Wats and Love

In case anybody's reading this, I thought I would post something because I have not done so for awhile. Today I am heading farther north with my friend Rachel, from Washington DC (soon to be my new home since I got into Georgetown's school of Public Policy!!!! YAY!!! how did that happen? I'm excited!). We are planning to cross the Thai border into Laos. Julie Lockman from Brooklyn first told me about this ride in which you pick between the slow boat across the Mekong River, which takes two days, and the fast boat where you have to wear a helmet and look down the whole time or you'll get whiplash. I picked the former option since I always appreciate a good "journey" even if the ride is exhausting. And I am already exhausted. As the elusive title of this posting implies (to me at least) I have been praying at many buddhist temples (called wats) and learning about love. Write me an email if you're interested in learning more and I'll post more about Laos when I come back!!!

Chiang Mai

I arrived to Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand, last Thursday and felt very quickly the liveability of the city. Nobody came rushing at me at the airport to harrass me to stay at their hotel, the cabby brought me just where I wanted to go without trying to charge me too much. I was like, "Where am I? Did I leave Asia?" I hope that wasn't an un-PC thing to write. I celebrated the comfortable feeling by renting a room here for a month, even though if I have no idea if I'll actually stay here that long. I wanted to have a home base away from my cousin's house in Bangkok, cause that city just aint my cup of tea. The mountains suit me much better. The day I arrived, I booked a trek to ride some elephants and visit waterfalls. Our tour guide's name was Mr. P, who I found very irritating at times, but memorable. He kept on exclaiming, "Oh my Buddha!" and then pretending that he saw a poisonous snake or a crocodile and shot his slingshot at the imaginary animal. After riding the elephants and swimming in the waterfalls we hiked to a "hill tribe" village to spend the night. It was a Karen village, a tribe that fought for an independent state within Burma but was never granted it from the military government. Arriving there reminded me of being dropped off at my Peace Corps site, and I imagined what it would be like to spend two years there instead of just a night. How random an experience the Peace Corps was. Instead of bonding with the village kids, things stayed quite superficial. We were unable to talk to anyone there since we don't speak Thai, but the kids were trained to come sing us songs at night around a bonfire and then they collected money. Mr. P just had to say the magic word, "education" and all of the westerners opened up our wallets. Where the money was actually going...who knows. "Education."
Oh, another great phrase that can't be attributed to Mr. P, but to Thailand in general is "same same but different." When someone asked Mr. P, "Are we hiking to the same waterfall tomorrow or a different one?" He said, "Same same but different." I used the phrase today when someone asked me how the buddhist temple that I visited was. "Same same but different." It was a temple, slightly different from the others I've seen, but the same.
I slept surprisingly well on the hard floor with mats that night and the next day we went rafting down the river in boats that were made of bamboo shoots barely bundled together. Seated on the boats while two guys did the oaring, our butts were getting extremely wet, fully underwater at times. (I'm not sure if you could visualize that, no, not my butt, but the structure of the boat.)
Fast forwarding back to Chiang Mai, I have spent quality time with my friend Rachel from Washington, DC who is also living in the area. She and I are taking Thai language lessons twice a week with an awesome tutor. Me likey. Chan chop mahk mahk. This is the first country in Asia I've visited where I'll be able to put together whole sentences instead of just words or phrases. On Sunday there was an awesome outdoor market where there were incredible treats for the senses: tastes, smells, sights, sounds. The best part of this place is that there are so many foreigners that nobody sticks out and. Going shopping at an outdoor market completely at ease was a pleasant experience.
I met an Indian/Israeli girl on Sunday who is in a similar boat to me: a 29 year old who was doing well in her life but decided to leave her job, take a break and travel for a couple of months. Today we visited the zoo and noticed how different each animal was. The flamincos slept on one foot, for example, just like in the Three's company show. There were also these freaky-looking dinosaur looking birds with red and blue heads. It made me think of people too, how different we are and what makes one person happy isn't at all what another person is about.
My "job" opportunity, which is really just volunteerism, has not panned out yet, and I can't say that I mind. I just had dinner with two people working for NGOs in the area and they were complaining about how frustrating their work. Tomorrow, I'll be visiting orchid farms, more waterfalls and going white water rafting for the days afterwards. Maybe by next week they'll get their act together to start exploiting me for free labor.

Elephants

I just got back from a trek in the mountains by Chiang Mai and fell in love with some baby elephants.

The beach

What do you get when you put thousands of backpackers together on an island for a full moon party? Foolishness. There were bus and train loads of us tourists shipped to the port where ferries brought the 30,000 plus tourists to Koh Phangan to celebrate lunar madness.

