As Shabbos Approaches

I just got off the phone with my mother, and to clarify: My iPod was fixed (or, more accurately, fixed itself after the battery ran down and it reset) and I am having an excellent time and not crying all the time and they moved me to a nicer room in the hotel and now the accomodations are fine. Also my parents requested a picture of me so here is one:



I have been very busy in Dharmsala, getting the lay of the land, and it's been a lot of fun to be off the guided tour. When I was living in Israel, I would visit all of these obscure holy sites - mostly Christian - just by buying a guidebook and walking around, occasionally getting lost and then being stuck backtracking for a mile, and that's the way I'm used to touring, but you can't do that in most of India. Dharamsala is different, and the roads are bizarre and steep and there is some wandering around, looking for that monastery you've heard of but can't pronounce, and no one in the area speaks enough English to understand your request for directions, so you wander some more until you finally find a taxi to take you home and then you pass the place you spent an hour looking for on the way and tell him to stop and pick you up later, and the trip was a success.

First try, I did not get in to see the Dalai Lama, but with sufficient begging at one office I was given the number of another office that is better to beg at. I also met the Dalai Lama's sister-in-law (he had ten siblings), and she got me a tour of a nunnery to the south. She's a friend of some Orthodox women in New York (which is how I got in touch with her) and we spent about an hour talking about different religious traditions and feminism within those traditions, and I told her some stories about my time at different yeshivas in Israel and she loved them, and she told me about monastic education for women. She wants to keep up the contact and hear more stories, and I said I would be happy to do so. She lives at Kashmir Cottage, which is where Richard Gere stays, and she asked me how I knew that, and she was shocked to learn my guidebook actually said "Richard Gere Slept Here" when describing the guest house. In a strange coincidence he was on television last night in Runaway Bride, but I was busy watching Hindi dramas set in 19th century Rajastan, which I could actually recognize in terms of setting because I had just been to Jaipur.

Dharmsala is a center of intense and mostly fruitless political activity. I can get any piece of clothing that says "Free Tibet" on it except underwear, though to be honest I haven't really looked for "Free Tibet" underwear hard enough to testify that it does not exist. There's also a lot of posters about the Panchen Lama, who disappeared 11 years ago at age like 5 or something, and the Chinese government replaced him with some random kid and said the second kid was the Panchen Lama. Everybody wants the real guy freed, if he's not dead, and let's be honest: he's probably dead. Or was simply sent to rural China at age 5 and has no idea he's the Panchen Lama. But there's all kinds of posters and pamphlets with the same, only-known photo of him, age 5, begging for his release as if the Chinese Communist Party takes its political cues from something stapled to a tree in rural India.

The non-Tibetans in the area are Hindu, or I assume they are from the amount of Hindu altars strewn about the area and lack of mosques. There is a Christian monastery in the area. Why, I don't know, but their walls are pretty high so I don't think I'm going to find out. There are a lot of cows wandering about, mostly raised for milk, but in India the cow is given presidence over say, anything else, and is allowed to just wander down the street in search of food. I think there are less cows on the streets here than in the busy city of Jaipur because there's simply less trash here for them to eat.

Today I visited all of the places you basically see whenever you see anything about the Dalai Lama: his temple, his audience room, his driveway. "Hey, I remember when Nancy Pelosi walked up this road before the Olympics! Oh wait, now I remember, I don't like Nancy Pelosi. Oh well."

I would write more but Shabbos close in. Good Shabbos to everyone.