clarification

Alright just so everyone knows, I am not staying in this country until January! Rumors. My bank account, parents, love of Christmas, thesis, and most importantly my visa, will simply not allow it. I'll be home for Thanksgiving.

In other news, Monday was the day in the Malayalam calendar when classes traditionally start. Although the public school system no longer recognizes this day, most of the music and art teachers still do. So, there was a lot of music, excitement, poojas and dakshinas (offerings to new teachers) round these parts. My "guitar students" gave me dakshinas, which I accepted but don't feel like I deserve because I will probably be out of chords to teach them in like a week.

My days are full of yoga, drumming, mutual tiny language lessons, chai, and a kitchen I still don't understand. And books. Many many books. I read when I get tired of not understanding anything. And I'm trying to hold on tightly to my quickly fading English skills.

Love you all!

in their natural state

One thing Jaki and I talked about a lot this summer was our utter ignorance about how many many things come to be. Like pineapples and peanuts and tea. I mean, I had a mental image of a tea leaf and hills of the western ghats covered in plantations, but not until I saw them in June did I GET it. Same with pineapples. Same with nutmeg. Everyone talks about how much you learn about culture and people when you travel but no one ever mentions how much you learn about FOOD!

So, I've been in the kitchen this week. They make their own everything; powders from chili and nutmeg and coriander, butter, coconut oil, etc. You name it, they've made it from step one. I have to embrace my relative ignorance in everything about the kitchen and the food, and ask what everything is all the time. Because cooking is one of the students' subjects here, they are quick in the kitchen and quick to point out when i slice a carrot too thickly or put a pinch too much ground coconut in a dish. It's really intimidating when we're all sitting around at meal time and everyone starts eating and I hear "EmilyCheche" followed by the name of the dish I've made. Sometimes giggles, sometimes thumbs up and (still ambiguous) head bobbles. With the exception of some overcooked yam slices in my aviel, I'm apparently doing okay. Phew. But y'all, Thanksgiving. Just you wait.

But I've also realized why Indian restaurants in the states are expensive.
1) These ingredients are largley things I have never seen in the whole of United States. But again I know nothing about things in their natural state. Maybe all of this grows in Kentucky.
2) This takes TIME. It's no spaghetti or burrito.

It's nice to know these things. In other news, My mom will be here in a little over two weeks! We are going to the beach! This country will make me leave in a little over eight weeks! How does it move so fast??

week 20

You guys i have been away from home for 20 weeks. That's creeping up on half a year. No WONDER I miss you all so much.

Yesterday a few of the students took me to a farm where we climbed trees and picked (more like swatted) nutmegs! If you have never seen the inside of a nutmeg, do some google research. I have never seen nature make such a rich red.

The kids have a show on October 9th, so practices of all kinds have started. They are singing and drumming and planning. Today they started practicing their Kalari, which is the traiditional martial art of Kerala,. It the flexibility and strength of yoga plus the cardiovascular strength of a triathlon. That was my one day experience with it in June, anyway. But these guys are rockstars, so, no problem.

I'm being devoured by mosquitoes I have to leave this computer!

reimagining

Now that I have more regular internet-age, I think I'll post more often so you all don't have to read a novel every month or so.

So, today, things about Sarang that I like:

I have not thrown anything away since I've been here. Only compost. Check plus.

I thought I might become unaddicted to coffee while here, until the kids learned that I like coffee and now it appears in front of me a few times a day with someone saying "EmilyCheche? Coffee?" (Cheche = elder sister)

My music classes won't start up again until next Monday, so I'm spending this week in the kitchen learning the art of this delicious delicious cuisine.

Everyone does yoga together in the mornings.

Adi, the youngest boy, likes our encounters to be a constant trading of English and Malayalam words. He'll just run up to me with some new object and say "Malayalam, ____. English word?" Thus my language immersion begins.

These kids know how to do everything.
They also have a constant craving to learn more.

Oh man guys. I'm not sure where to start.
Three weeks into India round two, and I've finally made it back to where I was in June, Aranmula. But first, a quick run down of where I've been:

Chennai - skippable city.

