3 sept. 2009

Transmissions from the Satellite Heart

***Pls. note that this post is about 6 weeks old, I originally wrote it on July 14th, right before going in to my Vipassana meditation course and subsequently did not post is here on the blog... much has happened since. ***

Hello there intrepid readers... welcome to another installment of "Welcome to Absurdistan". It's been a while since my last update and I do apologize. It's not like I have much of an excuse... well... I am on vacation. :-) So if my memory serves me correctly... and it doesn't this morning as it's a tad early and there are vague memories of sharing a bottle of "Royal Stag" Nepali whiskey with two Israelis, two Brits and a seemingly mute Frenchman. Anyhow... that's not the story I want to be telling or the one you want to be hearing right now is it. Let's just say, that Nepali whiskey is not exactly your finest single malt... but definitely A step up from the whiskey and Red Bull buckets that were Oh so prevalent during my travels to Thailand. Anyhow... I'm meandering.

So? Where are you now Chris, you might ask. Well, as I'm typing this, I'm lying in my bed in the Thamel district of Kathmandu. Now for those of you who don't really know, Thamel is the backpackers/tourist district of Kathmandu. All major cities of Asia
have an area like this... Vietnam is was Pham Nu lao (I know I've completely butchered this spelling), Phnom Phen was... I don't remember actually, but there it does exist, I just didn't stay there. Mumbai it called Colaba and in Bangkok we have the ever so famous Ko Sahn Road which was brought to light in the ever so wonderful movie, "The Beach?" starring the ever so talented Leonardo DiCaprio. Advice to all those of you thinking of going off to Thailand... DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE BEFORE
YOU GO. Wow, was that a mistake on my part. wow... I still haven't forgiven myself for that one two and a half years later. I should talk to my shrink about my decision making process ;-) Anyhow, back to Thamel. Thamel is hands down the most interesting and bustling travelers/backpacker hubs in the world. The famed Koh Sahn road does not even compare. Thamel is a maze of streets lined with budget hotels, adventure travel outfits, Thangka painting shops, pashmina shawls, Tibetan and Hindu art and artifacts. Not only is it a shopping extravaganza but the whole area is dotted with little Hindu shrines and Buddhist stuppas just in case you want to pray to your favourite diety before you commit to climbing up to Annapurna base camp... also known as the ABC trek. Get it? A...B... C... Annapurna... Base.... good. ;-) So, as I was saying I'm now back in
Kathmandu. My stint at the Faulty Towers of Buddhist monasteries is now officially over. I must say, although my last two emails where pretty... well... intense, and I think many of you kind of understood that i was miserable ( I don't think I said that), the remainingg time I spent there was absolutely splendid... did I just really say that?
hmmm.... let me reconsider those words. My time at Pema T'Sal, although very difficult at times, was an experience I would not change for the world. The last two weeks were much much easier than the first two and I think I can attribute this to the fact that, I just found my groove. It also helped that I was joined by another volunteer, but it's weird to look back at the cast of characters (and believe you me., there were a ton) and think about the things that "bothered" me and I really have to say that alot of it seems trivial. In some strange and distorted way, when i look at some of the video of the kids having a battle royale battle the head administrator looked on, I say to myself, "wow... that really wasn't too bad", yet at the time I remember thinking that I was witnessing the most insane thing on the planet and why was nobody doing anything to stop it (as I sat
there with my camera filming). I guess you just had to become part of the madness, or at least just see it all for what it was and accept it and then just roll with it. By the end, it was all very chilled out and routine (in a good way). I do have to say that leaving the monastery, I did so with a heavy heart. I miss my gaggle of micro monks. They definitely grow on you... not like warts or athletes foot though (mind you, with the monk's complete lack of personal hygiene in the monastery, I don't even want to think about it), but in a good way... sort of like... ... ... ... ... well to be honest, I haven't the slightest idea of what sort of good things "grow" on you, but you get the jist. We'll just leave it at, there is no real need for an analogy is there. :-) I'm also going to miss my teaching staff as weird and dysfunctional as they were. I made so real good friends there. I'm particularily going to miss my friend Palden who is a Tibetan refugee stuck in a bizarre sort of limbo that many Tibetans in Nepal and India find themselves in. He came by footover to India when he was 14 years old, crossing the Himalayas by foot ending up in Dharamsala. He then bounced around various Tibetan settlements in Northern India and ended up living in the Pema T'sal monastery two years ago. At first I thought him to be quite odd as he never ate with us and was always holed up in his room watching movies and reading. At first I thought him to be quite anti-social and rude, but I soon realized he was doing everything he could do to keep his sanity intact. In the end he turned out to be one of the nicest guys there. I feel for him as he came from Tibet without his parents and he hasn't seen or spoken to them since. The thing is that most of the Tibetans here, Palden included, do not hold any citizenship. They only have a Tibetan refugee status card, and there is really no way for them to get a Nepali passport. This holds true even for those who were born here. The only way for Palden or any other Tibetan to make it back in to Tibet/China is to basically sneak back in to Tibet via a very dangerous trek back through the Himalayas. One of my monk friends Daptka told me that he made this trip a few years ago in order to visit his parents. Sneak in, sneak back out... very tough story to hear. I have heard many many heart wrenching stories of families torn apart and struggles to reunite.

