The Move to A2

The Sunday after Hamsa and Danika's wedding, Allen and I loaded up the car and I drove 8 1/2 hours to Ann Arbor to make it in time for my orientation, which started last Monday. The whole experience was sort of surreal: we were stashing our stuff at a friend's place in Ithaca while we were camping, then we ended up crashing at her place the night of the wedding ... but it is pretty pathetic to see all the stuff you own get shuffled back and forth out of the back seat of your car.

My friend Gina helped me unload when I got to A2 and the sight of my unloaded stuff was just as comical...

(Before) All that fit in our car

I say that the experience was comical only in that it is extremely strange to be living in what is essentially an unfurnished two bedroom apartment by myself. The rooms are very echoy and, well, there isn't any where to "hang out". Luckily we managed to fit a desk and a small chair in the car ... so at least I have a place to eat and work. LOL!

(After) Wall art makes all the difference

Odd culture shock

I'm back in the States! I left India super early Monday morning; got in to NJ around noon; had two days with the folks and some errand running in NYC; and now I'm happily in Ann Arbor, MI looking for housing for next school year.

I'm very happy to be back. It was great seeing my family (even if only for a little while - I'll be back soon!). And visiting my home away from home - NYC - was a real treat.

But I've been giggling for the last couple of days about my "culture shock". Honestly, I haven't felt frustrated in the way I was expecting (maybe that will come later?) ... but rather, I'm getting a little thrown off by small differences.

The silliest, by far, is that America's light switches are "backwards" for me now.

In India, to turn a switch on, you press the bottom half of the switch; sometimes, the top part which will now be sticking out from the wall even has a red light on top that lets you know the power is now on.

In the States, it is the opposite.

So, embarrassingly, a couple of times I've walked into a room in my parents house and wasn't exactly sure how to turn on the lights because the way they were already positioned said "off" to my brain.

LOL!

I guess I should be pretty thankful that this is, seemingly, the worst of my culture shock so far!

Vipassana Meditation: MIND CONTROL!

Catchy title, eh? Now do I have your attention...

Vipassana meditation, or more specifically this 10-day Vipassana meditation course run by S. N. Goenka's students, was recommended to me by several people, including Allen who did the course 10 years ago in Nepal, not because of its religious significance (in truth the Goenka is absolutely adamant that this is non-sectarian and that anyone -- Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Christian, etc -- can be a Vipassana meditator), but because I was looking for a more formalized training in meditation.

I wanted to find a technique that would help me find calm and balance in my life. As you may have noticed in some of my blog posts, the level of uncertainty and chaos here in India can be at times quite maddening. I realized that I was coming to a place after living here for 2 years where I felt I was really starting to hate it. Everything would set me off; the constant car-horn honking, the cows covered in shit that take up what little room there is for pedestrians, people staring at us, people being incredulous that I neither was Indian or spoke Hindi, beggar children asking for money or candy... And I could be in a funk for days at a time. That is no way to live.

I missed the calm of the mountains and I wanted a way to find that calm within myself, no matter my location.

And I have to say that Vipassana REALLY really helped me. I'm not perfect, I know that, but now I have the tools to take control of my own happiness. The philosophy and the language of Vipassana may be based in Buddhism, but the teachings are things I'm sure you've heard (because I've heard them myself) a million times before:

Know yourself
You are the Master of your own mind
You are in control of your own happiness
Don't let what others do or say affect you
Let it go

But my goodness, every time someone said that to me I always wanted to scream: "HOW!?" How do you just let it go? How can you control your own happiness when some external thing has caused made you feel bad!?

But, Vipassana teaches you that ... in reality, in truth, that external thing did not make you feel bad. You, your sub-conscious brain read signals from your body that told you that you should feel bad.

The course teaches you a number of things including:

• All matter is constantly in flux - impermanent, ie their structure may change from moment to moment (no brainer, science has taught us that the atoms are constantly in motion, no matter is truly solid).
• You can experience (feel) these changes taking place on your body if you properly train your mind to focus. You will after 3 days of deep meditation be able to feel the skin on your body pulsating and vibrating. You will feel all manner of sensations (heat, tingling, stinging, pain, vibrating, the touch of your clothes). You will feel all these sensations over your body and realize their impermanence (their constant change)
• Understanding the impermanence of your own body helps you to understand the impermanence of life (All things are changing).
• With a heightened AWARENESS of your body (through deep focus of your mind), and the subsequent understanding of IMPERMANENCE, you will be able to develop EQUANIMITY towards life's ups and downs --- this is the essence of Vipassana, that you need to develop awareness and equanimity to reduce the misery in your own life.
• The root causes of human misery are CRAVING (passion, lust, greed, jealousy, desire, etc) and AVERSION (fear, loathing, hatred, angry, etc). For example, you really want something to happen - so much so that you stake much of your mental energy to making it happen. When it doesn't happen or only lasts a short time craving leads you to despair because you have lost sight of the impermanence of everything.
  
