Return

Aside from the hurry and scurry of life at home, I haven't yet written from here because I haven't really known what to say. Like arriving in Hyderabad, there's been this span of time where I find it difficult to think about all the differences from a macro-level as I'm struggling just to take them all in. But now, it's been nearly a month and I'm home, not just in Wisconsin, but in the bedroom of the house I grew up in, able to pause and reflect on what's changed and what's stayed the same.

It's actually quite hard to believe it happened. Fleeting like a dream, I have to talk about India with people constantly, to assure myself of it's occurrence and crystallize it in memories and stories. It's most assuaging with the people who were there with me, the ones who are also struggling to make sense of this strangely new yet static, unchanged place we call home.

None of us are entirely sure what to do with ourselves. Don't get me wrong, I'm having the time of my life playing games with kids at a summer camp and teaching them yoga, training capoeira again and seeing everyone I missed. But there's still this sense that one's going through the motions and isn't always entirely there. It's hard to just drop everything and fall back into the routine of life at home. The terrible thing would be if it wasn't, if one could just come back and seamlessly fall into place. Things have been in many ways, very, very good here. But I don't feel like I fit anymore.

In a sense, returning to Madison carried the same self-indulgence of going home - a regression to an infantile state in an environment where everything is taken care of for me. It's lovely, comfortable and convenient, but I feel restlessness a-brewin'. For that reason, my mind's been somewhat trained to the future, preparing for my senior thesis and thinking about my plans for post-graduation (taking a post-bac research position somewhere for a year or two, possibly in DC), even as I make a point of living in the present. While I find many of my friends and peers fearful of post-graduation life, it's something I'm massively ready for, just as I was ready for college life come senior year of high school. After India, it's hard to find life without adventure and environmental challenge satisfying, hence why I've been keeping myself challenged and busy in other ways since leaving. But I'm excited to be somewhere new again and slowly transform it into a home, running it over with memories like ivy.

But how is it being home?...It's good. Spending so much time with American kids (who are far more like Indians than American adults) has made it easier, and practicing yoga daily has kept be connected. The latter reminds me that India really did happen, and assures me that it really did change me. The most terrifying thing about being home is the prospect of getting run over by the current, and forgetting all the quiet truths I learned abroad. Like mantras, I've repeated the jarring differences between here and there in conversation to anyone who asks, the ones that had me reeling my first week home.

And what of these? First, it was the environment. Like any animal removed from his native environment and simply dropped into a foreign one, I was initially stupefied. My brain wasn't sure how to process all the wide open spaces of my home town, sterile like a hospital, as bursting with personality as a loaf of Wonderbread. The scarcity, whiteness, and indifference of everyone made me feel uneasy as well, drawing such a sharp contrast to the constant circus of grinning, colorful Indians tumbling one-over-another of which I'd grown so fond. Not to mention the indulgence of expensive, air-conditioned cars and orderly, $3.75-a-drink coffee shops lining the wide, open roads.

And secondly, hitting harder and deeper, were the social norms. Cynicism, sarcasm and the act of complaint had become altogether absent, something I failed to realize but now miss terribly. Adjusting to these and their near-constant presence in most any conversation I found myself in has been a generally unpleasant experience. Truly, I miss the laughing optimism of people in India, the acceptance of life as a rigged lottery and heartfelt gratitude for it's happier moments. American Entitlement does not resonate with me and I have a hard time relating to the shallow woes of others (not that deeper pains do not exist here as well - more on that in a bit) which I cannot help but place in newfound perspective alongside street children and begging, child-bearing mothers. Thankfully, disgust does not arise in me in response to these whinings, as I easily remember making them myself many times in the past. An understanding of how luxuriously the vast majority of Americans live cannot, I think, arise without having had the opportunity to experience a place where people live in far harsher conditions. So I do not resent them; I just wish they could see outside their time and place.

