ROAD BLOG AHEAD

I just looked at the date and absolutely cannot believe that November is almost over! I’d made myself a promise to keep up with the whole blogging situation and thought I was doing great. The calendar, however, says that I’m lyin’ about that one. So, then… I have some really great excuses for why I haven’t written sooner. But we’re not going to call them excuses are we? They’re… um… information. Yeah. Not excuses, but little snippets of info about what has been happening on the home (and away from home) front.

First, for a few people who wrote me, concerned that I would sleepwalk off the balcony and go splat in the road, the pillars and railings were replaced in what has to be a record amount of time for India: about three days. Gotta say, I was impressed. A bunch of masons and helpers scurried around for an afternoon and rebuilt the whole thing. It’s even a bit stronger than before.  And it’s finally getting painted so rusty bits don’t come off on our hands. I’ll show a picture when the painting of the railings and the front gate is complete. Don’t have one yet. However, at the same time, they finished the small, mud brick fireplace in our central room so we now have a place to warm ourselves as the nights grow chilly:

The minute we had the guest room in a semblance of order, a couple of young friends turned up in town. Nono and Anita are a lovely French couple in their 20’s who we befriended earlier this year and became, in a way, their fairy godmothers. Now it may well be literal as I prophesied that Anita would be pregnant within months and, surely enough, she’s fully three months along and they’ve come to have the baby here. They came and stayed for several days while getting a place of their own. Sunday, the 18th, was my birthday. I actually managed a proper birthday cake that not only looked right, but tasted like a genuine chocolate layer cake:

The gifts were practical and things that I would never have gotten in the west. Again, no good pictures, dammit. Some of the best things came from the nuns up in the caves. There was a sack of crumbly dried cheese made from dzo milk (dzo are the female of the yak species.)  There was a sack of rock candy from Lhassa. There was (and this got me very excited as it’s a favourite) a sack of troma, the tiny black roots that grow only in Tibet, taste faintly like sweet potatoes and are served swimming in either butter or yoghurt. All of these were treats just brought back by the nuns who’d been in Tibet for the summer and carried them back to India in their rucksacks. Old Asi Dolma, bless her, sent me the only thing she had when she heard it was my birthday - a huge, perfect persimmon. Palga Tulku Rimpoche and his dad Yab gave me a huge bag of tea direct from Darjeeling (better than the local tea by far) inside a woven basket. Lena bought me five meters of good woolen cloth for a new chuba skirt for winter. It was a fantastic birthday, quite different from say my 50th in Vancouver, but very memorable and surrounded by dear friends.

The next morning at 5 a.m., Lena, Nyondo, Yab and I left by car for Dharamsala where we had to do some paperwork for our stay in India. The scenery between here and there is absolutely breathtaking on a cold, clear morning driving through the Himalayas:

Dharamsala, while currently the seat of the Tibetan Govt. reminded me of nothing so much as a smaller version of Kathmandu. Many of the same tourist souvenirs, restaurants trying to reproduce some version of Italian or French or Japanese food for visitors. I also had my most… grueling… exposure yet to the vast and convoluted bureaucracy of India. Despite having some assistance in advance, it was still two days of lines and forms. Not just triplicate, but um… what’s nine-plicate? And you couldn’t fill one out and photocopy it, you had to fill each of the 9 copies out individually. Each then generated three more papers which generated… Astonishing. It does, however, serve the purpose of employing thousands of people in white collar jobs. In the end, we made some new friends and got the papers we needed.

In between filing papers, I took a wander down to what had been described as an “international” grocery store. Woot!  Things I haven’t seen in either Rewalsar or Mandi!  Not everything I’d like (I could *kill* for some poultry sage and some rosemary and a box of cornstarch) but I did fill my tote bag with such exotic goodies as tofu, strawberry jam, olives (sadly not the Kalamatas I’ve been dreaming of, but oh well) some Gouda cheese, pancake syrup (Safeway brand - go figure) and the real score - a jar of capers! Oh yeah and I found both some plastic saran-type wrap and aluminum foil, neither of which I’ve seen before in India.

Lena’s big score was several of these:

They are congris (sp?) from Kashmir. Baskets woven a certain way around clay pots. You put hot coals in them and carry them around under your cloak or shawl and they keep you warm even in bitter weather. Lena lived in Kashmir years ago and has been dreaming of congris every winter since. Now we have some and, yes, indeed, they are quite addictive. It’s quite cold by now so we’re wearing lots of layers and clutching our hot water bottles tightly.

So who stole that last week since we’ve been back from Dharamsala? I’ve slept through a good part of it. The last day before we were due to come home, I woke up in the night with a raging abcess that began as a swelling under my left arm and , by 3 a.m. had me in incoherent agony as it spread into a kind of mastitis on the left side of my breast. I couldn’t move, couldn’t dress, couldn’t even turn over in bed. Add to that a headache and a stomach so upset by the pain that I couldn’t swallow any painkillers and I was not the most fun person to hang out with, especially on the ride home through the mountains. The curves weren’t a problem, the bouncing was.  I got home after a six hour jeep ride, crawled (really) up the stairs into bed and Lena began dosing me with megadoses of injectible antibiotics. They’re working, but slowly because that was one hell of an infection. I can now raise my left arm above shoulder height and roll over in bed. So I am waaay behind, and rather sore in other ways from two hefty shots in the behind every day for a week (with a week left to go.) I have other pics and will post them as I’m able. And try to find, if not the lost week, then maybe a few lost days.

