white and blue and gold

a few photos from amritsar (punjab), the holy city of the sikhs:

the golden temple:

wandering around the city:happened upon a guy embroidering a tapestry for a gurudwara (sikh temple)

crazy-ridiculous border-crossing ceremony at atari/wagah:

back in the city

a few pictures from pokhara and kathmandu.

pokhara (about 7-10 hours west of kathmandu):


on the way back to kathmandu:back in kathmandu:
bodhnath temple:
wandering the streets of kathmandu:

kathmandu durbar square:
machendranath festival:
courtyard stupas:
swayambunath:
walking back from swayambunath:
pashupatinath:courtyard houses of patan:

durbar square in patan:

and for some photos

i got tired of photo-adding so there are more from the beginning than the end, see my flickr page for more: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wevendy

from jiri to shivalaya: a woman grinding dried potatoes for soup:leaving shivalaya in the morning:

school on the way from shivalaya to kinja:kinja to lamjura pass:
friendly monk on the way from phakding to namche bazaar:
namche to tengboche:
monastery at tengboche:
yaks, mani stone, love the high alpine; debuche to dingboche:
late afternoon sun on ama dablam from dingboche:heading up to chukkung from dingboche:

view from chukkung ri (5546m): makalu!
heading back to dingboche: ama dablam in the afternoon
then it snowed! on the way to tukla:
sundog around everest from kala pattar (5545m) at 6am:
cho la pass:sorry, no digital photos (of mine) from gokyo, my camera battery died and it was very expensive to recharge... have to wait to develop my film :)

heading down from gokyo:
kumjung monastery:

mo topenko poto kisnu setsu?

hard to describe being back in kathmandu after 25 days out of civilization, trekking in the himalayas. feels like the jet lag that never hit me when i arrived in ktm from the us suddenly all flooded back in, things just moving too fast, too loud, all the chaos of kathmandu jouncing around in the jeep on the way back from the airport. 25 days without seeing a car, no internet (well, only once). i miss the austere stillness, the silence, only the low rushing of wind past my ears, cold numbing my cheeks. the heat of the sun, the smell of dust. i've felt for a long time that cultures that develop in harsh physical environments have some kind of reverence about them, and sherpa culture is a beautiful example. they have a gentleness, warmth, joviality about them, but also an inner fortitude (and outer, seeing porters hauling 120+pound loads, often in huge baskets, by a strap across their foreheads).

we trekked in from jiri to namche bazaar, up chukkung ri (5546m), over to everest base camp and up kala pattar (5545m), over cho la pass (5420m) to gokyo and dudh pokhari lake, up gokyo ri (5360m), and then down, back to namche and flew back to kathmandu from lukla. the way in from lukla is a haul, a lot of gain and loss almost every day, including one day of 1900m of gain, but when we got in past lukla (which is where most other tourists start their treks) i was so glad we'd done it. people on the way were incredibly friendly, happy and curious to have their pictures taken, whereas beyond lukla, it was harder to find people still excited about seeing tourists (apparently during high season, 700 people arrive every day in lukla... i can't really imagine it). walking in from jiri also helped ease in the acclimatization. it's crazy to be standing at the top of the "summits" we reached, which, while at over 18,000ft, are little brown rocky lumps compared with the high himalayas looming over. the sense of scale becomes completely distorted: plunging river valleys shooting up to towering black and white peaks, traversing along yak trails cut through steep hillsides where the corners seem to turn into clouds.

looking back at my pictures, i'm realizing how incredibly more diverse a place nepal is than i knew when i first arrived. walking in from jiri we apparently crossed through four different ethnic groups, and being back in kathmandu i'm realizing how different sherpa culture, even in terms of dress, from nepali culture. for women especially the different jewelry ornamentation between ethnic groups is incredibly distinctive. it was interesting to find the line where we could start to say hello to people in sherpa (tashidali) rather than nepali (namaste) and get responses. of course once past lukla it seemed like all our interactions also had to take into account the influence of outside tourism... dress style changed distinctively, most people were wearing puffy coats, running shoes, much less agriculture as it seemed most of the income came now from tea house tourism rather than subsistence farming. i'm not even sure how many of the towns in the high himalayas actually existed prior to the tourism boom as real functioning towns since many of them now seem to function purely on tourism. i found myself wishing that i could have been here 30 years ago, see what people were wearing, it seems like things have changed so much. still there are a lot of remnants: a yak herder with yak hair wrapped as a screen around his eyes to avoid snow blindness; traditional womens' clothing with striped apron, tunic vest, elaborate jewelry and colorfully printed scarves wrapped around their hair; a pregnant sherpa woman being carried to a hospital over lamjura pass (up around 10,000ft) in a porter basket (strap looped over her husband's forehead); baby carrier baskets, an awesome alternative to a cradle, where the baby is carried lying down in a basket on the woman's back by a strap over her forehead (in general, people carry everything with their heads).

