Life in McLeod Ganj.
On an average day we'd wake up and get ready at our apartment in Ahimsa House. We had a shared kitchen off of our room with our bathroom across it. Filtered drinking water was provided and we had a nice porch to eat on when the weather permitted.
I would often walk up to the Tashita Centre for morning meditation at 9, with the walk serving as good exercise as well. We had a 15 minute walk up a steep hill to get to the town centre. The road had barely enough space for two small cars to pass each other along the road so it was tight for pedestrians. Walking to town was like a video game with random actions and obstacles along the way, but one of the early levels of the game, as opposed to Delhi which would be a much higher one.
We would take a shortcut outside of our gate which would lead us up a steep path which was mainly rocks and dirt. It had a smattering of garbage, including broken glass and at least one razor blade but was still better than the road.
The road started with a hairpin turn which vehicles had a tough time negotiating. Some cattle and dogs were regulars on this stretch as well as a few monkeys as there was an overflowing dumpster at the curve in the road. All the animals dug through the garbage and sometime someone left a pile of vegetable scraps for the cattle to eat.
Along the road people were constantly honking and buzzing close to the pedestrians, who are far down the pecking order. Our street is one way, which means little, and you want to be at the very edge of the road. When you meet people coming the other way you avoid being forced into the road as you never know when someone might come down quickly. Dogs and cows add to the mix and some people walk down the road without seeming to care about the trucks honking at them and never seem to get hit.
We walk by the Dalai Lama's temple after about 5 minutes, which also holds the Tibet Museum which shows Tibetan-themed movies twice a day. Past the temple the street gets busy with a crowded taxi stand and many more people. As you head up the hill, shops and cafes are on your right and vendors selling tourist materials are in wooden booths to your left. Most of the vendors are Tibetan and laid back, so there is little hassle from them. On the other side you get some "yes sir, please enter my shop" but nothing bad. The worst part remains the traffic. There is some construction going on along the way, creating a terminal for a cablecar from Dharamshala. It is usually women carrying basket of rocks on their heads to the cement mixer.
As you keep going the stalls drop away and you have full time shops on both sides. The street gets busier and you begin to get beggars coming up to you. On the lower street, a few people with deformed legs are by the road asking for money. On the upper part, women with children will grab your shirt sleeve and follow you for a long time, saying ," no money, want food."
The whole question of what to do about beggars is one we have discussed at length. We've heard horror stories of people who give them something and are immediately surrounded by 50 people grabbing for more. We have also seen signs around town telling us now to give them packaged food as they resell it to vendors. A friend of ours who works with the poor told us that in order to sleep on the street you need drugs or inebriants of some kind, so that's where the money goes. There are so many beggars, you can't help them all. Online literature suggests that you donate to organizations that help the poor rather than give them money directly, but that's the sort of rationale that goes through one's head when one sees a beggar and rare is the time that the actual donation occurs. We'll let you know if we come up with a solution that we're happy with.
The shops along the way are very small, there's no supermarket here. Over time you learn who has what, and if they don't have it then magical "shop #5" has it, which has actually turned out to be true. Most places sell yoghurt and butter out on the shelf but we have managed to find a place that keeps it in the fridge. Anti-perspirant and lotions without whiteners have been difficult to find but we located them at a place that sells imported stuff at a premium.
One thing you'll see and hear a lot of is horking and spitting. Paan accounts for some of it, but much of it is cultural. Indians and Tibetans do not have the absolute fascination with mucus that the Chinese do, but horking ans spitting are quite common and can be stomache-churning to be around.
Further up the street we join with the other main street, parallel to ours. Meg figures it used to be a boulevard, as the two streets are very narrow and the line of shops between them are also super thin, with many shops opening onto both streets. These streets are often bottlenecked with traffic and the best ATM in town is here, often with a lineup of 20 foreigners. An annoying thing is that people cleaning just dump their water in the street. You can often avoid the little streams, but the people cleaning their balconies and roofs do the same thing, so often you feel some liquid dripping on you as you go up the street and you're not sure what it is.
In the morning I continue through town and this is the best opportunity to use the ATM. Going up to the Tashita Meditation Centre is another 1 minutes of even steeped walking with a little less traffic. This road is even narrower and heavily populated by monkeys so you have to be on guard. By the time you arrive at the centre you've got a good sweat going, as if you just had a quarter hour on a stairmaster.
The meditation lasts for an hour and is well guided. They have chairs and cushions in a large hall decorated as a Buddhist temple. It is a beginners' class and the attendees are all foreigners.
