Busy!

These last few weeks have been crazy busy -- I'm still at my internship (which I love) and now I've also taken on teaching one class at the college where we live. I have a whole new level of respect for my professors -- I had no idea how long it takes to prepare every lecture. My class meets 5 times per week, 1 hour each session. Add that to my internship, and I feel like I'm going from 7am until bedtime. Happily, I love almost every minute of it. My students are wonderful, and I'm becoming good friends with a couple of my internship coworkers.

This weekend my internship officemate has invited us to his family's yearly puja (ceremony with monks, chanting and instruments) that confers blessings on his family. I'm really excited for the whole experience. My officemate is excited to have us drink some locally-made rice alcohol. So we'll see how that goes.

More on the Paro festival

The festival at Paro was a wonderful experience. The festival was outside the administrative HQ and monastery for the dzongkhag, so some of the monks were watching from inside the building.

The festival was several days long, and consisted of dancing and singing in the main square (see photos in the post below for the view from up the hill). Thousands of people attended (we just went for one day). You can see the beautiful kiras of the women in the front of this photo:
A statue in the square where the dancing was happening:
Adorable young girl in her kira:

Paro festival

Last weekend we went to the Paro tshechu (= festival), about an hour from our apartment. The dancers' wardrobes were incredible, and everyone in attendance was in the finest kiras (women's dresses) and ghos (men). There was also for some reason a preponderance of young boys with toy guns. We'll post some short videos soon.

Trek and retreat

Last week I attended my internship organization’s annual retreat. After a couple days of meetings, we headed out into the forests of Bhutan for an overnight trek. Although the hours of trekking were light (4-5 hours the first day, 2 hours the second), the slope was pretty intense, so my legs were majorly sore the next day.

We hoisted prayer flags at a 15^th-century monastery at the summit – I had no idea how much of an undertaking this was. Prayer flags are all over the hillsides in Bhutan. Here’s what has to happen to put up a new prayer flag (either because someone has died, or for blessing for a living person):

1. Find a flag that has mostly disintegrated on an already-standing pole

2. Dig out the several feet of dirt and rock slabs that are holding the pole up

3. Position teams at triangle points to the pole with ropes

4. Position more people to where you’re planning for the pole to fall – these teams will have two logs roped together that act as a kind of pinchers for the falling pole

5. Slowly lower the pole to the ground, moving the pincher-teams back turn by turn

And yell a lot the whole process, the more advice you give, the better

6. When the pole is gently lowered to the ground, the old worn flag is torn off and burned. Then the new flag is attached, and the process repeated in reverse to put it back up. Finally, several monks performed a blessing ceremony for the newly hoisted flag.

A once-in-a-lifetime experience, and that was only four hours of it.

The monastery at the summit:

Taking down a tall pole:
Our finished raised flags:

Trek and retreat 2

Here are some other pictures from the amazing trek I did with my internship organization.

This little boy was the son of one of the guides on our overnight trek. The guides used horses and mules to port our tents, food, and other items. Here, the boy's dad is leading the horse, and the boy has his own pet on a rope.

View of a valley on the second day of the trek:
To the center-left is a lower flat area, just bellow the peak. That's were we camped for the night (yes, it was very cold!!).
The lead horse had a puffy hat on so the other horses and mules would ideally follow it (it worked some of the time).
The view about 30 minutes into our trek: