J.P's Residency Mussoorie

... ingratiating himself with his long lost brothers. Felt a bit out of place, very conscious that my foreskin and lack of Hebrew skillz identified me as a filthy impostor (despite the usual being mistaken initially as an Israeli). The girls felt similar, so we soon headed off to shoot the **** in more familiar territory. Monkey attack: Admittedly I didn't actually witness this, although I would have paid good money to have had ringside seats. All over Rishikesh and its surroundings ...

... you don't get any stares walking back home in dripping wet clothes, as this is completely normal, but swimming in a bathing suit is just way to strange! I did make a visit to the Beatles Ashram one afternoon. This is the Transcendental Meditation Ashram (this is the type of meditation I learned way back in high school but unfortunately haven't practiced regularly through the years or else I probably would have reached enlightenment by now!) that was set up by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi ...

We are in Mussorie, which is a hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas. It was a British tourist town from the 1940s. In a weird way it reminds Sandi of Clear Lake. The resorts must have been nice at some point, but they do not look to have been maintained since the British left and it feels kind of like a ghost town (we are in the low season). We took a 3 day trek. We felt like British royalty, because ...

... fair enough. However, after purchacing they took us down to the river and said prayers for us and our families. The final part of the prayer consited of us having to say how much we would like to donate 'for our family' i.e. more money which standing on the edge of the river made us want to donate some more and then get out of there! After this we decided to leave as we were getting stopped for money every place we stood next ...

... filled with black faced monkeys and cows to the ashram. Once inside, I followed the girls lead and found a spot for my mat and began to stretch. Good thing, a few minutes later, the class instructor, a short, stout, strong, bearded fellow walks in. While he got himself ready, I noticed the eyes of the mostly female class, showed excitement. Not that his guy was a hunk, but what I found out later is that ...

... didn't accomplish anything I said I wanted to before. I layed at home all day and watched Bollywood movies and ordered food in with my housemates. It was glorious. I now feel refreshed and ready to ace my Hindi final, which is on Friday. I am at my neighbors house and we're about to play Badminton. I leave Mussoorie to go back to Delhi on Saturday. I'm really excited, but also bummed, because I've made some good freinds here. There are two ...

... out number ends in "666". *Since then* We have our Hindi final on Friday. I was studying this weekend and for some reason I decided to open up the "Hindi Phrasebook" that my aunt Jeannie bought me. It has so much information in there! I don't know why I didn't use it before. There are charts of all the words and things that explain things a lot better than our Hindi book. Our Hindi book is based off of inductive grammer. So each chapter just has ...

So I have finally figured out the trick to this whole updating thing. Write them BEFORE I get to the internet café in a word document, then I don't have to pay for the time that I'm writing... duh. So right now I am sitting in my friend's room (where she has an outlet to plug my computer in) and pre-writing this post. (By the way Dad, the converters work great. A lot of other people here bought converters in the states and the first time they tried to ...

... beginning stages of learning Hindi and found myself fascinated with the concept of learning language. As an exercise I decided to write an entry as if I was a native Hindi speaker just learning English. I tried not to write anything that I would have been able to say in Hindi but am sure that I cheated more than a bit. It's amazing, because Mussoorie is home to one of the few Hindi language schools in India, so they're used to having lots of tourists ...

... that we both slept through the 10-hour journey ahead. After we had both dropped off to sleep we were rudely awoken by knocking at our locked carriage door. Under the impression that this was our private cabin, D refused to open the carriage door but after 10 minutes of heated discussion he relented and unlocked it. It turned out that the people on the other side of the door had also booked first class tickets - in OUR cabin - and on entry they unhooked two further beds that were ...