Advertisement
Published: March 14th 2007
Edit Blog Post
There is such a lot to tell you since my last entry and so little time so this will be a bit of a whistle stop tour through the last week.
After the Dalai's teaching we went to our placement with Nyima the Gap rep, and we were very glad she was there. The nunnery is in a very small rural Indian village about an hour and a half from Dharamsala so we definately stood out! We got to the nunnery and found there was hardly anyone around so say and had some chai to wait till the Head nun returned. We got talking to (through Nyima because they didn't speck much English, or Tibetan for that matter, and spoke Hindi only) four exceptionally cute nuns who were around ten. We tried to break the ice as best as we could be pulling faces and such like, then they sand 'Twinkle, twinkle little star" which the last Gappers had taught them but it sounded more like' Tingle, tingle" which amused me.
When we eventually got round to seeing the head nun (who amusingly enough for a buddhist is called Karma) we found out the nuns were just starting a month long
holiday. This was a momentary relief as I was very scared about the prospect of starting to teach but is now just a bit annoying as it means we are in limbo, we don't have much to do and feel like a waste of space. Also as they were on holiday no one seemed to take charge of us and show us our room so we had to keep asking, this coupled with the language barrier and fact that Tibetans intially aren't very friendly meant our first few days at the nunnery were quite hard and we didn't feel very welcome. Things have improved since, some of them have come out of their shells and we've realised much of it is shyness,also some of them can also speak more English than we realised so we're feeling a little better about it all. I'm certain once we start teaching it'll all improve further as we'll be kept busy and will be able to give something back to the nuns, to prove our worth I suppose.
As we had some time we decided to do a bit of travelling around the rest of Himachal Pradesh and go to visit the other Gappers.
Tilokpur Nunnery
Home sweet home...of a sort! We intially took an overnight bus to Shimla, the state capital where the British decamped to when Delhi got to hot for them, whiched turned out to be a very strange couple of days. The bus there was horrendous, I've rarely been less comfortable in my life, them when we arrived it was like we'd been transported back to England. It was cold and rainy but more significantly the buildings look like they have been lifted stright from a small Surrey town! The British clearly were nostalgic when they designed the Civic buildings so Shimla has mock Tudor post offices and Town halls. It was very surreal, it honestly could have been and english town that hundreds of Indian people were visiting...well apart from the hundreds of monkeys that is. Shimla is full of them, they are such a problem that the authorities have started a policy of rounding them up and shipping them off to Tajikistan!
Whilst there we climbed up an enormous hill to visit a Hindu temple. This hill was really really steep and took about 45 minutes to climb so as you can imagine (those who know me) me face wasn't far off the colour of beetroot when we finally got there, at which point no fewer than 6 people wanted to have there photo taken with us! 6 people! It was very bemusing, when looking through their holiday snaps they'll be pointing us out as two random white people they found at the top of the hill, I really don't understand it, they don't know us, we're not famous and we looked horrendous, why would you want a photo of us?!
We then headed on to Manali, or attempted to, we had to stop the night in Kullu a soulless place, because Manali was closed because of the snow. There had been 3 foot of snowfall in the valley, which was the last type of weather I thought it'd see in India. This was where we realised that nowhere in India has heating, if you're lucky you could get a one bar electric heater to huddle round, but then sods law the electricity goes off because of the heavy snowfall, as it did when we were there...needless to say that was a cold night! Manali was very chaotic and unfortunately because of the power cut we had no way of getting in contact with Charlie, the gapper there, we did however see our first yak! (pictures will follow...honestly!)
We're now heading back to Tilokpur to hopefully get everything started and start teaching a little early. We decided a total charm offensive will be the only way round the nun's lack of friendliness so we're practice our fake smiles as I type. Wish me luck!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.059s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 8; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0377s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb