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Published: December 15th 2009
Holy cow!
YEah, another cow at the beachHard to believe I arrived in Goa a month ago! Maybe because I don't move much outside of Candolim and the surrounding areas, it is hard to believe that I spent a whole month here. But about a week ago I was thinking each day was extremely long... I spent a whole week with a stomach bug, and I was doing even less things, not even yoga practice, and being close to Christmas on top of that, I developped another disease: I became homesick! As much as I love India, I realized how much I love to spend Christmas with my family and how much nicer it is when you have a white Christmas... And how much it sucks to be sick and away from home!
But now I am healthy again, and although I would still love to spend Christmas with my family, I decided to take full advantage of my time here and started enjoying Goa again, and I also plan a pretty cool trip for the month of January once I leave Goa...
But for now, I just tried to upload some photos, and it is a bit difficult for some reason, so I hope they
Vagator Beach
3 yogis and Shiva at the beach will all be posted (14 of them), last time only half of them ended up on the blog. Last Friday I took my camera to Mapusa for the Friday market... The pictures aren't great because I try to take them when peolpe are not really watching, I feel like such a tourist when I have my camera in hand... But that'll give you an idea of the colors.
It was such a nice day again at the market. It's so much fun to buy your produces directly from a person, as opposed to taking the stuff on a shelf in a big supermarket and paying the bored clerk or even worse nowadays in many places: you can scan your own stuff, get mad at the machine and eventually pay the same machine before you bag your stuff and go home.
Here it is different, buying produces is always a bit of an adventure, either because you need to negotiate the price, or because the vendor tries to sell you something else that you may or may not need. It's hilarious, but heck, it works, most of the time I go for cucumbers and come back with papayas, carrots,
Buy something mad'm?
Women selling stuff taking a break with us okras, sweet potatoes... They are also very good at remembering the things you like. My fruit man in Mapusa knows I like figs. Every Friday he says: "hello, figs?". THe other guy where I buy the dates yesterday asked me today again if I wanted dates... Does he think I can eat a whole box per day??? THis morning I tried to buy a coconut bread, I heard it's very good. The woman said: "Only after 4:30 pm, but you buy two beacuse it lasts for 2-3 days". So I went at 4:30 and her husband sold me one loaf but as I walked out of the store he called me and said: "pie?"...
So it's a lot of fun, and I also get into a little routine of for example buying my bread from the breadman in the evening. He comes on his bicycle, and he has a horn so that people know he is coming. He also sells samosas, cookies, and in the morning milk. And now when I hear the horn and I am doing my yoga practice, I am like Pavlov's dog, I start salivating...
The other day I was drinking chai with a
Candolim Beach
Self explanatory.... friend at the beach shack. Two men with their nicely decorated cow came and played some music. Then one of the man went on the ground and told the cow to put her feet on his lower belly. So the man had the whole cow standing on him. Tourists take pictures, the men collect the rupies and that's another thing that only happens in India.
Then at the beach last week, I laughed almost to tears when this woman came and told me, looking at my legs: "Your hair is VERY long". She was right, I was due for some serious waxing. But then she showed me how she does it: she uses a big thread and holds one end in her mouth and twists the other somehow and it pulls the hair off with not too much pain... They call it "threading". Well, maybe because I live in the Yukon, where we have the hairy leg contest each February (for women only), I had never heard of threading before. I thought this was very interesting but I turned down the offer and did my own waxing later that day...
Another little anecdote... We had a "clean-up day"
Mapusa market
The smelly fish section this past weekend. A woman in charge of a yoga school here decided to ask yoga students if they were interested in cleaning up the Anjuna Beach area. India, unfortunately, is full of garbage all over. 90% being packaging, like candy wrappers, and many plastic bottles. So almost 100 people said yes and went on Sunday morning to clean up the area. It wasn't extremely exciting but it was great to participate to that event. The surprising thing though was the response from the locals. Although some people smiled at us, thanked us or said we were "good people", others looked at us in digust or worse, one person almost got beaten up by a local... I try to understand if it's because of the cast thing, that it wasn't our job to do that, maybe some people think we are preventing locals from getting paid to do the same thing, or maybe some people felt insulted as if we were saying:"your country is so dirty, we have to clean it". But the idea was to raise awereness and maybe make a small difference. After the morning of garbage pick-up, we were treated to a really nice free indian breakfast
Mapusa market
my friends Anna and Puja at Yoga Magic, a beautiful yoga center.
So that's the stories for now. Tomorrow, moon day (new moon), we have no yoga. So I plan on exploring a village south east of where I am now, and this weekend, I also want to explore the southern beaches. So maybe I'll have more stories to share in a few days...
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