Shanti Hotel Dharamsala

... no healing powers.....!!!!!!<br>Half way through the monks bought everyone who wanted one a cup of tea. Very civilised!.<br>I ended up staying for the whole two hour teaching, some things you did need some knowledge of Buddhism for but other things not. For example internal and mental beauty is much more important than physical beauty and society today puts way too high a regard on the physical. This got a round of applause.<br>His holiness finished and very simply said ok that's it ...

... Tibetan. In the course of my appointments I was told not to eat bananas, curd (yogurt), green peppers, green chiles, mangoes, meat, oily foods, cold drinks, ice cream, carbonated beverages, tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, and sausages. At some point I had to stop going to the doctors because there wasn't going to be any food left for me to eat...I was worried I would be back on the brown rice diet. To accompany the strict diet, I, of course, had a lot of strange medications ...

... bowl but my host parents loved it taking seconds and thirds. After dechang there was the very traditional Tibetan butter tea which is made of black tea, milk, salt, and a lot of melted butter. Its pretty good, but as you can imagine a bit intense. After this I was as full as could be and my host parents went back into the kitchen, I thought to do the dishes, but re-emerged with sweet rice with dried fruit and more butter tea. I ate a few bites and had to lay ...

Arriving in Mcloud Ganj is like a breath of fresh air quite literally as it's in the mountains and I can't find any air pollution, it's clean here and the influence of Tibet and the west is very obvious. We are looking for a place to stay and I have been recommended a place by one of the farm guests, a monastery we go in the right direction and it is down. we go down and down and down some steps I think there are over 300 and we will have to come back up themw ith our packs if there ...

... I figure if you all send me $1 a week I can stay here indefinitely. Let me know what you all think) for the past few days. Very cool experience. The first morning I got up with the monks at 4:30 AM to join them for their prayer service. They all read different prayers (or sutras) with different intonations and complex rythms that all came together in a very musical way. Like I've mentioned before I've been eating very ...

The Tibetan enclave in Delhi offers nightly buses to Dharamsala which leave directly from the settlement. While waiting for the bus to arrive I was standing next to a man and an older monk who had the stature of a teacher, both of whom were originally from Tibet and also making their ways towards Dharamsala. We were approached by a man with no hands who was begging for whatever we could give. He couldn't hold out a hand as he had nothing but stubs ...

... egg into a glass of water. He was the first person to get me to meditate. Now it is just a cottage to rent. I wonder if the people who stay there know that he blessed that land before the house was built, that at one time I cried for a tragedy that I was finally, within those walls, able to let go of. Hmmm, but there is only so much reminiscing one can do, no matter how profound those memories are. Yesterday, I was beginning to get the ...

... a green bubble hanging out the bottom of one of his nostrils and dirty hair. He gestured that he wanted to listen to my iPod so I put it on his ears broke into a surprised smile when he said, in perfect, American-accented English, "Very good. I like this stuff a lot." Then two school girls, about nine or ten, came up. We were standing in a valley in the Himalaya, surrounded by rice fields, with irregular electricity and I think no modern ...

... in general we just enjoyed the tranquility, the home cooked meals and the time off from travelling. When it got to be the start of april we had to leave cos Gisele's visa ran out on the 5th. So we took a bus back to delhi on the 3rd, and on the 4th took a flight to kathmandu. It was a bit gruelling but went off without a hitch really, we arrived in delhi on the morning of the fourth, had time to have breakfast, then left for the airport and caught our flight. Bye bye india o/

... a couple of hilltops, the TCV is not an exceptionally easy place to negotiate. Workmen were concreting some of he paths but for the time being people were forced to scramble up soil banks and hop like mountain goats from one walkway to the next (a feat they were extremely capable of doing, which made me look clumsy and awkward by comparison). After my initial walkabout, three things struck me about the place.<br><br>Firstly, nobody gave me a second look. As far back as Turkey we had ...