But as I said, this is not to discount the pains of people here. Rather, I was stunned by the air of sadness that hung over people at a show in Madison, the night after I got home, which I left with the uncomfortable, unavoidable feeling that people here are simply not as happy as they were in India. Paradoxical as this seems, given our affluence, it's something I've been made constantly aware of over the last month. I'm floating all kinds of theories as to why, coming up primarily with a) the alienated, disconnected nature of life in a place where you can exist without interacting with or relying upon others, b) SES-isolation which prevents people from seeing how well they live and how much worse many people are forced to and c) the spiritual vapidity of most religious life in the States. I realize these are rather bold claims to make without walking the reader through my reasoning, but doing so would take a long, long time, so I'll suggest simply asking me if you're curious.

Getting back to social norms, it's been an odd readjustment. We keep ourselves so separate here, I sometimes feel lonely at the lack of interaction with others. While one cannot help constantly bumping into, tripping over and being squished up against others in India, I find people here apologizing for invading my personal space without having even made contact. Similarly, while strangers in India would frequently ask what I was doing there, whether I was married and why I wasn't married, strangers are strangers in the States and you generally don't interact with people you don't know if you're hoping to avoid strange looks. Switching from a country which wears it's collective heart on its sleeve to one which is guarded and frequently fearful has been unnerving. I miss the openness of people, the implicit trust and goodwill that peppered the most mundane of daily happenings. Really, nothing in India was mundane. Every day felt like an adventure and the sheer personality of the country made buying a cup of chai an opportunity to meet and learn from another.

These are the sharp contrasts that threw me off-kilter, to which I've been slowly, steadily adjusting this last month. Though I'm getting used to them, I refuse to forget that things could be different and that our way is not the inherently best way. In many ways, our way is no longer my way, and that deliberate resistance and rejection of societal norms which turn people into strangers has become a part of me. Through simply living my life one way and not another, I hope to Indianize America in the ways she could use it. Comfort is not the highest good. This is something we've forgotten.

And yes, I am most certainly going back. I've begun a lifelong affair with India, and realized I'd love to one day own a house there, in which I could live for several month stretches when the feeling grabs me. Happy as I am, being there, there's no good reason not to. In the short term, I'm planning to take my parents on a two or three-month tour some time in the next couple years, as I'd love to share the subcontinent with them and simply show them everything I've recounted.

I've transferred the pictures from my post-semester travels from my camera to my hard drive, but have yet to get them online with explanatory blurbs. I'm planning to finally take care of that next weekend, and I'll post something here once I do. For now, I'm going to go enjoy my family and practice my morning yoga. Much as I love sharing it with my kids (many of whom have taken to it like fish to water, much to my delight), it never affords the same, serene shanti I enjoy when practicing at my leisure. Take care, readers.

Foot out the door

The last few days of preparation for both my remaining exams and my next six weeks of traveling around the subcontinent have been, shall we say, hectic. But, all is going more or less according to plan and I'll ideally have passed my Cognitive Psych final with flying colors, completed my list of numerous little things to do and be sitting on a plane to Kerala in forty-eight hours. For the curious, my itinerary will take me through the following locations before flying home June 4th: Kerala, Mumbai, Udaipur, Jodhpur, Jaipur, Agra, Amritsar, the Himalayas, Dharamasala, Hardiwar, Rishikesh, Delhi, Khajuraho, Varanasi and Kolkata. Yes, that is approximately fifteen destinations. Yes, it will be a miracle if it all works out seamlessly. I'll be traveling with friends for about three weeks of it, before traveling on my own a bit and meeting up with some Indian friends in their respective stomping grounds before heading back to Hyderabad for my eventual flight home.

As I'll be traveling all over the place sans laptop, I'm not sure just how accessible internet will typically be. Do email/facebook if you need to get ahold of me, just know I may not be able to respond very swiftly.