After the meditation I usually do some chores and then head to the museum for a movie. They ask 10 rupees (20 cents) and put on a burned DVD which has Tibet in its context. Usually 8-10 foreigners attend. There are many places in town offering language classes, Tibetan culture, political information, Buddhist studies and snake-oily stuff about healing through chakras, singing bowls and other things offered by creepy looking gurus.
The LHA Charitable Trust is where Meg and I hold our classes. She does a beginners' class at 10:30 in the morning and I do a 3 pm advanced group. The office is on the main Temple Road not far from the main square. You go up some narrow concrete steps to the dark and dusty main floor before continuing up more narrow steps to the office. On one side are the administrative offices and the other is mainly classrooms. There's a library where the language co-ordinator stays. This room is full of textbooks as well as fiction and a few materials such as word cards.
When the class before mine lets out we all take off our shoes and enter the room. Students sit on cushions on the floor and range in age from about 17 - 40. Many are monks and a few nuns attend each class. Monks and nuns are so common here that no one bats an eye. A big difference from Canada is that there my class is made to show up so many kids would rather not be there. Here the students choose to come to class because they really want to learn English, so the attitude is very different.
Most of the class is verbal as we don't have a lot of materials. If they have to share something they often take pictures on their phones and use the picture. Classes vary from 10-20 students and attendance varies from day to day, making continuity difficult. There's a tv on the wall that can be used to access Youtube but it's unreliable. Simple paper, textbook and verbal lessons are the norm. Fortunately, our friend Firoz helps out in my class every day before he joins the conversation group and is an invaluable help.
After my class, sometimes before I'm even finished, people burst in for the very popular conversation session from 4-5 pm. This allows volunteers to contribute to LHA even if they have no formal skills and are only around for a day or two. Students sit in circles, filling the classrooms and the rooftop are and Nihma sorts the volunteers so that they're sitting with groups of between 3 and 15 students to talk about whatever and practice their English. The conversations get loud and animated as many people are jammed into a fairly compact space.
After the tsession, LHA shuts down quite quickly. Rarely can we walk home without meeting someone we know and we eat out with others for about half of our dinners. This is aided by the sheer number of cheap and excellent restaurants in town. Most are Tibetan with a fair number of Italian places and a few Indian. Many cafes serve proper coffee but only a handful sell alcohol.
The few shops that sell alcohol focus on spirits. We can find decent beer but wine is tricky. Most of the wines are sickly sweet fruit wines. We were going to try some Indian wine but they wanted more than $30 a bottle, come on, this is India.
Another thing that is plentiful here is books. After struggling to find used books to read almost anywhere we went, you could overdose on good books in McLeod Ganj. At Ahimsa House, every room has a shelf of used books. The library at LHA lets you borrow them for a deposit and many restaurants have a shelf that you can use to trade books. I wonder if they were solicited by the Tibetan community and they ended up with more than they could use.
The Tibetans here have quietly been taking very good care of us. When we almost moved to another place (the person whose place we were to take over's landlord didn't allow sublets), Dorji offered to have us move beside he kitchen, even though we didn't speak to her about this. When Meg was asking about buying a secondhand Tibetan outfit (a chupa) with someone in the office, again Dorji let her try one of hers that she said didn't fit. When we were asking about renting clean sleeping bags for a trek, Tashi showed up at our door with two new ones which had been donated. People are very quiet and reserved in this community and you don't know whether they are really agreeing with you or avoiding conflict. Obviously, getting things done by constantly talking to one another has benefited us greatly during our stay here.
One way to entertain yourself in India is to send a parcel, which is a ridiculous production. First, you get two forms from the office. Then you go to the photocopy place (intentionally) next door and get your passport copied twice. Next, go to the parcel maker (again intentionally) next door to get your parcel made. Sit in the parcel maker's shop while you itemize what you are sending and fill out the forms. Once this is done, he will put your stuff in a box and cover it in sacking, which he will sew up and seal with melted wax for less than $2. You then write the "to" on one side and the "from" on the other.
Finally, take it to the post office. They have never checked to see what is in your parcel but accept it, check the paperwork and will send it off once you have paid. There are seven people there but five are continually on tea break. It comes as a surprise when you hear they have digital tracking on your parcel as the office has more of a vibe of the post office you'd find at a Canadian pioneer village, so the mention of technology comes as a shock. Even the slow parcels are supposed to arrive in three weeks, let's see if that happens.
