A Few of My Favorite Flora

My Favorite Fauna

I'm sorry for the awful formatting of this blog post, but I figured that oddly arranged pictures of animals would be better than no pictures.
So try not to get distracted.

Some Auspicious Afternoons

For all those that were waiting on the edges of your seats, Losar ended wonderfully! As I mentioned, the last day of Losar was my friend Molly’s birthday. That was the plan anyway. Turns out, that specific day was deemed to be inauspicious. Anyone on this study abroad program can tell you the importance of auspiciousness and that you definitely do not want your Losar to end on an inauspicious day. Obviously, the only solution was to prolong the holiday! Losar was officially extended one more day and unofficially extended for many more days. The inauspicious day was still a holiday though, of course. It turned out to be a fabulous day and a group of us went on a picnic and spent a wonderful afternoon in the sun!

We went about 30 minutes outside of Dharamsala to the Kangra Fort, which is a super old and cool fort (I didn’t exactly commit the history on the sign at the entrance to memory, sorry…). Anyway, it’s on the top of this mountain with a spectacular view of the surrounding landscape. There were rivers running through the valleys on either side of the fort and mountains on all sides. We spent a while there, had a picnic with the Losar food, explored the landscape, sunbathed, and played cards. It was a marvelously relaxing mini vacation and I had the best time soaking in the scenery and the animal life. It seems that I’m not only slightly fascinated by monkeys, but all sorts of creatures. This category includes but is not limited to goats, cows, sheep, hawks, and pigs. I’ve just never seen these animals so close before and am strangely enthralled by them! I think my next blog post will be a flora and fauna tour of my India trip so far.

The fort was absolutely magnificent and I wish I could elaborate on it but I don’t think my efforts will be very successful. They do say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll put my photos where my mouth is and let y’all see the scenery for yourselves. The day after the inauspicious day we traveled to Bir, which is about two hours (East?) of Dharamsala and houses a significant Tibetan community. We stayed at the guest house at Sherabling monastery and again enjoyed a lavishly quiet and peacefully beautiful landscape. The quiet was only sporadically interrupted by young monks lighting fireworks to celebrate the end of Losar. In Bir we toured a Tibetan Children’s Village school. The TCV school system was set up when the Tibetans realized exile would last a while and they needed a way to continue the legacy of Tibetan language and culture outside of Tibet, where education is headed in a different direction. It’s a surprisingly well run and organized school that is very efficient and produces hard working and motivated students interested in preserving the unique Tibetan identity.

It turns out that the TCV schools all have four houses that their students are divided into and during the year they have competitions where each house has an opportunity to win a competition and a big trophy. I wondered if this practice was initiated before or after Harry Potter was popularized. Karma, the young Tibetan guy that helps out with our program, was in the Gryffindor equivalent and very proud of that fact. After the TCV tour we had an audience with Ani Tenzin Palmo, a Tibetan nun of Western origin who has gained some notoriety from the books she has contributed to. Her life story is really fascinating if you want to check it out and recently she decided to build a nunnery in India, which we toured. It was extraordinarily beautiful and so forward thinking! The buildings were gorgeous and extremely environmentally friendly. I’m so grateful on this trip that
I’ve gotten to meet and converse with so many wonderful people. And next weekend is supposedly our teaching with His Holiness, the most auspicious figure of all those in exile!


I can’t wait. I’ve been in India for just over a month now. Although it is a bit misleading to say that I’m in India because I’m really thoroughly entrenched in Tibetan culture and community at all times. But I’ve loved almost every minute of it so far and can not wait to see what comes next! I also wanted to mention the fact that my friend on the trip, Max, is a splendid photographer and is keeping a blog at
experiencingdharamsala.blogspot.com which has some great pictures to check out! Keep your eyes on this blog for an upcoming smorgasbord of flora and fauna that will hopefully make you as happy as it makes me!

Losar Tashi Delek!

Today is the third and final day of Losar, which is the celebration of the Tibetan New Year. It has been so much fun to have a holiday and see so much traditional Tibetan cultural practices in action! The students here at Sarah have had a week off of school to prepare and participate in Losar celebrations. You’ll have to bear with me in my attempts to transliterate the Tibetan words into English. So last week we started with the baking of khap-se, which are New Year’s cookies! All of the students gathered in the dining hall and they would bring in huge sheets of dough and we would cut them up and shape them. Thousands and thousands of cookies were made – the entire student body worked on them for about six hours! So there is plenty of khap-se to go around, and it apparently sticks around well into the summer months (the Tibetans don’t seem to have such a strong sense of things being fresh and stale that I’m used to).