If I had the time to stop and reflect on leaving Hyderabad, I'm sure this post would triple in length. However, I still have those aforementioned million-and-one things to do, and at least one more exam to take. I'll post more from my journeys if/when I get the chance and hope to get those Mamallapuram and Pondicherry photos up tomorrow afternoon. You can expect, dear readers, a "Whoa, I'm back in the U.S." post sometime shortly after I get home. But as I mentioned before, I intend to do a great deal of writing on India over the next six weeks and well into the summer, some of which very well might end up on here. At the very least, I have one more lengthy post marinating in my Blogger "Drafts" folder, which I intend to share upon it's completion.

Let me just state for the record that I, once again, have absolutely no idea what to expect. Also, I'm ecstatic. Phir milenge, yaar.

मुझे अपने भारत से प्यार करते हैं

Nothing could be more awkward than starting a blog post with an excuse, but I swear I've been writing - just not here. Having (it seems) just settled into life here, I've been trying to wrap my head around the reality of the end of my time at UoH, in (my God) a week. After my last exam next Friday, I'll be flying to Kerala to begin my nearly six week tour of India, the details of which I'm just now nailing down. Before then, I swear *hand on hypothetical bible* I'll upload my Pondicherry/Mammallapuram pictures and talk a little bit about that trip, in addition to uploading at least one more post I'm in the process of writing.

Anyways, the weirdness of nearly being at the end of my time here has been fortunately offset by my tremendous excitement for my upcoming travels as well as the summer to which I'll be returning afterwards. By some stroke of incredible fortune, I've managed to secure both senior thesis funding and a brilliant summer job, meaning I should be able to pay off my India loans by the end of the summer, for which I'm thanking my lucky stars. Beyond the relief of temporary freedom from financial concerns, I think it's going to be a fantastic summer of good work and good friends. All of this is making it easier to think about leaving in India in seven weeks. But really, it's knowing I'll come back that makes it okay.

So, given my limited internet access, I won't be writing a whole lot here in the next six weeks. However, I think it will take a summer's worth of reflection and turning-over before my time in India will actually come to an end, so I expect to be writing on the matter for some time. Some of that will likely appear here and a good deal, I think, will turn up in my private journal.

A friend warned me early on of writing too much early on and trying to make sense of everything too quickly. While writing is usually a big part of my sorting-out process, it was good advice in a way because it reminded me that I was here to experience and that it would take some time for those mental maps to come together. Now, all at once, I'm piling up observations upon observations and can't wait to get it all down on paper, thought out and mixed together. The other day at GOPs, I started jotting down notes on subjects I wanted to remember to write about. Moments later, I was staring at a two page Word document full of small notes, any one of which I could (and plan to) turn into pages with sufficient time and effort. There's a hell of a lot churning in my head and I plan to get it all out, one way or another. I started toying with the idea of a series of essays or, dare I say it, a book of sorts. I think I'll just start writing though, and write and write until it's worked out, without any preconceived notion of format or audience. Then, my frenetic brain satisfied, I'll decide what, if anything more, to do with it.

I've been thinking about what will come home with me from India and I keep coming up with 'everything.' It's so much more than some crafts, yoga, meditation and improved Hindi - it's every moment of every day that took me in and worked a change in me I can't yet put into words. I came here burned out, stumbling into the new year, not really understanding why I needed to come here, yet profoundly certain that it needed to happen and happen precisely then. What I found I can't yet describe - that's what the writing will be for. But I can tell so much has deeply, irreversibly changed in ways I sorely needed. And knowing it isn't over, that the changes are still working and moving me to something, someone more, I can't help but feel like I'm sneaking off with glorious treasure. I'll share what I find, one way or another.

And I know I'll come back. In a sense I'll never leave; there's no getting away from love after all.

Snippet

Tonight was the SIP cultural show.

I danced Thriller in a formal kurta. Pictures and video soon.

It's starting to feel like the end (of my time at UoH). Weird.

Anticipation

I’ve been getting restless lately, so perhaps it’s a good thing today’s got me occupied with a six-page philosophy paper. I usually get this way when I’m verging on two weeks without travel. Actually, I think it’s been more like three weeks but I kept myself busy enough last weekend (more on that soon) that it feels like two. Anyways, it’s Indian Philosophy today, Cognitive Psych in-class presentation tomorrow and then I’m leaving for Chennai, Pondicherry and Mamallapuram Thursday night (more on that too).

