Some photos

Finally, a few photos to give you a general visual feel for life in Kerala as I'm experiencing it. The first photo is an old Chinese fishing net.  These line the shores of Fort Kochin and are the tool of choice of local fishermen, though they are no longer Chinese.  The green fields are everywhere near Arunmula; I took this photo from the train when I was arriving from Fort Cochin at the nearest train station to the school.  The vehicle is an autorickshaw, a much more humanitarian, motorized version of the human-powered rickshaw.  I have heard that up to six people can pile in one of these puppies, but the closest I've gotten is four passengers plus the driver.  The house was a particularly idyllic spot in Fort Cochin.   The last two photos are from last weekend's trip to the backwaters.   When our boat docked at about 6 PM for nightfall, a smaller boat paddled up and asked us if we'd like to take a ride.  We were literally about two inches away from the water, and the boat's size allowed us to paddle through very tiny channels...this is the blurred photo is from.  The last photo is a view at sunrise from where our houseboat was docked.

As for updates, yoga is killing me.  We went from 1 hour daily, much of which was talking, to 2 hours, almost all of which is asana practice.  My whole body hurts.  I'm waiting for the pain to turn positive, but right now, it's just pain.

It also seems to be getting hotter, which I knew would happen, but I still just can't believe it.

I'm having an ongoing battle for territory with my cockroach, and am wondering if we have some karmic connection that keeps the roach coming back again and again.  Thus, I have not killed it.  I am contemplating getting some paint and marking the roach, in order to confirm my suspicion that it is a repeat visitor.

National elections are coming up, scheduled for a number of different dates throughout April.  Workers are spraying slogans and symbols for the communist party on the main walls in town, as Kerala is a pinko state.  It still sends a small visceral shock through me to see the hammer and sickle painted on walls or flying from red flags.

Not much else for now.  Slowly starting to learn more about the way marriages work here, as well as caste.  Still no luck with the language.  

Heavy Rains, Backwaters and Big Bugs

I have never seen rain like I have seen the past few days; a good old-fashioned thunderstorm like what I grew up with in Wisconsin summers, and have missed every year since I moved to the Bay Area. Thunder, collecting itself in between bursts, lightning tridents connecting sky and earth or jumping cloud to cloud, and endless torrential rains. And when I say torrential, I mean the strongest largest drops of rain in the densest, most massive quantities imagineable. The monsoon rains don't start until June, but it is impossible for me to fathom what a monsoon is if this hasn't already qualified.

It has rained three times during the last week, always beginning around 3:30 or 4 and lasting until about 5 or 6, which is exactly when my singing lessons take place. During two classes, we needed to suspend our singing because it was simply impossible to hear the electronic drone box which marks the starting, 5th, and octave pitch of whatever mode you are singing in. More traditionally, this tonic pitch, or shruti, is played by an instrument like the harmonium or shruti box, but my teacher just plugs it in and lights it up. With volume on full blare, we couldn't hear a thing.

The sound of the wind itself, the massive leaves of the surrounding trees being blown about, the rain hitting the roof, throwing down fruit from the trees which pellet down on the thatched roof of the classroom, joined by the already constant chorus of birds, all completely overpowered our little drone box and our two tiny voices. The rain slackens and intensifies, but never stops until it actually stops. The first time it rained, neither my teacher nor I had an umbrella, so we tried to wait out the rain. She gave up after 30 minutes so that she could get back to her family and cook them all dinner, so was drenched by the time she reached the busstop a few minutes away at the main junction of this small town. I waited almost two hours into nightfall (it is 7 PM now and pitch black outside as I write this), and the rain actually ended in time to let me get to dinner at 7:30 in a relatively dry state.

My teacher, when talking about improvising, says the music is imagining. When it rained the second day during our lessons, she stopped and said it was God imagining. That image and the storms are beautiful, but it is hard not to think of this force bringing the devastation of Katrina and the 2006 tsunami. The thought of worsening climatic conditions is right around the corner of my mind, as I recall an article I read before coming here about the imminent possibility of Bangladesh and too many other regions in this part of the world being completely submerged by rising waters and raging storms.

In other less beautiful yet ominous news, I saw the biggest cockroach I have ever seen in my entire life, and believe me, I saw a number worth noticing during my year in Taiwan. This time, it was not a cute albino gecko startling me when I turned on the lights, but a ghastly, nasty beast perched on the wall right near the toilet (or porcelain hole in the ground that serves as my toilet). I didn't entirely stifle my scream, and Shin, the 67-year old Korean man who just arrived this week, (rounding up the total count of male students at the school to 2), shuffled out of his room in boxers to see if everthing was alright. This was much appreciated, as freaking out to oneself is not nearly as cathartic, as I realized a few days later when I encountered an inappropriately gigantic spider who had set up camp inside the glass where I keep my toothbrush on my desk. Ugh!! Anyway, I directed Shin's attention into the bathroom and towards the cockroach. In a frustratingly nonplussed manner, he noted that perhaps it was time for me to make friends with the animal. Will I ever be that calm? Do I want to ever be that calm?!

