More Manali

One more way India differs from the US: if you want a cup of coffee in the morning – at least one that isn't the instant powdered kind – you're going to have to wait. You know how most cafes, Starbuckses, etc are open by 5 or 6 in the morning? Yeah, here they chill until 9. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the locals all drink tea.... I suppose it's a really nice thing if you work in one of these cafes, but if you are a visitor looking for that morning caffeine fix, you might want to seek alternatives.

So, dear readers, while I am waiting for 9am to roll around I will be a good little blogger and tell you about the last couple of days, since as you may have noticed I was slacking a little bit on that front.

We've arrived in Manali on Tuesday evening. The first couple of days were spent exploring, sightseeing, and generally wandering around.

Yep, real life snake charmer.

We did fun things like visit one of the old local Hindu temples.

There is some really intricate wood carving on some of the old buildings in Manali, unlike I've seen in other places. Oh, and skulls.

Gill and I sat on a yak. It was very soft, but not quite as big as I expected. Maybe smaller yaks are easier to maintain here at relatively low altitudes (around 2000 meters).

We took some photos..

This is a Tata Nano. I see more cars like this here than any other... doesn't it kinda look like my Yaris at home?

The marigolds (and roses, and everything else) get really tall here, presumably from all the monsoon rain.

It's apple season in Himachal Pradesh.

If you look closely you can see both English and Tibetan writing on this wall under the painting. I found it to be a nice change from English overtaking everything it contacts; here the English has been covered up by Buddhist art.

Oh yeah, the hotels have cool names. Ours is called "The Dragon."

Yesterday for breakfast we decided to check out a little place we'd passed earlier called “Dylan's.” It, like the few other cafes that carry the stuff, advertises that you can get real brewed coffee there.

It was pretty darn good.

Verity finally found a good soy cappuccino!

What's that, you say? Fresh pineapple mint juice? Don't mind if I do...

There was a cast & crew running around Manali all day shooting some film, so we watched that for a while. They did not ask us to be extras (inconsiderate jerks).

After our nice relaxing morning we wandered down toward New Manali to purchase some gifts (and maybe a couple of things for ourselves, too).

Not the greenest city park I've ever seen...

No, I did not try one.

Later, Marie, Verity, and I took a detour through the woods near the river:

and found this cool tree:

and then on the way back into town we wandered down a side street filled with dhabas. They were impressed that I could decipher this sign:

In case you're wondering, it's: Chai - Coffee - Omelet in the red, and the blue reads: Veg momo, Chicken momo, Fried momo... (I'm actually not sure what the first word on the second line of blue says), then Soup, Chowmein, Dal, Chavel (which means rice). Cool, eh?

The three of us decided to try some dessert at the little place across the main road from our hotel, The Bee's Knees. I'm not sure if I mentioned it before, but in Dharamsala most of the businesses that provide wi-fi to their customers have passwords that reflect the spiritual, heavily Tibetan makeup of the town: “compassion,” “thankyousomuch,” “ilovemandala,” or sometimes more food-oriented ones like “bananacake” or “mochaccino.” It's cute. You get used to expecting a sweet, New-Age-y answer when you ask for the password after ordering your ginger lemon honey tea. That being said, you may be able to imagine our reaction when we asked for the password at The Bee's Knees and was told...

are you ready for this?...

“1nightstand69.”

Bahahahahaha.... well played, Bee's Knees cafe.

As I was telling my sister last night, I'd be alright with coming home any time now. I like it here, and I have actually been feeling a surprisingly low level of homesickness (maybe it's because I know I'll be back soon), but what I have been feeling lately is a sense that I have things to do – and I have to be home to do them. I miss my job and the paycheck it brings. Money certainly isn't everything, not by a long shot, but when you've spent two straight months spending your savings and not making much back, if any, then it gets a little tiring. Life in India is cheap, but it isn't free.

In closing, I leave you with photos of some of the local doggies:

New bukkits: living the high life in India

The other day my students took their Unit 2 test. It's always interesting to see how people score on exams; some of my best communicators in class don't do as well as I expect them to, and a few of the quietest, blend-in-to-the-crowd students do surprisingly well indeed. One thing I noticed was that even my strongest students had some trouble with the writing portion, in which they were asked to "write a short email to a new friend" and answer six simple questions, such as what is your name, how many siblings do you have, that sort of thing.

So I did what any concerned teacher would do and I devised an activity for them to practice their email-writing skills. I typed up an email from one fictitious person to another and filled it with punctuation and grammar errors. I tried to base it largely on the ones they've seen in class so as not to throw too much at them at once.

I have since been informed that I may have gone a little overboard. It's a tricky situation: they need to know how to do things like write emails (and sound intelligent), but their grasp of the English language is somewhat slippery, so I have to be careful not to do things like say "my town is called Springfield" and then tell them the whole thing should be in present simple tense, because a whole bunch of them got confused with "called" being a past tense form of a verb. Being a native speaker, I didn't even think of it at the time.