This restlessness is mostly intellectual; it’s not that my classes here aren’t engaging – they are and I generally love them. But there’s very little work assigned for outside of class, a fundamentally good thing as it’s kept my weekends clear for travel. Academically exhausted as I was upon arrival, I really didn’t mind. And in fact, I’ve sufficiently filled my free time with meditation, yoga, exercise, reading, writing and exploring the city to keep myself from getting, sin of sins, bored in India.

But even with all of that, I’ve been feeling a bit torpid. To some extent, I miss getting thoroughly engaged with whatever I’m studying on my own, outside of the classroom. While, as I said, I’ve been a more avid leisure reader than I’ve been since I was eight years old, plowing through Goosebumps and Animorphs, the nature of the reading has been more like savoring than concrete learning, probably because I’m a sucker for fiction. Come to think of it, my nonfiction reads have been mostly handpicked by past professors – that’s something I’ll have to learn to start doing for myself. But for now I’ll work out this restlessness through writing.

As for recent adventures, Taylor and I went into the old city (downtown Hyderabad) last weekend to properly see Charminar and the Laad Bazaar. I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to be calm and poised amidst the same chaos that stunned and overwhelmed me to the point of brainfreeze four months ago. I can so clearly remember the city’s sensory overload when CIEE unloaded us some day in our first week here and struggling to take in something totally unlike anything I’d ever encountered. Having grown up between rural and suburban Wisconsin before moving to college-town Madison, my experience of ‘the city’ had been limited to Milwaukee’s evening music scene and a handful of afternoons in Chicago. The difference between that and the hundred-thousand sights, smells and sounds sounds sounds of Hyderabad is staggering. And stagger I did, one warm January afternoon, between smoking rickshaws and yelling, pearl-waving vendors in a single-file American line into a local restaurant. Sidenote: Any hopes I had of a country-boy lost in New York City moment have been thoroughly dashed – something tells me Hyderabad’s got it all, louder, brighter and inescapably closer.

But there Taylor and I were, this last infinitely hotter Saturday afternoon, immersed in the same old ocean of noise (three points if you get the reference), sweat and smoke, feeling, of all things, lucid tranquility. A creeping smile betrayed my confidence in a place I could have nearly shit my pants mere months ago. Like when I’d sorted the ins and outs of local transportation, I felt like I was making it. And it’s a good feeling – making it from scratch was part of the unique challenge India presented that lured me from my countryside cocoon.

The day was pretty run of the mill – we saw Charminar, shopped a bit at the Laad Bazaar and had some damned good Chicken Biriyani and Pallak Paneer at a local hole in the wall – but it was good to spend an afternoon in the heart of the city so nonchalantly. It felt like I’d made Hyderabad somehow my own. But then again, it’s I who’s adjusted. So really, it’s the other way around.

Last night I realized I’d unwittingly arranged to spend Easter Sunday in Pondicherry, a former French colony on India’s southeastern coast. To my great fortune, a number of 18th century European-style cathedrals still operate throughout the city, promising a truly unique Easter service experience. Besides, no one does brunch like the (residual) French.

The semester’s end is nearly in sight – two exams next week and two the following before I hop an airplane to Kerala, free as a bird for six long weeks. A small group of friends and I have worked out a fantastic post-semester itinerary (which I’ll post here soon), taking us through India’s essentials, well-known or otherwise, before they fly home from Delhi and I travel a bit more on my own. I’ll be fortunate enough to have friends from the University in Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta, who’ve offered (read: insisted, for those of you unfamiliar with Indian hospitality) to show me around their stomping grounds when I’m in town.