Due to language barriers, everyone to whom I described the bug, whether Korean, French or Indian, could only use the word "animal" to guess at what I had seen. It seems no one knows the English word for bug, nor do I know the Korean, French or Malayalam word for it. So, animal then. Seems quite appropriate. After this incident, I fled to the bathroom on the second floor of my house, and used that for a full day. When I decided to brave my bathroom again, the animal was nowhere to be seen. I'm only afraid of stepping on such a thing before I have the chance to turn on the lights. Egad.

In other more news-like news, I decreased my singing class to 1 1/2 hours a day starting this week, and will be increasing yoga to 2 hours a day. My teacher seems to have come to his senses after our first week together, and suddenly became much more professional. We still talk alot, but actually about yoga, not marriage! My hopes for this new schedule are that I will not burst my vocal chords from singing too much, and that I will continue to discuss yoga, its place in Hinduism, and its remarkable similarities as a philosophical and ethical system to Buddhism (or vice versa, as my teacher pointed out the other day), while also being able to actually finish a whole set of yoga postures, and end with a proper meditation.

I continue to eat far too much and too well. I am slowly building up a wardrobe of clothing here, and actually bought a sari today. I really wasn't intending on getting a sari, as I don't feel an urge to wear one. Even though they are worn daily by many married women, and poor women walking barefoot at that, they feel very extravagant to me. I don't wear dresses at home, and saris feel like power dresses. That and the fact that your midriff shows make them a rather unappealing option for me. But I was at the clothing store to buy a few more outfits and wanted to look at the fabrics, which are so unbelievably gorgeous. My eye caught on a bolt of deep red cloth with sections of gleaming white embroidered flowers. The bad man shopkeeper noticed, and quickly pulled the bolt from the shelf and splayed it teasingly across the display counter. I literally couldn't take my eyes off that raw red silk. Mmmmm. I wanted to put it in my mouth, wrap myself in it, roll around on it, and merge with it, all at the same time. It was only $30, and now it is mine. I'm a bit loath to get it cut into a sari, as I really will never ever wear it after leaving India, but....what else would I do with it? Any ideas? If I do cut it into a sari, I plan on wearing it for my 36th birthday, which is right around the corner. Seems fitting. And I will definitely take a picture and post it somewhere.

In a final bit of news, I took an excursion a few hours north this weekend and sailed around on a boat in the Kerala backwaters, which, along with a beach town in Kerala, are the two "must do" things here for tourists. The backwaters were beautiful, though I felt conflicted about the experience in terms of the disruptive and polluting nature of the barges, which were once used solely for crop and commercial transport. I also felt extremely odd about the dynamic that takes place between the foreign tourists on the boats drifting by staring at the "scenery", which just so happens to be people living their lives on the shores of the canals. Conveyer belt tourism. Very disconcerting.

I'll stop there, as it is getting late, and I need to allot an hour to apply nourishing coconut oil to my scalp and then take a cooling shower before bed.

Thinking of you all.

Ma ma and Albino Geckos

It seems I have not been able to sit myself down and write any sort of coherent chronicle of my past week in India. So here is an attempt at a skeleton.

For the first 5 days here I was in a barely contained fugue state of panic at the heat and humidity. It was almost all I could feel or think about. Thankfully, that has passed and my body has acclimated. My mind has also acclimated to being in a near-constant state of dripping sweat. And I don't need to worry, as I would at home, about insane body odor, as being olfactorily aware of other people in this climate is the unavoidable norm.

Monday through Friday, I have three hours of class in the afternoon, one hour of one-on-one yoga and two hours immediately after of one-on-one Carnatic singing. However, after a few days of sleeping way past sunrise, I finally decided to start hauling out of bed for daily yoga class at 7:30 in the morning. About 13 to 15 of us practice crammed into a space which is basically a large cement floor walled in on 3 sides. The yoga feels sooo good, and the relative breezy quiet of the morning, along with the exertion-induced calm, help my mind sit more easily and lightly.

After an hour of this, I feel like continuing to sit, but if I do this, I'll miss breakfast and be starving by lunch. So I run to breakfast with the rest of the class. There are about 20 students here, all women (or as a friend put it, the V** squad) all sitting at one long table, with the embarrassingly attentive staff sitting at two smaller tables on either side of us. Taking every meal en masse is a bit exhausting, and I find myself wishing almost daily that the format were a bit more like a meditation retreat, with some or all of the meals being taken in silence. Going from yoga to group chat is a rough transition, especially given my extreme non-morning-person-ness. But the folks here are good to great, and I'm letting myself sit in silence when I feel the need.