I got on an overnight bus from Bangkok in which I was the only American on the double decker bus. (The rest were Europeans.) After talking to the extremely nice French girl seated next to me I drifted asleep, but was jolted awake in the middle of the night for a food stop. I deliriously stumbled over to the food stand and ordered some curried chicken eating across from an English bloke. He started telling me about his travels in India, specifically in the city of Varanasi where all the cremations take place by the Ganges river. As he described the harassment he experienced while stepping on shit in the dirty streets I became anxious and blurted out just that, “I’m getting anxious.” “Do you want a valium pill?” he asked me. “No I’m just going to buy a soda,” I said and dashed away from him.
I had the idea to come to this substance abusing island because two of my brother’s friends told me they were renting a house there. And I had also met the Swiss couple who told me about their yoga center. I ended up spending most of my time with two people I had just met though, two Estonian Hari Krishna dudes.
While seated on the back of my new Estonian friend’s motorcycle I got to ask him, “So what’s the deal with Krishna?” Something I’ve always been wondering ever since I first encountered Hari Krishnas selling their little books of the Bhagavad Gita outside the New York City subway. He told me about the group and also about his life as a famous Estonian musician (I googled him after leaving the island and he is legit) before he renounced his fame for spirituality. He made very good company as we swam in the ocean and waterfalls, visited chinese temple with his other friend with an Estonian name who told me to just call him “Vincent” (that was NOT his real name). The three of us would sit together and sing kirtans, or devotional songs, continuing my post-ashram chanting craze.
I also did some yoga at the center that the couple told me about while I was there. But this was yoga with a different slant. The swami at the ashram where I stayed in India was celibate, as I thought all swamis were, until I arrived to “Agama yoga center” which apparently is a hub of tantric yoga. Something that Madonna probably studied along with her Kabbalah lessons. So, this type of yoga is meant to build and release energy in order to achieve enlightenment through the body, not in spite of it. Or something like that.
The night of the full moon party after partaking in my free trial day of yoga classes, the center sponsored a “spiral meditation” at the beach. This was a party in itself that they said was meant to build solar energy to counteract the lunar energy that makes the party animals on the island lose their mind. We arranged ourselves in a spiral holding hands with people of corresponding astrological signs. There was a bonfire and house music playing with the swami performing some weird incantations in the middle. I don’t know what shit was going on, but at the end of the night I lost my shoes somehow and am happy to be alive.
My Estonian friend got into a motorcycle accident that night on the way to the full moon party and he was bruised on his arm and legs although it could have been a lot worse. He has a good attitude though, and unbending faith so this incident will only increase his devotion.
I knew that it was time for me to leave the island the day after the full moon party despite all the colorful people I had met and the beautiful scenery. I had already milked my way into some incredible guest houses with gorgeous views because the original room they had promised me for a reasonable price wasn’t available when I arrived. Lucky for me because I paid a fraction of what the rooms were worth.
My last morning at Koh Phangan was spent drinking tea with my brother’s friends on the porch of the house that they rented. We spoke about our crazy adventures thus far and our persistent desire to see even more of Asia.

Leaving Bangkok

After recharging my figurative batteries for some days I am planning to leave my cousin's house for the next month. I'm headed to a beach island today called Ko Pha-ngan where a couple of my brother's friends will be renting a house. That's also where the swiss couple that I met on the trainride in South India lives doing yoga for 9 months out of the year. Ko Pha-ngan is known for their "full moon parties," but I'm not sure if I'll make that. They are also known for their waterfalls and snorkeling of which I will definitely partake. After that I'll hopefully head to the North of Thailand to start the job. Details are yet to be determined, but I already told the guy at the International Rescue Committe that I'd be able to stay until May 1st, so that is the new estimated arrival date home.
Hopefully I'll make it that long! I thought I had better learn some of the Thai language but didn't feel like enrolling in a class so as an alternative I went on the website "Conversation exchange" where I found Thai people living in Bangkok who wanted to practice their English. Today before taking the bus south I'm supposed to meet with a Thai girl named Papayahanaga to practice Thai and go shopping at the big weekend market. She says to call her "apple." I hope that her friends "Banana and Orange" don't back me into an alley and take all my money!
Anyway, I'm leaving my laptop at my cousin's house for the next month so that I don't have to worry about it at hostels, en route, etc. I guess I'll try to update this again from an internet cafe at the beach or in the North somewhere. Until then, the farang (foreigner),
Julie