On an average day we'd wake up and get ready at our apartment in Ahimsa House. We had a shared kitchen off of our room with our bathroom across it. Filtered drinking water was provided and we had a nice porch to eat on when the weather permitted.
I would often walk up to the Tashita Centre for morning meditation at 9, with the walk serving as good exercise as well. We had a 15 minute walk up a steep hill to get to the town centre. The road had barely enough space for two small cars to pass each other along the road so it was tight for pedestrians. Walking to town was like a video game with random actions and obstacles along the way, but one of the early levels of the game, as opposed to Delhi which would be a much higher one.
We would take a shortcut outside of our gate which would lead us up a steep path which was mainly rocks and dirt. It had a smattering of garbage, including broken glass and at least one razor blade but was still better than the road.
The road started with a hairpin turn which vehicles had a tough time negotiating. Some cattle and dogs were regulars on this stretch as well as a few monkeys as there was an overflowing dumpster at the curve in the road. All the animals dug through the garbage and sometime someone left a pile of vegetable scraps for the cattle to eat.
Along the road people were constantly honking and buzzing close to the pedestrians, who are far down the pecking order. Our street is one way, which means little, and you want to be at the very edge of the road. When you meet people coming the other way you avoid being forced into the road as you never know when someone might come down quickly. Dogs and cows add to the mix and some people walk down the road without seeming to care about the trucks honking at them and never seem to get hit.
We walk by the Dalai Lama's temple after about 5 minutes, which also holds the Tibet Museum which shows Tibetan-themed movies twice a day. Past the temple the street gets busy with a crowded taxi stand and many more people. As you head up the hill, shops and cafes are on your right and vendors selling tourist materials are in wooden booths to your left. Most of the vendors are Tibetan and laid back, so there is little hassle from them. On the other side you get some "yes sir, please enter my shop" but nothing bad. The worst part remains the traffic. There is some construction going on along the way, creating a terminal for a cablecar from Dharamshala. It is usually women carrying basket of rocks on their heads to the cement mixer.
As you keep going the stalls drop away and you have full time shops on both sides. The street gets busier and you begin to get beggars coming up to you. On the lower street, a few people with deformed legs are by the road asking for money. On the upper part, women with children will grab your shirt sleeve and follow you for a long time, saying ," no money, want food."
The whole question of what to do about beggars is one we have discussed at length. We've heard horror stories of people who give them something and are immediately surrounded by 50 people grabbing for more. We have also seen signs around town telling us now to give them packaged food as they resell it to vendors. A friend of ours who works with the poor told us that in order to sleep on the street you need drugs or inebriants of some kind, so that's where the money goes. There are so many beggars, you can't help them all. Online literature suggests that you donate to organizations that help the poor rather than give them money directly, but that's the sort of rationale that goes through one's head when one sees a beggar and rare is the time that the actual donation occurs. We'll let you know if we come up with a solution that we're happy with.
The shops along the way are very small, there's no supermarket here. Over time you learn who has what, and if they don't have it then magical "shop #5" has it, which has actually turned out to be true. Most places sell yoghurt and butter out on the shelf but we have managed to find a place that keeps it in the fridge. Anti-perspirant and lotions without whiteners have been difficult to find but we located them at a place that sells imported stuff at a premium.
One thing you'll see and hear a lot of is horking and spitting. Paan accounts for some of it, but much of it is cultural. Indians and Tibetans do not have the absolute fascination with mucus that the Chinese do, but horking ans spitting are quite common and can be stomache-churning to be around.
Further up the street we join with the other main street, parallel to ours. Meg figures it used to be a boulevard, as the two streets are very narrow and the line of shops between them are also super thin, with many shops opening onto both streets. These streets are often bottlenecked with traffic and the best ATM in town is here, often with a lineup of 20 foreigners. An annoying thing is that people cleaning just dump their water in the street. You can often avoid the little streams, but the people cleaning their balconies and roofs do the same thing, so often you feel some liquid dripping on you as you go up the street and you're not sure what it is.
In the morning I continue through town and this is the best opportunity to use the ATM. Going up to the Tashita Meditation Centre is another 1 minutes of even steeped walking with a little less traffic. This road is even narrower and heavily populated by monkeys so you have to be on guard. By the time you arrive at the centre you've got a good sweat going, as if you just had a quarter hour on a stairmaster.
The meditation lasts for an hour and is well guided. They have chairs and cushions in a large hall decorated as a Buddhist temple. It is a beginners' class and the attendees are all foreigners.
