Matheran

Our second weekend adventure was to a hill station near Mumbai called Matheran. Hill stations are little towns in the mountains where people go to escape city life. Perfect for us! And Matheran is unique in that no cars are allowed, and the only way up the mountain is to take a minibus part of the way and then walk, or to take a steam-powered train (called a toy train).

We decided to go for the full adventure experience and take the toy train, but our journey to Neral Junction, where the train departs for Matheran, was a major headache. The plan was to take the train from Pune to Karjat, take a rickshaw from Karjat to Neral, and then the toy train to Matheran. We waited at the Pune train station for a long time, hoping our train number would show up on the board. While we waited little children bathed in front of me, and a strange man smoking an unknown substance tried to touch all of our feet. Finally we discovered that the train had been canceled. Oh, India! We eventually found a taxi driver to take us the 3 hours to Neral, but not before Cait almost got hit by a bus, we made a number of phone calls from an STD booth, and I insisted on buying a Pepsi in a glass bottle to calm my nerves.

We finally got to Neral, boarded the toy train, and after another long wait, the train was off. The train takes about 2 hours to travel 21 km. It goes really sloooooooow. But here's why. It's climbing a freaking mountain! According to my guidebook, "the track has no fewer than 281 curves, said to be among the sharpest on any railway in the world." Let me tell you, I was pretty glad it was going so slow. When we arrived in Matheran it was dark, and there were MONKEYS all over the train platform.

This is getting a little long, so I won't bore you with details about the Hotel Woodlands and its delicious food and lovely views but slightly stained sheets. Or the guided horseback ride we took in the morning to Porcupine Point. Or our messy, muddy walk through town in the pouring rain. Or our hours-long delay at Karjat Junction and our train ride back to Pune on a sleeper car. Just trust me, it was an adventure!

Dear Pune, sometimes you can be a drag.

The novelty of India has worn off. (Don't get me wrong I am still loving the classes at the institute and wish I could keep studying there for longer than the month I booked.) I am mostly dying for a green salad or just pretty much anything fresh and not cooked into an unrecognizable heap. I am sick of my hard bed and the florescent lights that shine directly in your eye. Traffic is a drag and the constant honking is the opposite of cute. What else can I complain about? Oh and the wild dogs that bark incessantly as soon as the sun goes down. Basically I miss my home in the States.

Thanks for letting me rant. I feel better already!

Practicing at RIMYI

My friend Jen took this picture of me practicing in the hall at RIMYI. I am really enjoying all the practice time. Because June isn't a very popular month to be in India enrollment is lower than the last time I was here so there's a lot more space to practice. Last time if you showed up later during the practice time there was hardly any space to lay down a mat. And if you got up to get a prop from the storage room you'd often return to  your spot to find that either your spot had shrunken or someone had taken most of your props. This time there's so much space that it's practically like being at a spa (well, maybe not a spa but it's pretty nice).

And here's a picture of the hall during practice time. See, look at all that space! Lots of room to spread out and have a leisurely practice. Along the top of the walls are lots of pictures from Light on Yoga. The teachers are often referring to the pictures during class. It's fun to be practicing and going to class in a room filled with all of those amazing pictures. India is not an easy place to be. There's always a couple of people who hate it and can't wait to get home. I'd say I am missing my home and family but I love the institute and I really like India. There are things I don't like of course; I am pretty sick of rice and would give anything for something crunchy and fresh  - like salad or even just a crisp apple. These types of things can really get some people down. It's hard to be away from the comforts of home and be immersed in an environment where the yoga is so challenging.

Tonight we did backbends with Prashant. My friend Katy called it - she said "I bet he is going to kill us with backbends tonight". She was right. We did Ustrasana nearly a hundred times. (That's an exaggeration but it seemed endless). Then on to Urdhva Dhanurasana and Dwi Pada, over and over and over. The class was incredible with so much profound philosophy. I really look forward to pranayama week next week. More on that to come soon!

-Aaron

for Jennie Williford

As requested, here are three photos for Jennie Williford.

The first is the "hole" on Hari Krishna Mandir Road. This is how we walk to the yoga institute every day. In case you can't tell from the photo, that water is pretty disgusting. A few times, during really hard rains, the "bridge" has been gone completely and we had to walk around the block.



The second is the armed guard posted outside the institute. I tried to take a better picture of him from across the street, but he didn't like that very much and gave me the universal symbol for "Cut that shit out."





And the third, while it looks kind of disgusting, is actually a photo of one of the most delicious things I've eaten here. It's the "Chef's Special Kabob" at the restaurant around the corner from our apartment called Aroma. In that pile is cauliflower, paneer, tomatoes and peppers, and then some sort of mystery kofta, made out of lentils I think. It's not very photogenic, but trust me, it's delicious!