Mamallapuram - take all the attention you get for being a woman traveling alone in India, plus all the attention you get at a seedy beach town, and you get Mamallapuram. I left pretty quickly after spending an evening with a kid in the Bob Marley Cafe having homosexuality and murder explained to me in terms of sin and cos.

Auroville - Auroville. What the hell. This is a crazytown people. It is LOST meets Carrboro in India. It's a "universal city in the making," started by The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, a famous philospher and poet from Tamil Nadu. I spent a week there just trying to figure out what was going on, and in the process met some of the most amazing people I've ever met. ONE OF WHOM, was a french guy in his sixties who was, I kid you not John Locke. He even used is pocket knife at meal time. Also they drive around cars that look like the Dharma Initiative cars that say "The Auroville Project" Anyawy, I think it's a really special place doing some very important research for humanity, and not somewhere I can be yet. Someday perhaps.

Trichy and Maudrai - saw some big beautiful inspiring temples.

Kodaikanal - got out of big cities to see some MOUNTAINS. had the most exquisite view from my hostel. Went on a nine hour hike down the mountains and couldn't really move the next day. Oh and I was COLD for four days for the first time in SO LONG.


AND 20 hours and six buses later....Aranmula!
I think I've told most of you about what I am doing, but just in case: I am living with a family that runs an alternative boarding school out of their home. Trying to democratize learning and the family structure, they have set up a really amazing place where these kids are becoming responsible, kind and articulate people. They have two campuses: One is on their farm a few hours east of here, where they are teaching and learning through experiments in organic farming and reforestation. They other campus is here in Aranmula, where the kids are able to take arts classes with the teachers from VKV. There are ten kids between 8 and 21, the parents, and Gauthum and Anu, their first son and his wife who are in their mid twenties. So there are 15 of us in this big ole house and there is constant music and laughter and cooking. Yesterday we spent about 22 hours traveling to a city where the kids have a regular radio program. Tomorrow we are trekking into the woods to learn about butterflies and dragonflies. The father is in the process of adapting their most recent radio drama (which they wrote) into a street performance. Am I in heaven?

Ok, all for now. Love you all.

superlatives and lists!! ((long overdue))

i know this is so late, but i've been busy ya'll! 

after a 53 hour commute (yes, 53, yes, count 'em, 53 hours to get to charlotte from kuala lumpur), i have been keeping busy with long-lost things like peaches and bathtubs and bookshelves. 

BUT before all that, emily and i compiled a list of the best and worst of southeast asia, either as helpful travel advice to anyone planning a trip in the future or just because it was really fun.

here we go:

Best smart-traveler move:

Winner: taking a $3, local overnight bus from Jakarta to Solo. 16 hours as the main attraction on a bus crammed with people, vendors selling giant stuffed animals, band-aids and everything else imaginable. some unpleasant knee-groping from the creep across the seat, a pretty constant paranoia of being robbed, and a completely sleepless night, but a true traveling experience. and we saved like $20.

Best surprise:

Winner: Tadlo, Laos, a picture-perfect, not-yet-discovered by Lonely Planet, town with cheap bungalows huge waterfalls really great people and good food.

Runner-up: finding a amusement park, complete with rollarcoasters, popcorn and bumper cars (we got schooled by an Indonesian kid btw), in the small town of Solo, Indonesia.

Biggest 'should-have-listened-to-Lonely-Planet' moment:

Winner: taking the lovingly-dubbed 'scam bus' from Si Phan Don into Cambodia. It started as an uncomfortable bus ride, escalated into a border crossing where the guard (named Ouch Mean. for real guys.) piled on 'extra fees' and took literally all of our dollars, and climaxed with having to pay an extra $6 to sit in a minivan listening to a Eurotrashy hipster talking about having sex with underage prostitutes in Bangkok. pass.

Biggest 'skip it' place:

Winner: Jakarta. seriously fuck Jakarta. We spent two days sitting in traffic, seeing nothing nice or pretty, and feeling generally sketched out and unwelcome. This was about a week after the bombing, so maybe we caught it on a rough week but our overall impression was don't bother with Jakarta.

Runner-up: Pulau Perhentian. beautiful islands off the coast of malaysia, which sounds like a no-brainer until you realize you're about to see many easier-to-access, cheaper, more beautiful islands. also, there was a tsunami warning while we were there. downer.