The night before Losar began we had a special soup called gu-thuk­, which is a variation of the traditional Tibetan soup, which is called ten-thuk­. The gu-thuk has noodles and vegetables and special balls of dough with written messages cooked inside of them. They’re reminiscent of fortune cookies, except a lot messier to get at your fortune because it’s in the middle of a dense doughy ball covered in soup. And the fortunes aren’t quite as cheery as usual – they’re statements about your character and most are strangely negative. A really popular one this year was sol-pah­, which translates to ‘charcoal’ and represents “a cruel person.” Another common one was sru-pen, which translates to ‘chilly’ and represents “a blunt or sharp tongued person.” Luckily mine was not so terrible. I fished out a phrase that means ‘joyful little shoe.’ Unfortunately, my Tibetan has not progressed to the point where I can read that Tibetan phrase (it has vowels, suffixes, prefixes, stacked letters, and umlauting sounds – yikes!). But a joyful little shoe is “a person who will always reach his desired destinations and will be successful in all he does.” Hooray!

Losar itself started on Sunday morning at five am, when my roommate woke me up so that we could wash our hair before going to prayers, which were at six am. We groomed ourselves for a while and she helped me put on my chupa, which is the traditional Tibetan dress. Thank goodness she was here to help because I would have been completely lost without her! The technique behind the blousing is definitely an acquired skill that I have yet to acquire. We went to prayers, which was exciting because everyone was all dressed up and we had a special offering of katas (ceremonial scarves) to the throne of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. We were served rice, which we got to throw in the air for part of the ceremony. After prayers we had a special breakfast of chang-pue porridge. Chang-pue is fresh Tibetan beer made from barley and honestly was a little bit strong to handle at seven am. Everyone from Emory took about one sip and then headed back to the kitchen to make toast and drink coffee.

But don’t worry; Losar is all about eating so we did not go hungry that day. The first day of Losar is traditionally spent in the home with the family, but the students here are not able to go home to Tibet, so they decorate their rooms and visit all day long. I helped my roommate decorate her friend’s room with streamers and origami and paper chains and snowflakes, etc. Each room also has an altar set up with pictures of HH the DL and assorted Buddhist imagery. The rooms also have offerings set up, which I have a wonderful picture of! This picture is actually from the room where the Parliament of the Tibetan Government in Exile convenes, so it’s a very nice altar. On the left is che-mar, which is tsampa flour mixed with butter (tsampa is a huge part of Tibetan culture) and on the right is lo-pue, which are shoots of wheat. Upon entering a room during Losar, you’re supposed to take a pinch of each and say “tashi delek ae-ma bak-dro ku-kham sang, ten-du de-wa tho-par sho” which means “may you have a magnificent and healthy year ahead and may you always attain happiness.” Now try saying it three times fast! The upright panels coming out of the che-mar and the lo-pue are butter sculptures! They are so cool! Butter sculptures are a big part of Losar and there are some ridiculously detailed and beautiful ones that I’ve seen around. In the back of the picture you can see some big pieces of khap-se, which are cookie representations of traditional parts of the altar, including a sheep’s intestines and head. In exile, these are largely represented in cookie form. But according to my language teacher, “of course in Tibet we eat the whole sheep’s head… especially the kids – they love it!” I’m not sorry to say I have seen no real sheep’s heads on any altars in India.

The main activity during Losar is socializing and spending time with friends and family. The days are spent roaming from room to room. Tibetans make very good hosts and hostesses! I have a picture of Gen Passeng-la’s daughter, who was adorable in her pink chupa and pigtails offering cookies to everyone.

These three days are the only time that the boys are allowed in the girls’ dorms and vice versa, so it’s very exciting! The nights are usually for festivities including bonfires, alcohol, and fireworks. Good combination, right? But this year, the high up voices have let it be known that Losar should be celebrated in a more somber fashion. Since the 2008 uprisings in Tibet and the subsequent hardships of those in Tibet, Losar has been toned down to express mourning for those suffering in Tibet. This year it’s supposed to be more about religious traditions and spending time together than dancing and drinking. People are still playing and listening to music and drinking chang-pue, just not going crazy.

Although today is the 21^st birthday of Molly, one of the Emory girls on the program. We shall see how that turns out! On Wednesday the Emory program is going on a fieldtrip to Bir, where we will be visiting monasteries and meditating and who knows what else. I’ll talk more about that later – for now, ten-du de-wa tho-par sho! Happy Losar!

