BootsnAll Travel Network



June 24th, 2008 – Dharamsala, India

I woke up feeling a little bit better but not great by any means.  Today we had our second final, which was in the class of comparative race and gender led by my professor from Touro.  I went to all my classes today but everyone was buzzing with the anticipation of our final.  Immediately after class, the entire group minus the students who were not enrolled in the Tibetan Buddhism class, who were not mandated to go on this field trip, went to the relatively famous Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharmasala, India.   When we got there we saw kids ranging in age from 6 months old to 14 years old.  The person we met took us around the entire village, from a classroom for kindergartners, where we sat with them, took pictures with them and played with them.  We then went to where the very young children lived.  There were these little tibetan refugees running up to us, hugging us, and playing with us.  Again I walked around and snapped a few photos.  We then went to where the older children lived.  Basically each home housed 35-40 kids where an older and younger kid each shared a bed.  The last stop was going up to the temple. Cait was feeling sick so I stayed back with her, and then it started raining so I stayed under cover and waited for the rest of the group to get back.  On the way back, Ben and I get dropped off in town so we could grab some food at the Snowy Lion where Grady was staying.  After we got there, Abira, Haarsh, Grady and his wife, Arrindum, Martine and Michelle all coincidentally came as well.  Apparently this tiny restaurant at the bottom of a small hotel was the place to eat. Ben, Arrindum and I shared some fried mutton momos.  I ordered mutton Thanktuk which is basically mutton, and huge, broad almost wonton style noodles in a broth with spices, chillis and vegetables.  It was very good.  For dessert I had a piece of lemon curd pie, which put me in a food como. It again started to pour and this time I was far away from the hotel with no cover and no umbrella.  A funny side note.  As I was trying to wait out the rain with Arrindum at the entrance to this restaurant, these two old tibetan women started looking at me.  I had just put my money belt underneath my shorts, as I usually do to hide it and quite frankly its the most comfortable, secret place I can hide it.  One of the lady’s standing next to me taking cover as I was from the rain started poking me in my crotch with the metal tip of her umbrella.  Every time she did it, her and the other lady started to laugh.  Arrindum and I were looking at each other saying “what the hell is she doing?”  I will leave what she was doing to your imagination. Eventually Arrindum and I just decided to make a run for it.  We had to be back before 3pm as we were having a guest speaker who works for the tibetan center for human rights  After buying an umbrella for 180 rups, I made it back just in time for class.  We had about 20 minutes of class before the speaker came.  He gave a brief introduction and basically just opened up the floor to questions.  I had several questions and the best part was when the speaker gave him his own opinion about the Dalai Lama and the status in Tibet. 

After the speaker we all waited around for our final exam in our race and gender class.  We got it around 630pm, and I got to work after a few hours of eating, and procrastinating.  We had three hours to complete it from when we read it, I started working on it around 10pm and finished before 1am.  It was a damn hard test!



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