Indian Home Cooking

We have a cook. She comes every day, mon thru fri, and fixes us a dinner. Having a cook is actually not something special in India. It's such a service oriented country. Lots and lots of people have a cook, not just rich people. We are definitely not rich but the dollar goes a long long way here. For the four weeks she is cooking for us the fee is 3000 Rupees which is about $67. We do have to purchase the food. A weeks worth of groceries is about 140 Rupees, or $3.

She cooks a vegetable, rice, a dal and some chapatis. She is even making me a gluten free bread called Bakri (see below) which is made from Bajari flour (millet). This is so super because I hardly ever get to eat bread at home. It's easy to eat in India when you are gluten free. Seems like everything in the States has some type of wheat in it.

Delhi Belly

I have the "Delhi Belly". Not to be confused with the new Indian movie, of the same name...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delhi_Belly_%28film%29. I am sick. I won't gross you out with details - it's your basic India stomach ache and intestinal distress. I took some of the heavy duty pills I brought from home and I started feeling better pretty quickly. I wasn't well enough to go to Geeta's Friday night class which is a major bummer. My roommates and I are purchasing the class recordings for the month though so I can do replicate the class on my own but it's definitely not the same. Classes are over two weeks from yesterday and the next two weeks will fly by. I want to get as much class, practice, and observing time as I can get before we leave Pune on the first. When you're sick you just have to accept it and stay home. I considered going to class and doing a sequence in the back of the room with the menstruating ladies but the idea of stretching my abdomen over a bolster sounded disgusting. So I decided to stay home. I am lucky that Sarah is here to keep me company. Last time I was here I was sick for 2 days with a sinus infection and I had to tough it out all on my own. Being sick is no fun but being sick alone by yourself on the other side of the world is torture.

On a positive note we purchased our plane tickets to Kerala. We will be there July 1-7. Kerala is a state down south on the west coast. There are supposed to be some of the best beaches in the world there. We probably won't get too much beach time however because it is monsoon season. And Kerala get clobbered with rain this time of year. We plan to spend the night on a house boat and also stay out in the wilderness near a tea plantation...or is it a coconut grove? Some of the details are still a little bit foggy.

Bhaja and Karla caves

This post is a bit overdue, as I went to these caves over 10 days ago. Every Sunday RIMYI (the yoga institute) is closed. Since every other day of the week we're pretty much glued to our neighborhood in Pune, we've used Sundays to go exploring outside of the city. The first Sunday we hired a car and driver to take us about an hour outside of Pune. The drive alone was very eventful! You see much different things on an Indian roadtrip than you do in the US. For example:
Can you see the people sleeping in the back of this truck?

Then it was on to Bhaja caves, 18 rock-cut Buddhist caves. Some of the caves are simple halls (viharas) where the monks slept on beds carved out of rocks.And some of the caves are chaitya halls, a kind of Buddhist shrine with a stupa in it, containing relics.
Then it was on to Karla Caves, which is really just one cave, a chaitya. It's the largest and best preserved chaitya hall in India. But what makes Karla really spectacular from a cultural voyeur point of view is the Hindu temple just outside the cave entrance. On the day we visited, and on most weekend days, thousands of people were climbing the long steps through the mountain to reach the temple. It was quite a scene! And not only were we the only white people there, as has been the case almost everywhere we've gone, but folks kept asking us if they could take their picture with us. Here, we pose with a group of people plus a live chicken:
It was a great day! Other highlights, sans photos: a gigantic Ganesh statue on the side of the highway; an enormous herd of sheep on the road, completely blocking traffic; eating chikki (the local sweet); and many others. Soon I'll fill you in on our most recent weekend adventure...

Prashant's Tuesday Class

I continue to be baffled and amazed by Prashant Iyengar's teaching. Tonight's class was out of this world. We started out with abdominal work. We were doing Urdhva Prasarita Padasana (aka leg lifts) for what seemed like forever. (after class a friend told me she timed it and it was 30 minutes of leg lifting!) Each set of leg lifts was to be done using different breaths - lifting on an exhalation or inhalation. Then we moved on to Janusirsasana - ABOUT 30 REPETITIONS, interspersed with a dog pose here and there! Believe it - 30. We were doing Janusirsasana for nearly an hour. He instructed us to use all the different breaths in that pose too. And of course there was lots of discussion about Uddiyana Bandha. (google it) We ended the class with a long Sarvangasana with our heads wrapped. It was intense. His philosophy discussions during class are intense. He is intense. I am amazed by this man. My lousy words here cannot describe the magnitude and profundity of his teaching. After I leave here I look forward to exploring these ideas. It took nearly a year and a half after my last visit before I noticed a change in my practice. I think I will notice any changes more quickly this time because I feel much more open to what he is trying to say.  -Aaron

how do you say goodbye in Marathi?