Keeping up the bloggers’ tradition of posting things to look at on Fridays, I’m pulling out assorted photos that I’ve taken over the past couple of days. It’s been a good week for visuals around here.

First, persimmons for Sylvia:

This is for Marcy. See her wonderful blog and you’ll understand why I thought of her when I took this photo of a pony passing underneath my window. Actually, I was so busy trying to get a clear shot that I didn’t actually register the contents of his burden until *after* I uploaded the pics to my computer.

This was actually the last in a procession that passed along the road at our front door. For about 24 hours before, I heard, off in the distance, the sounds of baaing and bleeting. The sound came from higher up the mountain, but got progressively louder and closer from about midday until sunset. The night’s are chilly now, the afternoon sun still warm when it falls directly on one but it doesn’t warm shady spots a bit. It’s the time of year when the herds are driven down from the higher mountains into more temperate winter pastures. Somewhere around dusk the noises stopped getting louder though they did not cease. I fell asleep to the sound of sheep and was awakened at dawn by the same restless calls. Then I got busy until, about noon, Lena called out from downstairs, “Here they come!” At that point my mind was on a million other things so I didn’t know who “they” were, but I figured it was worth a look. I grabbed my camer and went to the balcony just in time to see this go by:

Have I mentioned that the local buses that go up and down the mountain all stop right by our house? They do. They also take up most of the width of out little road, making passing an iffy proposition. A bus is usually followed by a few jeeps and a motorcycle or two waiting for a wide spot so they can go around. Add a few hundred sheep going in the opposite direction and chaos ensues:

I was surprised to see only two goats in the middle of the flock. I may have been raised in a city, but I know a maaaaa from a baaaaaa, especially when I’ve been hearing them in my sleep. I would have thought there were quite a few goats mixed in since mixed flocks and herds are pretty normal around here. Turns out I wasn’t actually wrong, just impatient. About a half hour later, the other flood went by:

A smaller bunch than the sheep but still a helluva lot of goats for the goatherd at the rear to keep moving along.

Even our cow (we drink her milk so I feel somewhat proprietary about her) stuck her head out to see the parade. Usually all I ever see of her is her rump and a twitching tail.

Eventually, all of them vanished around the curve in the road heading down into the valley below.

I thought that was the end of it, but about ten minutes later our housekeeper, who was hanging out laundry, called me to the window and pointed out the pony carrying the ones too little to keep up with the herd. The little kid faces were enchanting and whimsical and made even Malka, who has lived in these mountain all her long life, chuckle with delight at their cuteness.

By the way, do any of my sheep-knowledgeable friends recognize this breed? It’s the most common local sheep, used for both meat and fleece. The farmers around here shrug and tell me that they are “just sheep.”

There’s an ongoing gag in one of Douglas Adams’ book about a sofa that has become lodged on a curved flight of stairs in such a way that it can go neither forwards nor backwards. Indeed, computer analysis indicates that there was no way that sofa could actually have got into that position in the first place, but there it sits.

Nyondo and I both independently had that story in our heads today. This blog is going to be mostly pictures and I expect that most people will understand why today felt like a Keystone Cops movies with a screenplay by Douglas Adams himself.

I know I’ve mentioned before that here in the Indian Himalayas, most things have to be made rather than bought from a store. Slowly, over the last 9 months or so, we’ve been having furniture made for the house we moved into in February. Actually, the house itself had to be made first and that had a very steep learning curve. We’ve got most of our essential furniture already: beds, table and chairs, desks. So we’re at least functional. Now we’ve been working on getting other stuff built and finished, things like bookshelves, a bed for the guest bedroom and an elaborate and substantial construct to go in that bedroom that will combine a wardrobe, desk cum altar and shelving for use by guests backed on the other side by shelving to form a small nook to hold medical supplies and equipment and a desk for Lena to use for her doctoring work. She designed it, Kamlu, the genius carpenter built it and it has been being stained and polished. Today it was ready to be installed. Except…

Except that, in the weeks between design and completion, the route by which it was planned to enter our house, the route which had been measured and found workable, had been blocked off by our neighbors in a complex and irrevokeable way for reasons I won’t even try to explain here (but had nothing to do with our furniture.) We realized this about the time the varnish was drying. Hokay then… Measure the stairs. Nope, won’t make it around the curve. We got one piece of it up by hauling it over the balcony from below. It was decided by the people helping us to try that again with the largest and most elaborately details part of the structure. Pictures will explain that procedure far better than words:

This is the backside of the structure. You can see how large the whole unit is.

Here is the door that opens onto our balcony:

So get a bunch of workers from different projects and start hauling it up:

Hmmm…. not working so well. Let’s turn it around the other way and try again from different perspective:

Whew, okay, nobody dropped it at least. It’s up there…

Um yeah. It’s up there in front of a door that’s much too small. Maybe we can turn it and it will magically shrink to fit. Yeah! Let’s try that!