Today is a great day for a lesson in geography! For the past week and a half, I’ve been living on the Sarah campus of the Institute for Buddhist Dialectics, which is in lower Dharamsala. The campus is about a ten minute drive on long, winding roads from the town of lower Dharamsala. Lower Dharamsala is a predominantly Indian town with a few main roads that have shops crowded in on both sides. The streets are incredibly busy with buses, cars, motorcycles, pedestrians, stray dogs, and assorted other animals. I’ve seen donkeys, cows, and goats on the streets here. Upper Dharamsala has a totally different feel due to the presence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The ride from Lower to Upper Dharamsala takes about twenty minutes by car and is pretty much straight up the side of the mountain. It’s a thrilling ride, especially sitting sideways in the back of a jeep. The roads are really only big enough for one modern car, so driving up the mountain is really just one continuous game of chicken. Usually the car I’m in pulls of the road to make room for the oncoming traffic, which is relieving. Another interesting part of the ride is that the turns are so sharp that the visibility of the road ahead is zero. Cars honk when they approach a curve in the hopes that other drivers are listening. Some of the most exciting moments in the car are when the other drivers do not hear and we swing around a hairpin curve to find ourselves bumper to bumper with another vehicle. I usually spend most of the ride wondering if the drivers were trained before being exposed to the roads. Or how many cars have plummeted off the edge of the mountain. Because the edge is right there!

Anyway, you can probably tell I’m not super interested in geography. (I’d rather discuss traffic anatomy.) But Upper Dharamsala (referred to as McLeod Ganj) is a mostly Tibetan community that began in 1959 when His Holiness the Dalai Lama (or HH the DL, as we affectionately call him) came to India. The first Tibetans that came over didn’t expect to stay long and lived in shelters made from flattened tin cans. Now it’s become somewhat of an attraction for tourists, so the coffee shops are filled with people from America, Spain, Germany, etc. I have a picture of Temple Road, which is prime tourist attraction area because it leads to the Temple that HH the DL had constructed in the 1960’s. The tourist business is helpful because it brings in money to the Tibetan community and raises awareness of the political situation concerning Tibet. There’s also a great selection of food due to the variety of peoples living there. A great Japanese restaurant started by a Japanese woman, a French café founded by a French couple, an Italian restaurant started by Nick the Italian, etc, etc. Tourism comes with its downfalls too, of course. I don’t feel the need to stress those. The views from McLeod are spectacular, especially from the Temple.

The Temple is where we went our first day in Dharamsala for a Long Life Puja (Celebration/Ceremony/Ritual) for HH the DL. The long life of His Holiness is incredibly important to the Tibetan community, for obvious reasons, thus the puja. Our program had seats right outside the main room of the Temple, so we got an actual view of His Holiness throughout the entire ceremony! It was a great introduction to our Tibetan Buddhist studies program. The puja involved many people coming before HH the DL to wish him well and have objects blessed. After the ceremony, he walked through the crowd and stopped to chat for a while with the people right in front of us, who were from Brazil. HH the DL worked the crowd with certain finesse and had everyone chuckling at his jokes. It was terribly exciting to see him in real life and I’m only starting to understand the important role he has had in the past fifty years and continues to have for the Tibetan people in Tibet and in exile today.

The Temple is pretty simplistic itself, but has amazing views of the mountains and of McLeod Ganj. There’s also a path that surrounds the Temple called a kora. The walk can take as few as twenty minutes or up to an hour, depending on your walking speed. (Speaking of which, my roommate says that I walk very quickly – fancy that!) The walk is gorgeous, with breathtaking views and prayer wheels and prayers carved in stones and painted on rocks. It’s very peaceful and most Tibetan Buddhists walk it at least once a day.

So right now I’m living on campus at Sarah, where I’ll be until March. In March, we do a two week homestay in McLeod, followed by two weeks of classes, followed by a month of independent research where I can go wherever my heart leads me! Oh also, last weekend some of the other girls and I spent all weekend getting supplies for chubas, which are the traditional dresses that Tibetan women wear. We picked out cloth for the dresses and blouses to go underneath and took them to a tailor in McLeod. The Tibetan New Year, called Losar, is later in February and hopefully our chubas will be ready by then! I’m very excited. Well that’s all for now, I’ll write more about Sarah and my classes at some point in the future. Enjoy the selection of animal pictures I’ve taken around campus and town! Actually I was going to post pictures, but I'm going on a walk instead. Up soon though!