• The technique tries to train your body at the deepest level (sensations on your body) about equanimity, so that on a more superficial level (ie your day to day interaction) your mind becomes aware of how you are responding to stimulus. When your body comes in contact with stimulus (noise, smells, the sight of a person you like/don't like) your body literally responds with sensations (either pleasant or unpleasant) ... your unconscious mind then interprets these sensations for your conscious mind and your conscious mind takes that information and responds with how you outwardly feel towards this outside object. The problem of misery arises when your conscious mind reacts to the object in question without equanimity (balanced-mind) ... for example, someone insults you ... they acted once, but you relive this experience again and again in your thoughts. You make your own self miserable by not being able to accept the impermanence of the experience, impermanence of your own ego, impermanence of the feeling you have towards this experience .... this technique helps you at the deepest levels of your mind learn to let go.

But it was HARD mentally and physically. We would meditate for, I'm not kidding, 12 hours of a 17 hour day (starting at 4:30am, ending at 9:30pm). You are asked to hold one posture for at least one hour of meditation - and I don't care who you are, it hurts; your feet go numb because of the weight of your legs on them, your knees scream with pain, your back and stomach muscles are in agony...

But you have to accept those sensations with awareness and equanimity ... because some (not all, but some) of this pain is a manifestation of your unconscious brain trying to get you to respond. What do I mean by that? I'll give you an example.

You know I hurt my knee last May, right (nothing serious, but it gives me trouble). I wasn't looking forward to the prospect of having to hold my knee in only one position for an hour... but because I was going to give the technique a chance I gave it a go.

And the pain was UNBEARABLE.

My mind was so disturbed, it was pleading that the time be up ("When are they going to sound the gong that we're done!!?!?!?"), I was freaking out that I must be permanently injuring myself because the pain was so bad, in short ... by 55 mins I was done, I let go and changed positions ........ but my mind could not calm down, I was angry all the rest of the day and into the night. My hobbled out of the meditation hall in a huff - everything was a lie, the teacher was a crackpot! I had done serious damage to my knee it would never be the same -- this isn't blasted impermanence!! I didn't understand what they were talking about so obviously the teachers were wrong ....

And as I kept on fuming my knee kept on hurting - whereas only a couple days prior my knee would usually bounce back from pain after a meditation session was over ... this day my knee hurt up until I, convinced that my knee would never be the same, finally fell asleep.

An epiphany at the early morning (read: 4:30am) session - snapped me out of my funk. I had wasted a WHOLE DAY being upset ... a whole day of my life was spent fuming and huffing and puffing.... I couldn't meditate properly while I was upset, everything was frustrated because my mind was spinning with negativity. So I tried that morning to calm myself down... my knee hurt a little less, so I said ... "OK, today, try to meditate with equanimity, Nik"

And I learned two things from that. One, the pain was GREATLY reduced when I kept a balanced mind. When my mind was disturbed the pain was greater - because the negativity was feeding off itself (I was upset about my knee hurting, which made me feel like my knee hurt more, which made me upset about my knee....). When I tried to stay equanimous - not that the pain disappeared, but I could look at it more objectively, I would not be touched by it, I wouldn't feel it as much.

The second thing I learned was that I'm not perfect (selflessness, egolessness) - so even though I tried every session after that to last a whole hour in one pose, I forgave myself and got over it every single time I failed to do so.

HUGE! This was HUGE for my thinking.

I feel more in control of my emotions. Granted, I've had a pretty rough transition back to reality (I had a turn around time of 2 days before we're leaving on our next trip, so I've been busy to put it mildly). But even though I can tell I'm pretty upset about how insane things are right now ... I feel like I have to tools to cope and to keep myself from just being in a funk for the next couple of days.

I would recommend Vipassana to anyone who had the time to spare for it. I thought it was life-changing.