Oh, the surprises one gets when teaching!

It's not so bad, though. Today I had them compare notes, during which time I wrote the entire first paragraph on the board. Then I had them come up and one person correct each sentence, after which I asked the class if the corrections were, well, correct.

The best part, I think, was when a couple of them went back and forth reversing each other's corrections because there was some dispute over whether an apostrophe belonged in a particular word. One student went up and inserted the little flying comma, and another got right up and erased it, the entire class had a nice little giggle, and it was the perfect setup to discuss when we need to put apostrophes by the letter S.

I think I'm going to start doing something like that each class, and hopefully it'll get them used to sentence structure and everything. Does anyone from R-C remember "Daily Oral Language" from Mrs. McGann's class? Isn't that what it was called? I'm thinking I'll do that sort of thing and see how it goes. They seem to do well when they can check each other's work, but when it's up to each one of them individually they have some trouble. I really want to try to get them over that. The culture here is very community-oriented, and it comes out in the classroom. I dig that. It's a little tricky to get them not to help each other on tests, though.

In other news, I have a new trash can at my place!

A shiny new bukkit: I haz one!

I'll have to see if I can get them to do something about my electrics next...

Brij and I were a little excited about the new additions in our hallway this morning. We think it may have had something to do with our telling the guys who run the place that if they want westerners to stay there, as they claim they do, then they should make a little more effort to get the place up to something resembling a western standard of living. Seriously, guys. You could at least replace the shower head that's missing in the one room, and scrub the walls for god's sake. I had to do the walls thing on my own, and if you recall, I also went through a couple hours and half a (rather large) package of butt wipes to scrub down all the trim and the headboard. I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but about a week before I moved in I asked them to make sure the room was cleaned before I got there. To be fair, the floor was all sparkly and still even a little wet. Really, though. You could make some effort to make the other surfaces presentable.

That said, I really do like my room. It's small but not too cramped; it's sufficiently "Indian" without being so ghetto I count the days until my flight home. In the immortal words of Goldilocks, it's juuuust right.

I am, however, a little concerned about the temperature situation. My room most definitely does not have heat, and the nights have been getting chilly already. I'm thinking I may have to stock up on blankets in the coming months.

-- For those of you who are curious, my typical morning goes something like this:
Awake to music from Suikoden for my alarm, around 7:30. Congratulate myself on having the foresight to download this ringtone before I left home.
Get up, put on flip flops. The floor is made of tile and is always, always cold. Go into the bathroom and turn on the water heater.
Fill up kettle, turn on. Make sure everything else in the room is switched off because otherwise the breaker trips.
If/when the breaker trips anyway, muscle open the door to the hallway (it sticks) and flip the switch. Repeat until it stays.
Once water in kettle is boiling, make oatmeal and stir in homemade peanut butter I bought from some Tibetans at the temple a few weeks ago. Add dried fruit and nuts or fresh bananas as available.
Eat breakfast, drink some boiled (clean) water, wash dishes in the bathroom sink.
Take a shower. Turn the water off often so as to conserve the precious hot variety; the tank is pretty small.
Flip off the water heater.
Get dressed, turn on wall outlet to charge my phone/laptop/Nook/whatever. Prioritize wisely, because there is only one outlet in the room.
Fill up large bucket in bathroom with water and some powdered laundry detergent. Put dirty clothes in to soak.
Lesson plan or read one of the handful of books I have going at any given time. (Currently working on: God Against the Gods, Koran Curious: A Guide for Infidels and Believers, and They Do It With Mirrors. I recently finished The Seven Daughters of Eve and one night I knocked out Metamorphosis. I recommend all of 'em. Lon, I think The Night Circus is going to be next on the list.)
Brush my teeth with purified water, then scrub the laundry that's been soaking. Dump the soapy water in the sink, refill the bucket with clear water, and rinse. Repeat as necessary. Wring everything out as much as possible and then hang it out on one of the clotheslines on the balcony or drape it over the side in the sun. Hope all my laundry doesn't fall on the filthy ground while I'm not looking.
Collect my stuff, triple check to make sure I have my keys, and head to class sometime between 10 and 10:30 if it's a weekday. Otherwise I keep my balcony door open so I can holler down to Marie and Gill to see if they want to go do anything in town together.

Today the after-school excitement was a street market down past the main square.

Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of food.

They even had carnival rides. They were old, dirty, creepy carnival rides, but carnival rides all the same. I did not ride them.

On my way there I ran into a few of my students, all of whom cheerfully engaged me in conversation. I also stopped in to the post office to send off a small birthday package; thankfully the experience went much more smoothly than last time. I had to lick oldschool stamps. I can't remember the last time I even saw stamps that required licking.

For now, I'm going to go study my Hindi, so to quote the picture Casey so thoughtfully left on my FB page earlier today......

Namaste, bitches. ;)