Trapped in Dharamsala

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1-17 July

Dharamsala is like a golden cage - it's fun to stay there, but it's too fun; and after a while there is the nagging feeling that there is so much more of India to see, if only I can break free and get on a bus.

The days take on a fairly regular routine - wake up, go to a favorite breakfast place, walk down the street afterwards and see someone I know, stop and have a chai with them and then before you know it two hours have passed. Try to walk back to the guesthouse or somewhere else, see someone else, have another chai and, boom, another two hours are gone. Pretty soon after lunch it's time to go to a conversation class at 5:30 and afterwards it's dinner and chai with the staff and volunteers at the education center. Like I said, it's a golden cage, and with all that chai it better be a cage with a convenient clean bathroom in it.

My most consistent conversation partner is a Vietnamese monk named Dang, and we would always have great talks that usually went along the lines of "This is how it is in my country, how is it in your country? Really? No, we would get laughed at if we tried to do that in my country." In that manner an hour goes by pretty quickly and we have both learned something interesting about another country. We now have a tentative plan to go to Varanasi together in the middle of September, which would be pretty hilarious, I think.

I wound up staying in Dharamsala for a few good reasons, also. First, I was there at the right time to catch the Dalai Lama's 73rd birthday party as well as the annual teachings he gives for the 600 or so Taiwanese that sponsor the teachings. The 73rd year of the Dalai Lama's life is interesting in that the Tibetans consider the 73rd year to be a "black year" or "obstacle year", in which the Dalai Lama needs all the help he can get to reach his 74th year. Among the help he may expect to receive is a moratorium on constructing any new buildings and voluntary vegetarianism amongst the Tibetan population during that year. Other obstacle years include the 13th year and a few others between the 20s and 50s.

The other good reason to stay a little longer was to wait and see if I got sick again. Since I was comfortable with the local hospital and they already were familiar with my case I thought it would be better to stay here a few extra weeks and see what happened rather than go off somewhere and not know where hospitals were, etc. I know one monk from Nepal who thought it was the funniest thing that I was waiting to get sick again. Whenever I saw him he would always ask "Are you still waiting to get sick again?" and then start laughing and laughing. As it was, I didn't get a fever for the rest of my stay in Dharamsala, although I did catch a little bug going around town just a day before I was to get on an overnight bus ride to Manali (yay!).

Before I left Jamyang and I went to see a friend of his who was a thangka painter. Thangkas are traditional tapestries that depict moments in the life of the Buddha or Tibetan saints etc. Other popular themes are the Wheel of Life and mandalas. The amount of work that goes into these paintings is phenomenal, and the really nice ones have a lot of gold dust mixed up into the paint. After the paintings are finished they are bordered with beautiful and ornate clothwork and then hung in homes, monasteries, businesses, etc. Some thangkas at monasteries are huge and can be 15 meters or more in length. Jamyang's friend usually just takes orders from various monasteries and pumps out paintings that then are sent all over India and Nepal.

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