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!