The road to hell is truly paved with good intentions. Let’s try a big, sharp tool:

Oh, not on the shelves, let’s just disassemble the balcony. That will be much easier to replace! Fortunately, the guy with the pickaxe in this picture is our landlord. So we don’t have to worry about him freaking out at what we’ve done to his property!

Hmmmm. As my mother used to say, “almost” only counts in horseshoes and hand granades. Bummer… Let’s sit here dejected and wait.

For the guy bringing the ladder.  No. I don’t know what they planned to do with the ladder. I will never know what they planned to do with the ladder.

Hmmm… Guess it’s a little on the short side eh?

Okay, well, if a little frontal deconstruction is almost good enough, let’s grab that pickaxe and finish the job. NOW we’re getting somewhere:

Of course, most of the pillars on our balcony are now lying in our front yard. But the unit is into the house and Nyondo is going to make very sure it can’t get back out again!

Getting it into the bedroom was a comparative piece of cake. It fits exactly as it was intended to:

on both sides:

And is an absolutely lovely piece of work:

On the plus side, for the moment we have a lovely, unobstructed view from the balcony:

That was our morning. How y’all doing out there in the land of Brueners and Ethan Allan?

One of the big reasons I’ve been absent from the blogosphere lately and why my last post or two was all words is that, when I went from a tiny laptop computer to a desktop system last month, I was unable to install the photo/image editor I’ve been using the past umpteen years onto the new system. I do have a rather old version of Photoshop which is great for artsy stuff, but cumbersome for quick and dirty batch viewing, cropping and resizing. So I found myself putting off blog writing until I had the pictures to go with the words and putting off optimizing the pictures because the process had become tedious rather than fun. It was only last Thursday that Nyondo was able to go into Mandi, where there’s a marginally faster internet connection available, and download some much needed software, including my beloved ACDSee suite. So herewith I present for your viewing pleasure, a few visuals of the Diwali celebration.

Like the best of all holidays around the planet, Diwali is very much about getting together with friends and eating and drinking too much. Indian sweets are a big part of the excess. The sheer amount of sugar that goes around during the days of Diwali is staggering. Imagine if the Easter Bunny, all the trick-or-treaters of Halloween and all the Valentine’s Day lovers decided to consolidate their efforts on Christmas Day. The streets might look something like this:

Of course it’s no fun to sit home alone and binge on gulab jamman so you do it with your friends. Here is Nyondo (far right) with our friends Gupta and Anju and their daughter:

And you do need something besides sugar to get you through the ceremonies and the parties:

Possibly the only thing that exceeds the candies and treats on the night of Diwali is the abundance of cheap - and loud - fireworks. Alongside the sweetshops, the fireworks wallas display a variety of wares ranging from sparklers to rockets to glittering showers of incandescent colour:

I am endlessly amused by the packaging on these things. This is probably the ONLY kind of turkey I’ll see this November in India:

Diwali is, in part, a festival honoring the goddess Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and fortune. Here is one of her temples. We pass it as we drive down the mountain from Rewalsar to Mandi:

And her image is on the most unlikely items. It says something about the gonzo and enthusiasm of Indian culture that they make firecrackers with pictures of Lakshmi on them that are specifically intended to self-destruct. I just can’t see Westerners celebrating the holidays by exploding images of Moses or the Virgin Mary!

Today is Diwali, the Indian Festival of Lights. There is the air of festivity that one sees in the West around Yule or Christmas or other year end celebrations. And, indeed, it IS the end of the lunar year here. Tonight is New Moon and all over India lights are blazing in temples, homes, businesses. Diwali is specifically connected to Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and fortune.

I am sitting here listening to the sounds of thousands of firecrackers, rockets, sparklers and every possible form of personal fireworks. From where we live, partway up the mountain, I can see all the way down into the bowl formed by Lotus Lake and across the the ridges in the distance. The explosions of some seriously powerful crackers echo repeatedly, from mountainside to mountainside. At one point, the electrical power in the valley went off for a good ten minutes or so, not an uncommon phenomenon around here. From town rose a chorus of good natured cheering and people used the deep darkness as an excuse to set off hundreds of multicoloured fountains to illuminate the night. It’s noisy and gorgeous.

I was initially bummed because I’m at home with a cold just coming on while Lena and Nyondo are down in town celebrating the holiday with some Indian friends. They own a small shop selling cloth and household linens and, in the time we’ve lived here, we’ve all become more than just merchant and patron or doctor and patient. The last thing they need is to catch this bug that’s been going around. I thought it had missed me since Nyondo has been over it for quite awhile and Lena is just sniffling after two weeks of it. But woke up yesterday with a scratchy throat and cough. So I sat home while they went off to the puja (ceremony) and dinner.  However, I may have gotten the best of the bargain. From town one could never see across the mountains and down into the valley and watch a million sparkling lights, hear the cheers and screams of delight, the giggles of children and the sense that it is, indeed, a festival of illumination. So I am going back out to watch some more. Happy Diwali everyone!