After the meditation I usually do some chores and then head to the museum for a movie. They ask 10 rupees (20 cents) and put on a burned DVD which has Tibet in its context. Usually 8-10 foreigners attend. There are many places in town offering language classes, Tibetan culture, political information, Buddhist studies and snake-oily stuff about healing through chakras, singing bowls and other things offered by creepy looking gurus.
The LHA Charitable Trust is where Meg and I hold our classes. She does a beginners' class at 10:30 in the morning and I do a 3 pm advanced group. The office is on the main Temple Road not far from the main square. You go up some narrow concrete steps to the dark and dusty main floor before continuing up more narrow steps to the office. On one side are the administrative offices and the other is mainly classrooms. There's a library where the language co-ordinator stays. This room is full of textbooks as well as fiction and a few materials such as word cards.
When the class before mine lets out we all take off our shoes and enter the room. Students sit on cushions on the floor and range in age from about 17 - 40. Many are monks and a few nuns attend each class. Monks and nuns are so common here that no one bats an eye. A big difference from Canada is that there my class is made to show up so many kids would rather not be there. Here the students choose to come to class because they really want to learn English, so the attitude is very different.
Most of the class is verbal as we don't have a lot of materials. If they have to share something they often take pictures on their phones and use the picture. Classes vary from 10-20 students and attendance varies from day to day, making continuity difficult. There's a tv on the wall that can be used to access Youtube but it's unreliable. Simple paper, textbook and verbal lessons are the norm. Fortunately, our friend Firoz helps out in my class every day before he joins the conversation group and is an invaluable help.
After my class, sometimes before I'm even finished, people burst in for the very popular conversation session from 4-5 pm. This allows volunteers to contribute to LHA even if they have no formal skills and are only around for a day or two. Students sit in circles, filling the classrooms and the rooftop are and Nihma sorts the volunteers so that they're sitting with groups of between 3 and 15 students to talk about whatever and practice their English. The conversations get loud and animated as many people are jammed into a fairly compact space.
After the tsession, LHA shuts down quite quickly. Rarely can we walk home without meeting someone we know and we eat out with others for about half of our dinners. This is aided by the sheer number of cheap and excellent restaurants in town. Most are Tibetan with a fair number of Italian places and a few Indian. Many cafes serve proper coffee but only a handful sell alcohol.
The few shops that sell alcohol focus on spirits. We can find decent beer but wine is tricky. Most of the wines are sickly sweet fruit wines. We were going to try some Indian wine but they wanted more than $30 a bottle, come on, this is India.
Another thing that is plentiful here is books. After struggling to find used books to read almost anywhere we went, you could overdose on good books in McLeod Ganj. At Ahimsa House, every room has a shelf of used books. The library at LHA lets you borrow them for a deposit and many restaurants have a shelf that you can use to trade books. I wonder if they were solicited by the Tibetan community and they ended up with more than they could use.
The Tibetans here have quietly been taking very good care of us. When we almost moved to another place (the person whose place we were to take over's landlord didn't allow sublets), Dorji offered to have us move beside he kitchen, even though we didn't speak to her about this. When Meg was asking about buying a secondhand Tibetan outfit (a chupa) with someone in the office, again Dorji let her try one of hers that she said didn't fit. When we were asking about renting clean sleeping bags for a trek, Tashi showed up at our door with two new ones which had been donated. People are very quiet and reserved in this community and you don't know whether they are really agreeing with you or avoiding conflict. Obviously, getting things done by constantly talking to one another has benefited us greatly during our stay here.
One way to entertain yourself in India is to send a parcel, which is a ridiculous production. First, you get two forms from the office. Then you go to the photocopy place (intentionally) next door and get your passport copied twice. Next, go to the parcel maker (again intentionally) next door to get your parcel made. Sit in the parcel maker's shop while you itemize what you are sending and fill out the forms. Once this is done, he will put your stuff in a box and cover it in sacking, which he will sew up and seal with melted wax for less than $2. You then write the "to" on one side and the "from" on the other.
Finally, take it to the post office. They have never checked to see what is in your parcel but accept it, check the paperwork and will send it off once you have paid. There are seven people there but five are continually on tea break. It comes as a surprise when you hear they have digital tracking on your parcel as the office has more of a vibe of the post office you'd find at a Canadian pioneer village, so the mention of technology comes as a shock. Even the slow parcels are supposed to arrive in three weeks, let's see if that happens.
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| A street dog asleep on a vendor's space before they set up. |
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| Temple Road with traffic and cattle. |
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| Meg and her class on our last day of teaching. |
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