Here's a list of Vipassana centers in the United States, and the rest of the world (wink, wink)

But as a word of caution, I really think you have to want it. It can't be done strictly out of curiosity. You have to want to give the program a fighting chance ... only then will you be able to work through it like I did. I mean, I could have easily, when my knee started hurting, said "I'm done with this!" and left. But what would I have gained from that? I would have been upset, probably for days, and my knee might never really have recovered because I wouldn't have been able to let it recover mentally. I would have lost so much.

So its a gamble for sure whether it will help -- but it all depends on the meditator.

If you're interested in learning more about it, I would recommend checking out this book "The Art of Living" by S. N. Goenka (the teacher of this practice) I haven't read it myself (I've got it on order), but I hear that it is an explanation of the technique. That said, I don't really think this book could ever be a replacement for the 10-day course ... which really forces you to really do the technique.

OK enough proselytizing.

Next up for us, this evening we're leaving to meet up with Allen's brother Richard, who we're taking on a tour of south India (Kerala and Tamil Nadu) for the next two weeks. Then from that trip we split up: Allen comes back to Banaras to continue his field work and I head to Bangalore for 3 weeks to help out at that NGO I worked with last spring.

Baltic Sea Cruise: Part 3 (Finland and Sweden)

Cruise Day 9: Helsinki, Finland

I feel a little bit bad for Helsinki, following immediately on the back of St. Petersburg... and besides the weather didn't want to cooperate either; which didn't help matters. But despite all that, we were determined to be excited about Finland because Allen's sister, Sally, spent a year there before college and only had wonderful things to say about Finland and the Finnish people.... and a particular licorice sweet called Turkish Pepper. So...

Ohhhhhhh.....

Ahhhhhhh.....

Ice breakers down from the north for the summer

Funny enough, we happened to be there on Helsinki's founding day (June 12, 1550), which they celebrated with a samba carnival. No joke, those are the floats of the various samba schools setting up on the center of town. Our tour guide felt bad for the girls in bikinis dancing on these floats in the rain.... But.... Samba? Carnival? Finland? (shrug) Best not to ask too many questions.

Cruise Day 10: Stockholm, Sweden

Stockholm was also remarkably pretty.

Nikki in front of the Nobel Museum

Old medieval alleyways

But Stockholm was also where we did easily the coolest excursion of our trip. We walked on top of the roof of this building.

A roof-top tour - only the second city in the world to do this type of thing (the other city also being in Sweden).

They decked us out in some pretty serious full body harnesses .... but considering what we were walking on...

... the harnesses definitely did the trick of making us feel safer. That said, you really couldn't beat the views we had.

It was a really amazing way to see the city - an experience we're sure to hold on to.

The other big excitement for this port was we were finally able to find Sally's licorice candy, Turkish Pepper.

We had a tour guide that recommended, instead of getting Swedish glass, that we bring home local delicacies like Surströmming, fermented herring that is a favorite up in the North (she was kidding*) .... we pounced on this advice and asked her if she knew about this Finnish sweet we were on the hunt for. Given, as she told us Swedes eat approximately 1kg of sweets a week each, she told us that yes they had this sweet and the best place to look for it would be a local convenience store.

Who would have thunk it?

But we found them ... and they are "interesting" ... they are salty licorice, which I guess is an acquired taste. But we found them! Which was awesome!

The other craze sweeping the nation was the up-coming (now completed) wedding of the Swedish Crowned Princess Victoria to Daniel Westling, her former personal trainer. Stockholm was the city of love in preparation for the nuptials ... and there were signs of everyone's enthusiasm everywhere you turned.

Back in the old part of town they have a little statute of a boy made out of iron. It is said that if you rub his head you'll come back to Stockholm someday.

Fingers crossed.

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* Apparently it is inadvisable to travel with cans of this stuff because depending upon how old they are they are likely to explode. - although there is debate about whether or not this is just a myth or not.

Baltic Sea Cruise: Part 2 (St. Petersburg, Russia)

Just got home to the States and man did I have a CRAZY trip home. I'll post about that soon, but first the last couple of updates about the cruise and Holland
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St. Petersburg gets its own post because it deserves it. I judiciously only took 200 pictures over the 2 days we were there. Hands down, this was the most beautiful city we visited. No joke. I'm gonna try not to overload you with images - but seriously, this was objectively a beautiful place.