All in all, I’m bursting with the same excitement I felt in the last weeks of 2008, waiting for my next great adventure to take off. Study abroad made for a marvelous excuse to live here, but this is the India I’ve really been waiting to see – India without the frills and comforts of being an American student at UoH; India, thousand-faced like Vishnu with a few good friends and essential possessions, seen from the jungles, ruins, backwaters and mountains with a sense of what I’m seeing, a sense of where and who I am. This is going to be brilliant, electric, unreal.

Aurangabad Follow-up

As promised, the photos from my weekend in Aurangabad have all been uploaded to their respective albums including Ajanta Caves, Ellora Caves, Kailasantha Temple and Daulatabad Fort. Here are excerpts from the album descriptions of two amusing encounters, should you (heaven forbid) otherwise miss them.

From Ellora Caves:

"While exploring the Buddhist caves, we noticed a group of Indians frantically waving their arms and motioning us inside. A few minutes later, we learned that someone had disrupted a large bee's nest in one of the nearby caves - a cave we'd need to past if we wanted to see the rest of the caves or, you know, leave. Learning of a second exit, we followed some fellow tourists to a large locked iron gate, which one could sort of climb around, if not over. Moments after scurrying up and around, the man with the keys to the gate arrived, and managed to pry it about six inches open. Weirdly liberated, we meandered down the road to the entrance of Ellora and approached the Kailasanatha Temple."

From Daulatabad Fort:

"On the way down, countless Indian children swarmed around me, also making the descent. One young girl, a few years older than her peers, boldly issued a "Hello!" with outstretched hand and set jaw before breaking into giggles when I returned the same. That previously set jaw swiftly dropped when I asked in Hindi how her day was, a reaction I quickly followed with a fake gasp and the exclamation "Vuh Hindi bolta hai!" or "He speaks Hindi!" She and her friends' eyes widened and giggles poured forth tenfold as I grinned and head-bobbed at her stunned expression. I love the kids here."

In other news, I've at last completed my Yoga certification course. Three months of 6am yoga culminated in eleven hours of final examination, spread over three days of testing. I should find out my exam results by late April but I think (knock on wood) I did just fine. It's really been an amazing opportunity, being able to study yoga during my time here, both in its actual practice and its theory, history and philosophical outlook and I definitely plan to keep it part of my daily life. That said, I'm excited to push it back to a more reasonable, 7 or 8am-ish timeslot and introduce regular, sufficient sleep to my daily life. While I discovered that I can be more of a morning person than I previously thought, I'm far from a pre-dawn person. But what good is enlightenment anyways if you get there groggy as all hell?

Overdue

I'm rather stunned that a whole month's gone by since I last updated my blog. I mainly blame the lack of hostel internet, but we've finally got a couple of desktops with internet, if not wifi. I was stunned actually, and am still adjusting to the phenomenon of readily available, reasonably quick internet.

I've been on two trips and celebrated two holidays since last I wrote. The pictures from the Mysore trip are already online and rather than reiterate what we did, I think I'll just copy-paste what I wrote for the album descriptions on Picasa:

"CIEE took us on a weekend trip through Bangalore to Mysore, the second largest city in the state of Karnataka. While there, we visited the Mysore Palace, which was constructed from 1897-1912 for the former royal family of Mysore. Nowadays, half of the palace belongs to the government and is maintained as a museum, while the other half still belongs to the heirs of the former royal family. Sadly, cameras were not allowed inside but you can see the palace exterior here. After seeing the palace, we journeyed into a local market where potent scents of fresh vegetables, bananas, incense and perfume joined forces to overpower our collective olfactory systems. Later that evening, we arrived at the lavish Sandesh hotel where I was lucky enough to share a suite with two friends and feast on their breakfast and dinner buffets.

For our second day in Mysore, we traveled to Shravanabelagola, a major Jain pilgrimage center and home to the massive Gomatheswara statue, built approximately a thousand years ago. The album cover captures my first sighting of the statue. Having walked off to the side after the long many-staired ascent, I turned around and nearly jumped out of my skin to discover a giant stone head, looming over the main temple. Numerous other sculptures immortalize Jain saints who dedicated their lives to Jainism's teachings of nonviolence. Afterwards, a local hacked open fresh coconuts and I drank the first coconut milk I've ever actually enjoyed (outside of a Pina Colada, that is).