As I'm writing this, Cait is in an airport shuttle with a number of Indians (including a babe in arms) on her way to the Mumbai airport. In about 30 hours she'll be home in Chicago. Is it really June 14 already? I'm super sad she's leaving, and that we only discovered last night that we both love the card game spit. Why had we been playing boring Skipbo all this time? She's a really fun roommate and a pretty terrific friend. Twice she's held my hand when I've been scared. And she's got the funniest voices and food songs of anyone I've ever met. I can't wait until our next adventure together!  -Sarah

rain rain here to stay

Some of you probably know that we picked a pretty weird time to come to India. All of the guidebooks (and most of the humans) I've consulted imply that we're crazy. The reason is that this is monsoon season. It usually starts raining in June and doesn't stop for four months. Well, like clockwork, the sky opened up on June 2!

At first it was pretty shocking and scary. It rained a lot! It rained so much that large amounts of water were flowing down the street, fast! It rained so much that some roads were flooded with over a foot of water. This all happened within about 2 hours!

One night last week, I left the yoga institute and found the streets in this condition. The routes I knew to get back to the flat were closed, and I walked through disgusting water up to my knees (just kidding, Mom!) trying to find my way home. Not my favorite day in Pune! Now I know my way around a little better, so hopefully that won't happen again.

I took these photos yesterday, looking out of my window. The building you see is the post office across the street. You can't see it in the picture, but it has an enormous orange tarp over it to protect it from the rains. It's hard to really capture the amount of rain, but I think you can see the water pooling in the streets.

On the plus side, the trees and plants are already getting greener. And it's really cooling off here. I think it's hotter in Bloomington right now than it is in Pune. And I can't think of a more perfect time than during a monsoon to curl up in your Indian flat with your milky, sugary tea and read a novel. I finished Jane Eyre, by the way. On to the next book...  -Sarah

Triangle Pose x 100

I swear we did triangle pose at least a hundred times today in class. I had two classes with Prashant today and he had us in and out of triangle pose so many times. The last one was a super long hold. I had to give myself a silent pep talk at some point. Its hard to stay focused because the mental/intellectual work he has doing is so fierce. In a nutshell he is every class telling all of us that our approah to yoga is all wrong. That we are actually not doing yoga - that we are only obsessed with learning new points and tricks. He has us doing some exploratory breath work in the standing poses. Doing some actions before, after, and during a "profound" exhalation. The breath work adds a whole new texture to the fabric of the pose.  -Aaron

Look at the cute baby lizard!

paan

First, let me say that I've not been keeping up with my blog duties, and for that I'm sorry. I've been too busy reading Jane Eyre, riding rickshaws, going to yoga class, and stuffing my face. You're going to read a little about that last thing now. By the way, the above picture is of Caitlin Ruth O'Connor, who's remarkably like me, in that she'll pretty much eat anything!
Aaron told me a little about paan after his last trip to India, and I read about it in my trusty guidebook. It's made of shredded betel nut, mitha masala (a mix of fennel seeds and other spices), and often chewing tobacco. It's all wrapped in a leaf, and chewed slowly (and not swallowed, if you've got the tobacco variety), and then spit on the ground.
Paan is sold by paan-wallahs from tiny stalls. You can tell it's a paan-wallah stall because there are usually a bunch of men standing around it spitting red stuff out of their mouths. Cait and I wanted to try the real deal, but when the paan-wallah pulled out a couple of betel tree leaves smothered in a weird red-brown paste, we wimped out and went for the sweet paan instead.
It's just like its more potent cousin except the tobacco is gone and seems to be replaced with a ridiculous amount of sugar in the form of a red syrup (think maraschino cherry juice). It's supposed to be a mouth refresher, but it kind of tasted like eating potpourri to me, and Cait said after that she felt like she just drank a bottle of perfume. But now we can check paan off our list!  -Sarah

First Classes

The instruction at RIMYI is truly out of this world. Tonight was a lively standing pose class with Geeta teaching and Raya demonstrating. We did only very basic poses and used zero props.. Even for the seated poses. The amount of detail in the teaching is really really astounding. Sometimes my brain gets over loaded with information and tired from concentrating so much that I notice myself wanting to space out. Grant it it is virtually impossible to space out - Geeta really knows how to keep us focused. At the end of class everyone started clapping and she had this super sweet smile on her face. It was great to see.

The rains have started. It is much much cooler and at night is very pleasant. The bad thing about the rains is that everything is all wet. Everything.  -Aaron