The last two days have been more or less fused into my mind as time
is immaterial here (I guess that’s what they mean by “India time”?).
There was a lot of walking around, some shopping and much lamenting the
lack of beer. I’m not normally a beer drinker, but a week in a holy city
will turn you into an ale-drinking tavern-going lusty wench it seems.
Bita brought us to a market in a nearby village to shop for spices and fabrics. We walked around for a bit and enjoyed cane juice and jaggery, a sugar paste sold in orangy big lumps which she assures us is both ayurvedic and sold for ten times the price in Montreal. I thought for a minute about becoming a jaggery trader, importing truckloads of orange sugar lumps and building an empire in Canada. Then I realized that one empire is enough to manage, with the laundry and the costcoing and the teenage warmonging and all that. I need more work like I need more love handles at this point.
We then went for fabric. As all six of us were sitting down, the shopkeeper showed us boxes and boxes of beautiful silks and sari silks (from what I can understand a mix of silk and polyester?). Marie-Christine and (young and fresh) A.-R. got excited about a green and blue piece of silk which I thought at first looked like curtain fabric, but then the shopkeeper opened it up and there was a plainer bit that was just beautiful. I tried to lure Marie-Christine’s eyes away from it by shaking an equally attractive turquoise silk in front of her eyes, but it was too late, they had agreed to purchase it together and have tunics and yoga bags made out of it. (I did try to get excited about other pieces of fabric since then, but it’s like that nerd that you rejected at a pub crawl that your girlfriend ended up marrying and moving to the Côte d’Azur with: I missed my chance and now it will be happy without me forever… Perhaps I’m reading too much into this fabric thing?).
For those wondering, the food situation is actually quite good, despite the no meat, no booze, no refined sugar thing. The rule is simple: stay away from the Indian re-creation of westerner food, and you’ll be fine. This tidbit of wisdom came to me following a particularly horrid pizza episode with what I think was yak cheese (or yark cheese for my francophone friends?). It didn’t taste bad, it just didn’t taste good either. So far, we’ve had very good luck following the lonely planet recommendations, and the words German bakery will be engraved forever in my heart after this trip. You’re better off sticking to a mostly legume & rice regimen if you can, with a little Limka (the Indian Fresca with real sugar) thrown in for a sweet taste.
The homesickness started to kick in when I asked Simon over Skype what he was doing, and he said “nothing”, which made me feel guilty, because my job is usually grand master social organizer for the family. Oh well. Teenager and Mari Chéri seem to be doing ok, or at least I didn’t see anything untoward in the Facebook statuses, which is good enough for me.
Three things I’m grateful for today:
1- We found a way to take a jeep for 100 rupees from the second bridge all the way to the entrance of the ashram. This spares us walking on a loooong stretch of road with cows, motorcycles, assorted dung types and organic smells.
2- Pretty psyched about getting an abhyanga and shirodahara treatment at the ayurvedic center on Tuesday.
3- The situation described in the previous blog entry has pretty much resolved itself. Praise Brahma!
Bita brought us to a market in a nearby village to shop for spices and fabrics. We walked around for a bit and enjoyed cane juice and jaggery, a sugar paste sold in orangy big lumps which she assures us is both ayurvedic and sold for ten times the price in Montreal. I thought for a minute about becoming a jaggery trader, importing truckloads of orange sugar lumps and building an empire in Canada. Then I realized that one empire is enough to manage, with the laundry and the costcoing and the teenage warmonging and all that. I need more work like I need more love handles at this point.
We then went for fabric. As all six of us were sitting down, the shopkeeper showed us boxes and boxes of beautiful silks and sari silks (from what I can understand a mix of silk and polyester?). Marie-Christine and (young and fresh) A.-R. got excited about a green and blue piece of silk which I thought at first looked like curtain fabric, but then the shopkeeper opened it up and there was a plainer bit that was just beautiful. I tried to lure Marie-Christine’s eyes away from it by shaking an equally attractive turquoise silk in front of her eyes, but it was too late, they had agreed to purchase it together and have tunics and yoga bags made out of it. (I did try to get excited about other pieces of fabric since then, but it’s like that nerd that you rejected at a pub crawl that your girlfriend ended up marrying and moving to the Côte d’Azur with: I missed my chance and now it will be happy without me forever… Perhaps I’m reading too much into this fabric thing?).
For those wondering, the food situation is actually quite good, despite the no meat, no booze, no refined sugar thing. The rule is simple: stay away from the Indian re-creation of westerner food, and you’ll be fine. This tidbit of wisdom came to me following a particularly horrid pizza episode with what I think was yak cheese (or yark cheese for my francophone friends?). It didn’t taste bad, it just didn’t taste good either. So far, we’ve had very good luck following the lonely planet recommendations, and the words German bakery will be engraved forever in my heart after this trip. You’re better off sticking to a mostly legume & rice regimen if you can, with a little Limka (the Indian Fresca with real sugar) thrown in for a sweet taste.
The homesickness started to kick in when I asked Simon over Skype what he was doing, and he said “nothing”, which made me feel guilty, because my job is usually grand master social organizer for the family. Oh well. Teenager and Mari Chéri seem to be doing ok, or at least I didn’t see anything untoward in the Facebook statuses, which is good enough for me.
Three things I’m grateful for today:
1- We found a way to take a jeep for 100 rupees from the second bridge all the way to the entrance of the ashram. This spares us walking on a loooong stretch of road with cows, motorcycles, assorted dung types and organic smells.
2- Pretty psyched about getting an abhyanga and shirodahara treatment at the ayurvedic center on Tuesday.
3- The situation described in the previous blog entry has pretty much resolved itself. Praise Brahma!
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