After Shravanabelagola, we shuttled over to Melkote, a small, local village for a traditional Iyengar (Hindu Brahmin caste) lunch at the local Dharamashala (a place where pilgrims, wanderers and vagabonds can stay while on their journeys), possibly the best meal I've had in India yet. Afterwards, we had the opportunity to wander around the lanes of Melkote, an 'actual' Indian village. You'll notice pictures of signs posted on some houses of a red flame set between the trunks of a white U. These signs denoted that the family within was of the Iyengar caste and worshipers of Vishnu. Finally, we visited the local ancient temple, dedicated to Shiva. In Hindu temples, the main statue of the deity is believed to house the actual God, and is never moved once set into place. I was stunned to realize that the statue of Shiva within had resided in that single place for over eight hundred years. Or, to put it into perspective, approximately four times as long as my own country has existed."

I found out that the head cook at the Dharamashala in Melkote often takes on students after final exams for a weeklong crashcourse through Indian cooking. Following my mental flowchart for life decisions from 'Would this be, in hindsight, awesome?' to 'Will you likely ever get this opportunity again?' I find little reason not to, particularly since I'll have around five to six weeks between my last exam and my flight home. Also I'm not sure life would be worth living without learning and occasionally preparing that man's Safron Rice recipe.

Food-related tangent: my Hindi teacher recently had us over to her house again, where we prepared Chicken Biriyani, a Hyderabadian specialty. Slightly overcooked, it was nonetheless delicious and I look forward to dazzling the tastebuds of unsuspecting hungry friends upon my return to Madison. You've been warned.

A couple days after we got back, it was time for Holi (also on Picasa):

"Holi, the Festival of Colors, is ostensibly celebrated throughout India for such lofty reasons as the triumph of good over evil and spring over winter. But as any Indian will tell you, people really just want an excuse to cover each other with colored powder, water and the occasional egg. While playing with the other students on campus, I was lucky enough to accumulate all three in staggering quantities."

I celebrated Holi with the student population at Gop's, UoH's quadrangle/place to hang out and eat snacks. Looking like lost sheep and blank canvases, we Americans were swiftly powdered, doused and egged without exception until no patch of white skin could betray our foreign origin and we, for a time, blended in with the technicolor crowd. This lasted until the singing, dancing, makeshift-drum slamming crowd was worked into such a frenzy that they began tearing each others' shirts, hungry for blank slates. My peers, following the 'when in Rome' mentality, made sure to include me in this ritual, prompting a pink, green and orange-bearing mob to descend upon me once again, so that moments later, my bare chest was as color-covered as the ripped, ragged tshirt I clutched in my neon green hand. Blinking, I watched the mob's attention turn to some other exposed impostor, whose pristine white skin disappeared just as quickly as mine. Christmas might have just lost its favorite-holiday throne.

Last weekend, I traveled with some friends to Aurangabad in Maharashtra, home of the Ellora and Ajanta caves. We first visited Ajanta's Buddhist caves which date back to the second century, B.C.E. The big, open caves were carved into square or rectangular pillared rooms, featuring huge stone carvings of the Buddha, Boddhisatvas and other traditional symbols like the twelve-pointed wheel.

That Saturday, we visited the less-famous but in my opinion, even more impressive Ellora caves, which showcase incredible temples and monasteries from the Buddhist, Hindu and Jain faiths. Interestingly, they were all carved around the same general time (550-750, 600-875, and 800-1,000 C.E, respectively), suggesting a time and place of interreligious harmony. The Kailasanatha Temple was the most impressive of the caves, carved with incredible detail out of a single rock, covering an area "double the size of the Parthenon in Athens." Further details can be found here but yet again, it's a sight of such incredible scale and detail that words simply cannot hope to capture the thing itself, so I'll refer you to the forthcoming bundle of pictures I took instead. I will point out that the carving alone took ten generations of God only knows how many people. Thinking about that while craning my neck in a stupefied attempt to take it all in gave me some appreciation for the immense devotion those artisans must have had.

