Namaste! Tashi delek! Meera naam Anna hai!

I'm back in McLeod again, sitting in a different, more touristy internet cafe attatched to the hotel Matilda and I have spent the last 2 nights in. We decided to come up here for the weekend because the Dalai Lama is currently giving teachings at his temple here.

First I'll tell you a little more about the last week, which has mostly been spent at my new home in Tashijong.

We arrived back at Tashijong on tuesday night, and missed dinner so ended up skipping it and spent the night planning lessons for our first day of teaching on wednesday. We were informed that we would be teaching 3 classes at Tashijong - all english, and all classes of monks. Our first class would be with the little lamas, aged around 6 - 12. Second, the middle lamas - the teenagers, and thirdly the big lamas who were around 17 - 20 years old.

Our very first lesson ran smoothly, and we pretty much improvised a lot of it because our planned lesson only took 10 minutes...haha. We ended up singing the hokey pokey on the roof top of the classroom which overlooks the beautiful surroundings of the place I now call home.

Tashijong is a pretty cool little villiage. It's set in the foothills of the himalayas and has a monastery as well as a little village. The people of Tashijong are a blend of Indian and Tibetan and the dialects spoken are hard to keep up with because at any one time Tibetan, Hindi and English may be heard. I'm keen to learn some languages while I'm here, and I'm especially interested in Hindi because when I travel it will be useful all over India. I have learnt a few phrases already.

It's been difficult adjusting to the new culture and to the thought of being away from what I consider "normal" back in Australia, but I am really excited about my time here because it's a pretty special thing. I've been trying to read up about India and also Buddhism, so that I can understand the culture better.

So this weekend has been pretty fun. Tilda and I met up with two of the other gappers who live near us and we all went out to see a movie last night in the India "Cinemaa 1" haha. It was a pretty funny cinema - just a little projection screen which cut off half the movie and had a row of stacked chairs and walls made with patchy sheets of cloth. We saw the movie "My name is Kahn", a part hindi, part english movie made by Bollywood. It was actually not too bad but funny because it went for soooo long, just like everything in India. haha. In India everything is drawn out and takes forever. Yesterday we stood at a phone shop for an hour trying to do a tiny thing. Also, we waited at a bank because Caroline's 3000 ruppees were taken from her by the atm because she wasn't fast enough to take them out. In India everything is such a process! To get back her money we had to run around to photocopy passports, get passport photos and sign several papers as well as writing out an incident report. Things like that I suppose I'll have to get used to! Patience is a virtue in India.

On another note, I'm really excited because in a couple of weeks time we've been informed that at Tashijong there will be a Lama Dance puja, which involves lots of dancing lamas with big colourful masks! Apparently lots of tourists will come to visit and the dance runs for over a week. I may be able to do some travelling in this time, so Tilda and I are planning a little holiday to the golden triangle - Agra (Taj Mahal is here!), Jaipur and Delhi. But I'm definitely keen to hang around for a day or so to watch the Lama Dance, something we've been told not to miss, and something which only happens once a year.

Sorry about the boring post today! Just a little update. I'm missing everyone quite a lot, but slowly adjusting to the new way of life.