as for the actual walking, it's amazing what you get used to as you hit the high himalayas: no running water, squat toilets with thick layers of ice around them, the canisters of water to flush them and the toilets themselves freezing over at night. only solar electricity. being cold all the time and therefore never changing clothes. once you're ascending above 10000ft and have to worry about acclimatization, you're not actually working that hard every day (only ascending about 400m/day), so most afternoons were spent basking in the sun or reading in bed. a lot of sleeping, but no good sleeping, always waking up and with strange (!) dreams. learned a valuable lesson about life at altitude from getting a little borderline frostbite at the top of kala pattar where the usual cycle of warming and cooling in hands and feet that i'm used to in the mountains no longer functions: having my toes hurt like hell when i finally started to regain some feeling in them and my fingers getting so cold i could no longer pull off my gloves with them (no worries, i still have all 20 digits; no permanent damage done haha).

one thing that did seem to become apparent on the trek that made me a little sad is that trickle down economics from tourism in nepal doesn't seem very functional. there is a booming tourist industry, especially in trekking companies, tea house lodges, etc. but the (very large) amounts of money poured into them doesn't seem to necessarily get spread around all that well.

check next post for photos...

a brief respite in the western hemisphere

just a few pictures from my trip back in the us in february.

flying over the persian gulf on my chennai-doha-ny-cle transit: entire landscape of whitish-tan land, turquoise water.winter in oberlin; postholing to pyle reservoir:
i love the lincoln park zoo in chicago:

flying

my mind is blown by air travel. and beyond just looking out the window, which by itself is just amazing (amazing!). flying is in some ways so easy, too easy. the fact that you can just buy a ticket and end up nearly anywhere with an airport in under about 30 hours, is so unbelievable. but the relative ease of flying is in no way a good reflection of the much more difficult social, political, cultural, climatic, geographical changes associated with traveling or covering such huge distances, much too little time to accommodate the cavernous culture shock or deal with the political differences between different places (having to get visas, etc.). i still find it hard to believe that a couple of weeks ago i started out in india, transferred planes in qatar, flew up the coast of saudi arabia, over kuwait and baghdad, crossed kurdistan (nostalgia for eastern turkey aww), the black sea, ukraine, russia before heading for the more familiar white north atlantic.

lifting off from chennai at night, it looks just about like any other city but how untrue that is!

landing in doha, qatar, watching a guy in all white cotton and shades glide along the tarmac. i was having a good time with the security checkpoint, cultural juxtapositions of women in saris being patted down by female airport security staff in islam-appropriate uniforms, until they started manhandling my bassoon, all taking the pieces out, putting them back wrong, and yelling at me when i would try to approach to tell them how to not damage it. after rummaging through your carryons, they just dump them onto the floor outside security, awesome, thanks.

arriving back in the us (and in a tiny town in rural ohio no less), the quiet bore into my brain... being able to hear the sounds of my footsteps, the crushing of the snow, hearing myself breathing again. i found people to be both more and less friendly than in india... people here are much less reserved, more gruffly, loudly, physically friendly, but then on the other hand, courtesy on the street actually exists here, whereas there's nothing remotely like it in india. having the tap water be either cold (cold!) or hot (hot!); trying to not cringe when i hand someone something with my left hand.

but i feel like i've readjusted easier than i thought. but i still struggle to find any kind of logical relationship between india and here. i think it just doesn't exist. i feel like if someone told me i'd been in a coma the last 5 months and had dreamed the whole thing, i might believe them.

walking

i walk a lot here. sometimes upwards of 1-2 hours a day, purely for transportation. i hate taking autos (and they're expensive), and often the city bus system (which is really cheap) will only get you about half-way where you want to go. walking here is a little bit of a skill: constantly going from non-functional sidewalk into the street, around trees (which actually grow in the streets here), piles of rubble, goats chickens cows, sleeping dogs, dodging crumbling manholes, missing chunks of sidewalk that reach down to murky sewage water, being constantly not-quite-hit by autos, cars, bicycles, buses with bellowing horns, trying not to run into the usual cluster fuck of crowds and not step in who-knows-what on the ground (really... shit, food, who knows what it is...). when i first got here i was advised to walk in the street as though i were a water buffalo: with no concern or reaction on my face.