We first went to see Catherine's Palace in Pushkin just outside of St. Petersburg. What had started as a small "modest" hunting lodge by Peter the Great and his wife Catherine I, was expanded and embellished by his daughter Elizabeth into a Baroque Palace on a grand scale.

Family in front of Catherine's Palace

The Hall of Mirrors was based off the room of the same name in the Palace of Versailles.

And the details in the room were breath-taking.

Catherine II the Great - her picture and a replica of one of her dresses pictured here - had some objections to the Baroque style that Elizabeth had used.

So she renovated some of the rooms to the Classical style that she preferred. See the contrast in the picture below

And what does it say of the opulence of a space when they design a wall of paintings as is pictured below? The paintings weren't painted in place, rather the whole painting was chosen and then cut down to fit on the wall as displayed. I wonder if the original artists had any objections to how their work was displayed.

Pictured wall

But the craziest part of the tour was realizing how much restoration work went into this Palace after the Nazis had occupied it during the Second World War. Click on the picture below for more detail on this picture of what the facade looked like .... but basically they intentionally destroyed it.... The tour guide kept saying that the Nazi's "had done damage to some of the rooms" ... but the pictures at the end of the museum showed that entire rooms, including the Amber Room*, where stripped entirely bare! The restorers only had old black and white photographs to direct their efforts - but they did an absolutely amazing job!

After the Nazis

After Restoration

Next was the Hermitage. 5 palaces. 3 million pieces (only a fraction of which are on display). It is estimated that if you gave every piece in their collection at least 30 seconds, it would take you three years to make it through their galleries ... if you don't eat or sleep or go to the bathroom.

It felt very much like the Louvre, in terms of the breadth and depth of their collection --- as well as the stunning architecture that was setting the backdrop for their collection.

Some of you may know that I'm a big fan of War and Peace, so I was tickled pink when we entered the 1812 War Gallery, which commemorates the Russian victories in the Napoleonic Wars. Front and center were some of the stars of those engagements....

Alexander I

General-Field Marshals Mikhail Kutuzov

(History AND Literature?! Nerd squeal!!!)

But it wasn't just the art on the walls that made your jaw drop...

...there was no mistaking that you were in a palaces ...

******

So how can you come to Russia without seeing a ballet?

Allen with tix to ballet

And Swan Lake no less. It was a beautiful production and a great experience I don't think I'm likely to forget.

***

Next up was the Cathedral on Spilled Blood.

Gotta admit that I knew nothing about this place before we got there... and in a way it was almost perfect that I had no expectations because this space was almost unreal.

The church is named for Alexander II, who was assassinated on its present site in 1881. But that isn't the catch... the catch is the church contains over 7,500 square meters of mosaics - according to the restorers.

That's right - there were restorers for this space as well because apparently (according to Wikipedia):

"In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the church was ransacked and looted, badly damaging its interior. The Soviet government closed the church in the early 1930s. During the Second World War when many people were starving due to the Siege of Leningrad by hostile Nazi German military forces, the church was used as a temporary storage site for the corpses of those who died both in combat and of starvation and illness. It suffered significant damage. After the war, it was used as a warehouse for vegetables, leading to the sardonic name of Savior on Potatoes."

It took 27 years of work to bring this unbelievable space back to its former glory. Totally out of this world. I couldn't justify (in this post of so many pictures) putting everyone one of my photos from this church in this post ... so I made a Picasa web album instead (added below). Hope you enjoy them even a fraction of as much as I enjoyed taking them.

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* No pictures - lucky you - because we weren't allowed

Baltic Sea Cruise: Part 1 (Denmark, Germany, Estonia)

The next stop on our (seemingly) round the world tour was to the white cliffs of Dover, where we met up with some of Allen's family for a Baltic Sea cruise. The thought was, since not everyone could visit us in India, we would meet half way in Europe and get to see some of our extend family there as well! I've broken up my descriptions of the various ports into three parts, so I don't completely overwhelm you with pictures.

Cruise Day 3: Copenhagen, Denmark

Allen on bike tour

Our first stop was Copenhagen, Denmark, where Allen, Richard (Allen's brother) and I did a bike tour of the old city.... Copenhagen was mercifully flat and just the right size for a bike tour.

The canals

The city center is what you would expect a well-preseved and old European city to be: beautiful. I will openly admit that I really do admire that so many European capitals make a concerted effort to maintain and preserve the historic buildings, and thus the real charm of these spaces.... what a difference from New York City, where the buildings touch the sky and mostly look like they came out of a sci-fi movie.