Thai Buddhism

I managed to break the inertia and leave my cousin's house today, taking the Bangkok subway for the first time. It was a clean and easy system with two thumbs up on my international public transportation scale. In every single stop the stations are announced in both Thai and English. I got off at the central train station where I obtained some time tables for trips I am sure to make in the near future including by the beach and mountains. I spoke to someone from the IRC (International Rescue Committee) who is hopefully helping me find interesting work/internship at a place in the north that deals with Migrant worker policies in Thailand. That would be da bomb diggity. Bangkok is a big, polluted, yet fairly well organized and nice city. I was determined to ride a boat down the Mae Nam Chao Phraya, which earned Bangkok its name as the Venice of the East. So I made my way over to the little port, walking from the train station. I was having a moment of "woe is me, it is more fun to travel with someone than travelling alone," but I knew that if I went home I would consider the day a failure, so I jumped on the next boat and hoped for the best. (Wasn't sure where it was going!)Things turned out smashing though, since I met two nice Canadians almost right away who knew where there were attractions to see and which stop to get off. I spent the day with them visiting the Grand Palace and the reclining Buddha. I had tried to investigate which attractions I wanted to see in Bangkok the day before, but it was all looking the same to me. I blame it on the inertia and being way too comfortable at my cousin's house to care about the outside world. So now onto my new favorite topic: religion. I thought I'd use this blog as an excuse to explore the different types of Buddhism. When I grew up, I thought that Buddha was the fat guy with the rolls of his belly exposed. Here in Thailand Buddha is extremely slender and is sometimes dancing in angular postures. According to the site About.com, which once gave my computer a virus but now seems pretty safe, the Chinese fat laughing Buddha is called Pu-tai. He is an incarnation of "the future Buddha, Maitreya". I saw depictions of this same incarnation of Buddha in Japan, where he is called Hotei but he looked slightly different. Apparently, there was one historical Buddha, whose name was Siddhartha (yeah, it's a great book by Herman Hess). He left his home and family at the age of 29 to find enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. Some religious texts say that there were six Buddhas before Siddhartha, and then the Buddha that is still yet to come (we in Judaism call it the Messiah!) So...that's 8 Buddhas in total. It is also possible to become a Bodhisattva, someone on the path to Buddhahood. There are at least two types of Buddhism: Theravada and Mahayana. In Thailand they practice Theravada Buddhism, which Wikipedia says is the oldest surviving Buddha school. Tibetan Buddhism is apparently of the Mahayana tradition, but slightly different. It's interesting that Buddha was Hindu, and Jesus was a Jew and look what happened.

Bangkok

I've been asked by several people in the past few days, what are you going to do in Thailand? Well, my friends, I'm not sure yet.
I'm still digesting India, living in the past and staring at pictures. To my defense, I haven't had my lap top with me for the past month and this is the first time I've downloaded my pictures. I left my lap top along with a suitcase at Pammy's cousin's house in Delhi. He was nice enough to play the movie Slumdog Millionaire which he already had on DVD for me before I had to go back to the airport for my flight. Just one more impression of India to take with me.
It's clear now that I'm "just another white person who went to India to look for themselves." (I'm quoting a friend here who was talking about someone else, but I'm applying the phrase to myself.)
Ben had been travelling around India with a 60-year old Jewish woman from Atlanta, Georgia before coming to the ashram. He said, "She just retired, had never left the US in her life. What's the logical thing to do next? Get a 10 year visa to India." CLEARLY.
I'm not sure what it is. India is just a place that you go in order to figure things out. You know, things as in what it's all about. Maybe it's the way that people hang out of the trains while feeling the cool air of the country side rush by.

Maybe it's seeing grown men weep after getting a hug from their guru Amma who was abused as a child in south India and since then achieved enlightenment by hugging everyone. Something like that is possible only in a country where spirituality dominates the psyche, where cows roam the streets and people are careful not to step in the holy shit. It sounds corny, but it's in a place like that when it finally made sense to me that we are all connected, that the divine resides in each and every one of us instead of being far up in the sky.
Alright, I might as well come out and say that I am a Hinju. I've been waiting to make this declaration since the day before my trip when I was in Pamela's room looking at her altar and felt something click as it made sense why I was moving again and giving up the job and apartment (well it was a room at least =) again to travel to Asia. It's because something was missing.
Many times at the ashram when we were chanting in Sanskrit I almost lapsed into the tune of "Yedid Nefish", "Shalom Alechem" or another one of my favorite Hebrew tunes. One Shabbat I brought my siddur with me to the puja and was showing people the Jewish prayers. No, I didn't think that God would mind the images around me.
Eating the vegetarian food with my hands never got old, although the day I left the ashram I have to admit that I binged on brownies and chocolate bars for breakfast and ate meat twice by nightfall. For me, asceticism isn't something to live by, but something to learn from through limited exposure =).
The highlight of my last days at the ashram was going to the wedding of another man who had rescued me by picking me up at the gas station my first night in Madurai with the sketchy rickshaw driver. The wedding was great because the food was delicious and spicy, I got to get decked out in Indian clothes, the music rocked, and the people who I went with were awesome. There was a Lebonese man who referred to me as his sister, a beautiful English girl who says that she may become a woman monk, my friend "Hanuman" who took the spiritual name of the monkey god and hopes to live in the US soon.
So even though "I still haven't found what I'm looking for" by U2 is still one of the only songs I have posted on my Facebook page, I feel like I came a little closer to finding it in India.
OK, soo this post was not about Bangkok at all even though I'm here now. I'm staying with another one of my dad's cousins who lives here and is a head of the small Jewish community. The day I arrived she was already preparing the filling of humantaschen that she's making for the holiday purim. It was cool to be let off by a taxi driver in an exotic home with gates around it, but to be reassured I was in the right place by the pictures of my extended family all around the living room. To go out to see Buddhist temples around the city and come home to a kitchen of Jewish cookbooks. Pretty random. I just went outside in my cousin's swimming pool and swam at night under the half moon. I came in because I felt a little dizzy, so maybe that induced the tripped out state of this writing. OK, I'll tell you more about Thailand another time and please forgive the poor choice of a title for this blog entry.