There is something to be said for Shabbos. Inspirational religious Jews will go on and on about how magical it is, but every week, it's not necessarily true. There's always something special about it, but sometimes you'd rather not be hassled or something comes up that you really wanted to do but it's on Friday night. When I wasn't religious, I used to go to the movies on Friday nights with my friend Jason Altschul. It was one of the reasons I made it through high school. Now a movie comes out and I try to convince my friends to wait until Saturday night or Sunday to see it.
If you observe Shabbos, it always happens. Shabbos occurs, and you know it and feel it, because you're racing up to the minute of it looking for last-minute supplies or making phone calls home or trying to get somewhere in time, and then you light candles, and then suddenly, no racing. Just Shabbos. Yesterday I ran out of the internet cafe, and it started pouring (it rains about once a day here for an hour or so, on-and-off). I ducked into the nearest shop and realized the clock was ticking on returning a phone call to Rinchen Khando (aforementioned sister-in-law of DL), so I asked if I could use their phone and offered to pay. The owner of the shop handed me his cell phone and said, "You can use it and you don't have to pay. If you try to pay me I won't accept your money." So I called, got Rinchen, learned maybe on Monday morning the Dalai Lama will give a not-well-announced public audience; she's looking into it. Then it magically stopped raining and I ran out, only to realize I didn't have spices for Havdalah. I ran into the first store down and asked if they had spices. The man said no, but it was clear he did
n't know what "spices" were, because right there on the shelf was a packet of raw cinammin. Then I went to the hotel, sat down to light candles and realized I didn't have matches. I always forget to pick up matches when I travel. I pack the tea lights but not the matches for flammable reasons, and then forget to get matches. So I ran up to the concierge, and asked where I could get matches, and they handed me a pack. One lucky break after another and I made it with a minute to Shabbos. And yes, thanks to a lot of packaging, the glass bottle of grape juice made it all the way to Dharamsala.
After I lit candles, I was too tired to even say prayers, so I sat and watched the sun go down. There was a mist over the mountains from the rain, and it slowly retreated while it was still light. All this time in India I've been taking pictures in desperate attempt to have memories in photo, so much so that there are 1300 pictures on my camera card. The problem when you are so focused on taking pictures is you don't really
look, because it's one or the other, and landscapes are those things that are never really captured i
n pictures anyway unless you're a photographer with a $5000 camera. Buildings and people, yes. Landscapes, no. Now I was in my room, sitting beside the candlelight, and I couldn't take pictures, and I sat and looked out at the rolling green hills, cloaked in fog, and it was as if I was looking at some magical place that was only supposed to exist in movies, where special effects are used. It was incredible, and it wouldn't have happened without Shabbos. Tourism is an action too rushed, too harried to allow the sort of thing I was looking at.
I went to pray, and remembered just in time that Jerusalem was now to my west, whereas it is normally to my east, and turned around.
Unlike most Saturdays, I didn't sleep in or a lot. I took a nap for maybe an hour in the mid-afternoon, but otherwise I was up from 8 am to now. Granted I didn't go very far, but my body needed the rest, as my throat was sore and that's usually an indication that my body is overtired (PS my sore throat is gone now). I walked around Dharamsala, and had two different encounters with monks, one Burmese and the other from Thailand. The Burmese monk with the impossible-to-remember name came up to me as I was looking at the Himalayas from the main temple complex and started talking, and it turns out he was here on pilgramage, but also he was learning English and he wanted to practice, so we talked for awhile, about Burma and religion and how much school costs in America. He had to apply to scholarships to study abroad, just like Americans do, and he had to write essays about why he wanted to study at this monastery and what were his goals and such and such. He came to Dharmsala for four months to study Tibetan Buddhism, but also to learn English, as there is a school here for monks and a lot come from abroad to learn. Such was the case with the second monk, Dan from Thailand, who was here specifically to study English and had a phrasebook in his hands, so I helped him along a little bit when I figured out what he was actually trying to say. He mainly asked about me, but asking questions was easier for him, and he was extremely nice. There are a lot of non-Tibetan monks here, obviously because they wear different colored robes, and now I know why: the English school.
Most of the tourists here are Indian, though there are a fair number of backpacking hippies and Israelis, enough that the keyboards in the Internet cafes have the Hebrew letters written in the keys and there's an Israeli cafe with a menu in Hebrew, and fliers for a Hebrew-language Tibetan cooking courses. I said "Shabbat Shalom" to some Israelis sitting at a cafe and they looked shocked, but did return the greating.
I'm not running low on the food I brought, but I am good and sick of it. Dr. Gumtek said it was okay to eat something heavily-looked in a decent restaurant, so I'll probably break down and eat something. So far only my water and soda has been Indian-bought, and a can of Pringles from a hotel. Orange fanta is really big here. At a rest stop on the way to Agra a van pulled up to the restaurant and a bunch of guys wearing bright orange shirts hopped out and started handing everyone free fantas. It was like that annoying commercial, only without sexy women or the annoying singing, but a free drink. It was very bizarre and seemed un-Indian, especially after an hour of driving past slums and sustenance farmers, to have someone in a matching shirt handing you a free soda, but man was I thirsty and now I love orange fanta.
Tomorrow: Probably the Gyuto Monastery, depending on how things pan out, and shopping. That or the nearby church named after a Viceroy that is supposed to be really beautiful.
(May 15th, 2009)