Best example of globalization:

Winner: talking with a group of young monks in Luang Prabang about the death of Michael Jackson.

Most enigmatic injuries:

Winner(s): Emily's month-long Cipro-resistant dysentary and Jaki's persistent 2-month-long sprained ankle. we don't know what kept emily sick or how jaki sprained her ankle. weird right?

((ps my ankle is STILL swollen. wtf ligaments))

Most kickass, generous foreigner:

Winner(s): TIE between Vincent, who hooked us up with every theatre in KL and saved Jaki from a lot of fulbright redtape, and Yasmina, who let us live in her perfect Bali apartment for 3 weeks for freeee.

Best faux-celebrity moment:

Winner: relaxing on the beautiful beach in sanur, taking off our sarongs only to be ambushed by 10+ (fully-clothed) balinese teenagers who insisted on being photographed a minimum of 25 times with our bikini-clad white-skinned selves.

Best pretrip purchase:

Winner: steripen. despite jaki using it incorrectly for a solid 2 weeks, it saved us many a time from the sickness that only took us down once.

Worst food:

Winner: DURIEN DURIEN A THOUSAND TIMES DURIEN. there's no way to describe how awful this 'king of fruits' is, despite its hyper-popularity in all of seasia. it's like rotten melon and cheese and garlic and mostly, hot garbage. there's a popular saying about durien, that it 'smells like hell, tastes like paradise' because it really smells like garbage and everyone realizes it, but what they're not admitting is that actually it smells like hell and tastes just as bad.

Runnerup: cuttlefish. i'd take a cricket to that nasty crinkly dried sealife any day.

Best food:

Winner: everything else. special shoutouts to seasian fruit (mangosteen, mangos, rose apples, lychee, rambutans, pineapples that will spoil u.s. pineapples forever), and the amazing indian food in KL.

Things we wish we'd known:

1) If you go to Indonesia, learn some Indonesian because everyone expects you to speak it

2) That Emily is both number-dyslexic (chica can't handle the 00's ya'll) and has a zero-tolerance policy for being hassled, catcalled, or anything of the sort.

3) Most importantly: that having white skin makes you a lot of things. It makes you mostly really funny to everyone, it also makes you interesting and intrinsically sexy to a lot of people so get ready to be talked to by everyone, and have your picture taken, and stared at ALL THE TIME. really

Special section: Catcalls, best of 2009, Southeast Asian edition

1) setting: drinking guinness in jakarta with a bunch of futbol players from cameroon (right, wtf?)

the line(to em): 'Is it possible to love you?'

the line(to jaki): 'I have a house near Bali, will you come away with me?'

response(from both): 'No.'

2) setting: zooming at 60 km on our beloved motorbike nusa dua, a man holding a baby and riding with his friend swerve up and drive next to us

the line(to jaki): 'How is it that you are so beautiful?'

response: confusion.

the line: 'Are you available?'

response: glance at baby, 'Are you?'

3) setting: walking to the beach

the line(to em): 'hey sexy'

em(simultaneous with his line): NOT OK!

4) setting: walking through some insane mall

the line(to jaki): (said very earnestly btw) 'I UNDERSTAND YOU.'

response: 'you do? i mean...i've been looking for a guy who understands me but who would have thunk i'd find him here!!'

ok guys, that concludes our best of seasia volume one, i've got to go watch madmen with my housemates (seriously, i am so acclimated)

seasia is so fun. you should all go. we should go back.

em's going to keep this blog because, while i'm over here illegally downloading music and wearing earrings, she is still in India!!! so keep reading.

lovejaki

 

BLOGATOGE

seriously guys, i just have to tell you how horrifically the trip ended.* i mean, i don't even want to get into it. let's just say jaki was really really terrible to me for the nine weeks we spent seeing the world. now we're not talking. it's shocking i know. we fought fought fought and eventually we just stopped talking. c'est la vie. did she make it home safely? boy i hope so. kind of. **







*jk it was awesome
**this blog entry will be replaced by a real post telling you guys about my adventures in India if darling jaki ever posts our final blog we've prepared. to get you all excited, we've got superlatives.

[love you jax.]