sure Vika would have loved to come and visit Dharamsala, but she will have to settle for what I have written here.

 

The performance was out of standing room and waiting by the exit I could hear some of the performance.   The performers were extremely talented and the crowd loved them.  They sang folk songs, did throat singing and had extravagant and lavish traditional costumes. At the end they even did an Indian themed song, wearing Indian dress.

 

After that I joined a few newly made friends for conversation on the rooftop of the Carpe Diem restaurant. I drank mango juice and tea.  They smoked and drank some beers.  There were a few good guitarists and a Pottery Arist named Bill from Colorado with his 16 harmonicas (I’m not kidding). The conversation was really good and it seemed like a good way to end the day.  I flirted a little too much with a girl from Belgium, but it was harmless in a good sort of way. 

 

It was a good day.  That’s the way it was.  So for me, it’s at least two more weeks here in Dharamsala.  I realized with watery eyes that as time passes parts of my crazy life trip are just starting to sink into my consciousness.  Listening to Buriat performers seemed to bring my trip full circle after having visited their homeland.  I am also starting to feel very relaxed knowing that in India I don’t have to switch cities every three days.  Even when I do leave Dharamsala I have some more ideas for lingering in some other places around this country.  As my trip starts to wind down it seems like a perfect way to finish.  I have been too much of a tourist, and now I finding cultural experiences with more depth. And there is nothing wrong with that.