Fish biscuits

This morning Yesterday morning Brij and I met a group of students and we all went for a hike to Dal Lake and then Naddi, a smallish village further up the mountain. Most of the students were from the Pre-Intermediate class, the one that I'd just recently handed over to Brij. Yesterday I wasn't feeling well at all and wound up sleeping for the majority of the day; luckily I was doing much better this morning and the weather was absolutely beautiful, so I was happy to get out for a little exercise.

We decided to go toward Naddi because it's only a 4km walk and mostly level. There are other places to see in the area but they involve more climbing, and some of us weren't really feeling up to that. As it was, we wound up taking a shortcut through the forest that proved more tiring than they led me to believe it would be, but we all survived.

It was a lot of fun hanging out with the students outside of class. We passed TCV, the Tibetan Children's Village, which is a boarding school for orphans. There were quite a few of them playing soccer (football) in the muddy courtyard. We joked that TCV stands for Tingmo Chilly Vegetable, three of the most common foods around here.

One of the students asked me what the name was for an insect that sucks your blood. “Mosquito,” I told her. “No,” she said, “not mosquito.” She and a couple of the others tried to figure it out in Tibetan, they told me the Tibetan name for it (which of course didn't help) and that they occur in tall grass, and I suggested that maybe what they meant was a tick. “Maybe...” they said, and kept discussing it. Eventually one of them told me it was a leech. I explained that leeches are more like worms, and that as far as I knew, they lived in the water. I was skeptical that “leech” was the word they were looking for but then again, I'm in India – what do I know? I still find it amazing that there are real live monkeys just wandering around.

That's a dog taking a nap in the grass. Somehow we managed to not drop the hackey sack on it the whole time.

We eventually made it to Naddi and played some hackey sack:

It only rolled down the hill a few times. The guys managed to get it back, though.

We had sandwiches, chips, and fruit for lunch:

A veritable feast! L to R: Ngodup (in the cool hat), Lobsang, KG, Dorjee, and you can just barely see Brij in the bottom right corner.

Lobsang -- not the one in the picture, another Lobsang -- even went out and bought us all ice cream and chocolate for dessert. We wound up with more bread and cookies than we could eat, and so it was decided that on the way back we'd feed the fish at the lake.

Naddi, not unlike the other places I've visited in India, exhibits a striking dichotomy in its architecture. You'll have fancy buildings like this one:

and then up the street there are hovels and half-built structures of concrete and exposed re-bar:

Some buildings, like this one, have both:

Check out the difference between the second and third floors!

The view of the Dhualadhar mountains is pretty darn scenic from up there.

After a delightful couple of hours near Sunset Point (during which time we did in fact encounter a couple of tiny little leeches, not ticks after all) we headed back. As we neared the lake, Lobsang said “Fish biscuits!” in the way that you do when your brain is working faster than your mouth. We all had a good laugh and busted out the bread and cookies, and fed what must have been hundreds of small fish.

Nom nom nom...

We decided to take the long, easy road back from there. On the way back we passed Tibet Charity's veterinary clinic and said hi to the doggies:

Once we got back to the main square in McLeod Ganj everyone went their separate ways. I returned to my room to pack, and then Brij came over and helped me move my stuff next door to my new place. I think I'll like it here. It's small and nice, but not fancy. It feels like a legitimately Indian place to stay; the room I'd been in the past month was quite comfortable but a little too touristy for my liking.

For all the comforts of home I'm missing in India, I think I'm adapting pretty well. I'll tell you what, though: one thing I'll be glad to have back come December is a nice, soft MATTRESS. As far as I can tell, they just don't exist here.