i've been realizing just how much you can tell about a person here by how they are dressed. cross reference with location and age and you have a pretty good idea of a person's background, what topics of conversation you might have with them. i'll start with men:
the typical would be nondescript sandals, button-down cotton shirt, pants. then there are variations:
-shoes: wearing no shoes at all is also pretty common. wearing closed-toed shoes instantly means more wealth.
-pants or lungi/dhotti (a kind of skirt, sometimes tucked up to be more like a mini skirt): wearing jeans and especially shorts (!) automatically jumps you to the higher echelons. the dudes on the street are all wearing pants, whereas the guys on the street wearing a dhotti seem more like workers, or like they live/work in the area, probably are more likely to not be wearing shoes. but the dhotti is also formal wear... a wealthy well-educated guy might wear a nice dhotti to a wedding. and old men on the street are also more likely to wear a dhotti... probably a white one in contrast to the usually printed plaid of the work dhotti.
-shirt: knit cotton/polo shirt again automatically jumps to a different level.

for women:
-sari: the worker women on the street are usually in saris as are older, wealthy brahmin women, but they're totally different: the worker women wear more nylon fabrics or simple cottons whereas older wealthy women would wear shiny silk/cotton
-salwar kameez: the uniform of younger women and middle aged women of the middle class. wearing a chudhidar (kameez top with tight, bunched up legging-like pants, an import from north india) is more stylish.
-jeans+kurta/western clothes: college students, more educated, wealthier

of course, these are not rules, they're only my observations....

for hindus (well, at least men...) you can also often tell what deity they worship. a shiva worshipper (iyer) will sometimes have ~3 white stripes across the forehead, whereas a vishnu worshipper (iyengar) will have a thin white U or V reaching down between the eyebrows sometimes with an orange vertical stripe in the middle.

i see all of this as part of this characteristic of public-ization here: so many things that in the us we're used to thinking of as private events become public actions in india. the streets are a place not just for walking and transportation, but for eating, shopping, socializing, drinking (tea or coffee... drinking alcohol is also done on the streets but not out in public), sleeping, peeing, playing, working (sawing wood, welding, car mechanics, tailoring clothing, etc.), brushing teeth, pumping water, shitting, worshipping (street temples are everywhere). everyone's all up in each others business here because it's all in public anyway. privacy is a major luxury.

i think when i first got to india, the life i saw on the streets is what i assumed was the "real" india. so when i would go to a coffee shop where wealthy and well-educated people come to drink expensive cappucino and look out at the street through floor-to-ceiling glass windows in the comfort of AC and the security of a guard watching their cars parked out front (places where I don't feel strange getting out my laptop), at first I considered these places "not-india," an escape or reaction against india. but really, the longer i stay here the more i realize that these places are just as much a part of modern india. sure, these places (which emerged only with the IT boom) are an escape from the insanity of the streets, but they're just as important an element of the face of modern india.

which i've been realizing, the longer i spend here, and the more of india i see, the less i feel like i have a good idea of what india "is." india is everything. it is cow-drawn carts in the street and swank highrises, barefoot flower-sellers and open sewers, laptop-toting businessmen and engineering schools, groups of young men pilgrims, white poweder smeared on their foreheads, all wearing the same color taking each others pictures with cameraphones, beggarwomen without fingers, old women in shiny silk saris whose children all live in the us, young couples wearing jeans going on dates, movie stars (not just bollywood but kollywood, tollywood...), marathon runners, the smallest men and women i've ever seen (how big you are here correlates pretty directly with how much money you have... not just fat, but physical size), old man pilgrims with wild eyes and crazy hair. india is so many religions, so many languages, so many individual states with their own individuality and identity (and new ones struggling to emerge all the time). even within a single religion, hinduism, there are so many different deities, so many different ways to worship. india's kind of a place where you do whatever you want because there is no one set way to do anything. i still feel here like i have no idea what's happening around me about 90% of the time, but really, i don't think anyone else does either, even people who've lived their whole lives here.

so, i've been struggling to figure out where i fit in here, who are the people i'm supposed to be friends with, what place in society i'm supposed to take. and i really still have no idea. while this has been frustrating, i think overall it's good, maybe it's why i came here. last year i started to think about defining "adulthood" as beginning at the time when you know who you are. eventually it becomes harder to throw everything to the wind and just strike out in a new direction. and really, eventually this is probably for the best. there's a major contradiction in my life between continuity and change... learning new things vs getting better at the things i already do. i feel like somewhere in this last year this transition happened to me maybe. as awesome as india is, i'm frustrated by the parts of my life i can't pursue here (contemporary music and climbing mostly... but cosmology too, though that's probably easier to do here than the others), parts of my life i don't think i'm willing to give up, and it makes me wonder if i can really be happy living anywhere besides the us (or, maybe the western world) (when did i become this square!? jeez). while i struggle with this here, maybe this is also an opportunity. one of my neighbors here is a pretty well-known musician and musicologist; i met him recently and he told me to learn music here like a child: don't learn grammar, analytically; learn by listening, absorbing without analysis or judgment. how much more we can learn before we get all caught up in what we already know.