Allen in front of the Little Mermaid

This is a funny story. So I'm sure most of you are familiar with the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Little Mermaid"...? Well, Andersen is from Denmark and actually lived in Copenhagen. In honor of him and his wonderful stories, a little mermaid statute was unveiled in 1913. Copenhagen used it for branding the city... but as tourism has grown it has become a symbol for the whole country of Denmark. Which isn't so surprising or seemingly weird ... except that the Little Mermaid is currently in Shanghai for a visit to China.... so for the tourists in Copenhagen they've erected a screen with a live feed on Shanghai... which is pretty weird. As the tour guide put it, The Little Mermaid has been Shanghaied to Shangai.

Cruise Day 4: Berlin, Germany

Next stop was Warnemunde (technically), but we opted to take a 2.5 hour train into Berlin to do a bus tour of the main monuments there. As I'm sure you can imagine, a lot of our stops were related to WWII in some fashion or another. We saw Checkpoint Charlie, one of the checkpoints in the American part of West Berlin...

Checkpoint Charlie

and a portion of the Berlin wall that has been turned into an art gallery...

East Berlin Gallery with Alexanderplatz in background

One cute hold over from the Cold War though are the cross-walk lights in former East Berlin.

The crossing man of the East Berlin traffic lights

Berlin was a lot more beautiful than I expected --- they have clearly spent a lot of time and energy on refurbishing all the buildings that were destroyed during the war and rebuilding the areas that had been deserted while the wall was up. Now, instead of seeming very distinct, East and West Berlin felt as if they blended into each other --- for example, at one point while we were in the bus we must have gone into an out of East/West Berlin a dozen times while winding through some backroads and there was no seeming difference between the two...... but this could just be because we got the sterilized view of this city. Nevertheless, we really really enjoyed our time in Berlin.

Parliament Building

Cruise Day 6: Tallinn, Estonia

Tallinn's old world charm

Now, "Who goes to Estonia for tourism?", is all I have to say.... the answer (not alltogether suprising) is anyone on a Baltic Sea cruise. The capital and port town of Tallinn is ready, willing, and able to take on any of the cruise ship passengers that come in. They've found their edge -- playing up the medieval roots of the old town (divided into Lower and Upper Town).

Town Crier (of sorts)

I didn't realize this till we were there - but Estonia has been bounced back and force between the control over various other Baltic countries and only gained (lasting) independence in 1991. Despite their long histories, it was pretty surprisng to learn how "young" some of these Baltic nations are.

Allen in Upper town

Tallinn also won a ton of points from the young people on our group because they had free wi-fi broadcasting from the port which we could pick up from inside the ship. Richard's now famous quote from that afternoon was "I'd rather wi-fi than eat" (he skipped lunch to take advantage of the free signal for as long as possible).

Britland

Oh England - what a wonderful and welcome surprise after ... well, just after.

So if Sikkim was fun because it gave Allen the chance to show me a bit what his life was like in Nepal ... England was delightful because I was able to show him around my old haunting grounds*

We had quite a whirlwind of a trip though - we stayed with four different sets of friends, in three different cities, using planes, trains, and automobiles to get around.

First up was Merry Olde London Towne. We had a couple marathon sightseeing days, which took us all ove town... including some of the main sights...

Big Ben

Tower Bridge and Southbank

The British Museum

Double Decker Bus and Piccadilly Circus

Buckingham Palace

St. Pauls and the Millennium Bridge

Borough Market

The Globe Theater to see Henry VIII

We helped some of our friends move in to their sweet new pad...

Bill, Heather and Otto

And helped another friend celebrate the end of (one of) her exams....

Congratulations Jessica!

We played in (what should be) a prize winning garden in Hitchin...

Sue and John

And visited the Bristol countryside...

Mithi and Drew

OMG! GREEN SPACE! It is absolutely UNBELIEVABLE how wonderful it is to be surrounded by green again.

Beautiful Bristol - word!

... And equally unbelievable how much fun we had visiting our friends in England. Thank you everyone for hosting this pair of wanderers ... your hospitality and good humor at our miserable state when we arrived were very very much appreciated and shall never be forgotten. Remember that --- when we finally have a couch for you to crash on, where ever in the world that may be -- we will always be happy to play host and return the favor!

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* I did a year of study abroad in England.