So there's a phenomena here in Nepal that some of yo might have heard of called Bandha. Bandha's are general strikes that have been historically been called by the Maoists to disrupt the country in order for them to bully the government and the citizens of Nepal... however, now that the Maoist hold a legitimate place in the Nepalese government, the concept of bandha has been co-opted by other groups and individuals to suite their own purposes. during my last week at the monastery, I was "fortunate" (and I say that with extreme sarcasm) to be able to live a local bandha. PLEASE NOTE, THE FOLLOWING STORY IS PRETTY INTENSE AND GRUESOME. It sort of exemplifies why I think that this wonderful country is so so so backwards and that I have dubbed it, Absurdistan. So about two weeks ago, I was sitting in our teacher's lounge with some of the other teachers and we noticed that where was smoke burning off in the distance. About 30 minutes later we saw a fire truck saunter down the highway towards the fire... we all speculated as to what it could have been. Pile of rubbish burning out of control? Jungle on Fire? who knows. The next day we were horrified to discover the real story of the plume of black smoke. It turns out that there was a school bus driver who happened to accidentally crash in to a motorcycle killing two teenagers who were joy riding about. On impact, only on of the kids was killed and the other was pretty badly injured. Now before I go any further with the story, let me inform you of some pretty backwards laws here. If you injure someone for life here you are responsible for their medical bills for life. If you kill someone you are only fined and face a potential jail term. So more often than not, when a driver finds out that the someone is pretty horrifically injured in a crash, they tend to... well finish the job. So, the bus driver seeing that one of the kids was not dead but terribly hurt, backed up the bus and killed the second kid. The villagers seeing what had happened, formed a mob (which from reading the papers here is actually a very common occurrence) and decided to chase the driver from the bus in to the jungle and then torch the bus. Yes, in Nepal unfortunately mob rule mentality is very prevalent. The driver was able to escape the mob and later turned himself in to the police however the local Communist Youth League ( other name for hoodlums) wanted the police to turn him over in order for them to "finish" him off. Thankfully the police never sucame to the hoods. Now what happened next, is also a very common occurrence. The families of the victims declared a bandha in the region demanding that the government or the bus company pay them a ransom for the loss of their children. They got the local Communist Youth League to barricade and effectively shut off the main highway in the area (on which the monastery was on) for a full four days. This meant that nobody could travel by vehicle in the region until their demands were met. Anyone who tried to go through the barricades or circumvent them in anyway where lynched. We know of police cars, ambulances and taxis that were stopped and torched. There is a story of one taxi driver that tried to go the long way around the barricades by going around another mountain in the region and it is said that he was dragged from his cab, had both his legs smashed to bits and then had his cab burned. really messed up. Anyhow, it turns out that a settlement was reached and four days later the roads were reopened. As weird and f'd up as it sounds, this sort of thing is actually a common occurrence and we read of bandhas like this on a weekly basis. The brutality of each just as nauseating as the next. As for me, well, being in the monastery provided me with a bubble of security. We were pretty much impervious to any sort of BS that was going on, except for the little inconvenience of not having electricity during the bandha as apparently the bus was torched underneath the power lines. Ai caramba.
So now that I've left the monastery, I spent a good week in the wonderfully idyllic town of Pokhara realxing and eating real food. The amount of tomatoes and other wonderfully mineral rich foods I've been binging on has been soooo good. Other than that... rancho relaxo. Now, as I mentioned before I'm back in Kathmandhu and am continuing my relaxing and sight seeing here as tomorrow I'm off to start my 10 day Vipassana mediation course. For those of you who are interested in what it is, you can visit the site to get glimpse of what I will be living. ttp:www.dhamma.org . So that being said, I'll be out of contact as of tomorrow 12 my time for the next 12 days. So any sort of communication won't be dealt with until then.

OK, well I think I've talked your eyes off here for more than enough and I thank you for your time... I'll sign off

now. I hope that everyone is doing great and I'll try to be in touch as soon as possible. I hope that you are all doing really well.... AND just in case you are wondering things are really really amazing here. I know some of you were kind of concerned about me and my happiness here, I just want you to rest assured that all is really good. Tonight there's a massive dinner with many of the travellers that I've met in the past few weeks at this amazing Israeli vegetarian restaurant... I think we're going to be at least 25 people. Going to be fantastic.

Namaste

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