While in Aurangabad, we also visited the Bibi Ka Maqbara or "Poor man's Taj," a mausoleum strongly resembling the famous Taj Mahal, as well as the Daulatabad fort, reminiscent of Hyderabad's own Golconda Fort. Pictures of all of these will be up soon, time permitting.

As for that second holiday, I got to celebrate Ugadi yesterday, the Telugu new year. A holiday in Andhra Pradesh, it also celebrates the beginning of spring and life itself. My friends and I went down to Shilparamam to celebrate, as we did for the Sankrati festival. While munching on a variety of mango-themed dishes, we enjoyed some traditional Kuchipudi dance, featuring ornately costumed women and smiling, adorably bumbling children dressed as flowers and bees. I also got some new kurtas and, finally, some lungis. The latter are essential for the rapidly heating climate (it's averaged over 100 at midday lately) and infinitely more comfortable than pants when lounging indoors. And hell, when it's socially acceptable to wear a glorified bedsheet wrapped around your waist, why not?

I think that covers most of March's main events. Classes are winding down, which is doubly strange as I still feel like I just got here and classes never really heated up in the first place. That's not to say they aren't engaging, but aside from attending lectures, academic demands have been few and far between. And really, that's fine by me, so long as I'm still learning and feeling intellectually engaged. Indeed, I've learned a great deal about the eastern religions and philosophies that originally piqued my interest in India, in addition to making leaps and bounds in my Hindi.

(Brief aside: Speaking Hindi with people while traveling on weekends or just going downtown has been one of the coolest, most rewarding aspects of this trip. It's fantastic and bizarre to find myself on the other side of the world, speaking with people in their mothertongue, meeting their children, wives and brothers while sharing a bit of my own story. All the hours of drilling vocab and learning the difference between a "d" and a "dh" were worth being able to speak with a three-year-old girl and her mother, even though neither speak a word of English.)

After three months of waking up at 5:30 in the morning to bike over to the yoga center, I'm about to take my certification exam. I've been studying all the relevant philosophy, psychology and physiology this weekend, as well as getting all the Sanskrit names straight and making last corrections to the asanas in practice. I originally started yoga for the sake of my capoeira game, hoping to become more flexible. In addition to learning that it was really my balance that needed improvement, moreso than my flexibility, I learned that I actually love yoga itself. So, finding the 6am certification course more challenging, I signed up with a group of friends, of whom two others remain and will be joining me for the exam. If all goes well, I'll pass and receive teaching certification, which could, I hope (*knock on wood*), yield some sweet part-time employment. Whether teaching students at the UW SERF or hippies in Madison, it'd be great if someone paid me to do something I'd be doing every morning anyways.

Everyone around me has been marvelling "My God, I can't believe it's almost over already." In one sense, I see where they're coming from and it is rather weird to be already registering for my fall UW classes. But it seems far from the end for me, as I'm really only around 60% through my time in India and the best is yet to come. I've felt the most here when traveling, and while I have made some good progress in seeing the south, I have a few more stops here and the entirety of the north to see. So I guess I'm marking time with those experiences and the majority of them are yet to come. I'm getting really excited for my five-ish week trek through the north, which I'll begin by cutting out west to Goa before working my way clockwise around the subcontinent. I plan to see the desert, hike in the Himalayan foothills, and visit some wildlife preservation sites to name a few, and will be starting to arrange a more concrete itinerary with my accompanying friends soon.

I've been thinking about those five weeks and how, money permitting, they just might be the most free five weeks of my life. I'll really have no obligations other than making my eventual flight home, leaving me free to go wherever I please, taking time along the way to enjoy what sights may come my way. I know it's going to be wonderful and that unbridled freedom to explore, experience and grow is a big part of what called me here. So the journey's far from over for me. And I think, after it all, I'll be ready to come home.