After one week of eating with my right hand, I think I'm getting the hang of it. The first week, I was basically picking the food up, lifting it up above my head, tilting my head back, and kind of dropping the food into my mouth, with an inevitable 1/6 to 1/8 falling past my mouth down onto the banana leaf we use as plates. Oops. I'm finally realizing that I just have to use more of my hand and kind of shovel the food into my mouth. I've gotten a few explicit or silent lessons from a few of the Indians, so by the time I leave, I should be able to get all the food directly in my mouth.

Speaking of which--the food rocks!!! So much so that I don't miss meat. The occasional lust for a hamburger or burrito does wander through the old brain, but really, it's alright. It's difficult to imagine that it will be me, 7 weeks from now, who will be providing the hopefully delicious vegetarian meals for hungry students at the center in France.

But back to the food here. I had no idea there were so many varieties of bread in India. In the States, I've only seen naan and dosa. Yummy delicious bread and fruit in the morning, with one chutney and chai. Lunch is the main meal, consisting of rice, bread, curry, a number of chutneys, and usually some sort of vegetable salad. So so good. Unfortunately, I have my one-on-one yoga class directly after lunch, so I really should not eat at all, but this is impossible, both due to the quality of the food and the fact that I would keel over if I didn't.

Chai again at 5 with some snack that is usually gone by the time I arrive. Then dinner, again, bread and more chutney. There have been 3 birthdays in the week since I arrived, so we have had tiny bits of cake and ice cream/coke floats a number of times as well.

The only thing missing (other than meat and red wine) is coffee. Coffee. Coffee. The chai almost makes up for this, but......It seems there is coffee in Chennganur, the nearest large town, so an expedition is pending. I was there this weekend for some clothes, and the music store is also there, so a good browse is in order.

Anyway, morning is yoga, breakfast, then back home for singing practice for my afternoon class. Then lunch, another hour of yoga......the teacher is amazing, or so I hear/suspect/experience in the morning class. But somehow, most of my one-on-one class has been the teacher and I talking about anything and everything. Well, ti started that way. The first day was fine. Life philosophy and such. The second day I asked him about his past and his studies. This was good and interesting but somehow diverged into his personal life, his thoughts about marriage, etc. I gradually fell into silence and by the third day, he was talking, entirely of love, marriage, girls in past classes who had wanted to marry him, his willingness to marry, etc. By this point, I was no longer enjoying our conversations and just felt mightily uncomfortable and squirmy. This is the only dark spot on my experience so far. I think my swami has a crush, or wants me to have a crush, or something. So I'm trying to figure out what to do about this as I desperately want to study yoga, and he is the only teacher here. We did do yoga Thursday and Friday, though he talked through all my asanas, making it difficult to focus only on my breathing. You'd think he would know that, as a teacher and swami and all.

Then, after yoga (listening), my voice teacher comes out and we have class outside in the yoga area. Singing is great/exhausting/challenging and many more things. Two hours of singing fairly non-stop, the pedagogy being teacher sings, student repeats, faster and faster, then with longer and longer phrases. I have now been given 3 songs in 3 different ragas (which correlate roughly to modes, or more simply but inaccurately for the non-musical out there, scales).

Then dinner and home for more practice, reading and sleep.

That is the outline of my days here. I will tell you more about the feel of being here next time. The banana, coconut, mango, papya and jackfruit trees, the temples, candles and incense, the new birds who are always singing marvelously, and all the other sounds I don't know, the geckos who continue to startle me every night when I turn the lights on and see their sudden movement on the wall out of the corner of my eye.

As for people here, overall, they are friendly to neutral, which is a welcome change from my experiences in East Asia, where people ranged from friendly to outright staring and yelling, which was still usually friendly but in a really awkward way that made me want to crawl into a hole. But the second flip-side to this experience is that we are extremely sheltered at the school, and even though I go through the town every day, the language barrier and cultural separation (which is very gendered), as well as the fact that I know my stay here will be short, are limiting the possibility for any sort of meaningful interaction with people. It seems most interactions will be limited to transactions.

But all is well and I am happy, if not confused at times, both practically and existentially. :)

Body Shock in Kerala

I feel my head is still not screwed on straight, and that I am experiencing everything through a thick haze of humidity and fog, so this post will be sticky and short. (Did I mention that it's about 32 centigrade here, which I've avoided converting, but I'm guessing is around 100?)

I arrived in India at 4:30 AM Friday morning, at Kochi Airport in the southern state of Kerala, after a 2-hour layover in Kuwait City, where I experienced my only stomache problems to date. I knew I shouldn't, but I couldn't not, so I ordered some chicken tenders at the McDonald's in Kuwait City Airport. My stomache registered complaints with my cerebral management for about 24 hours afterwards.

A driver from the homestay I had booked picked me up at the airport, which was brilliant, because I didn't feel up to navigating the crowds and my first taste of autorickshaws/cabs/public transport in the pre-dawn hours.

My main first impression was how many people were already awake, walking around, doing whatever one does at 5:30 in the morning. I soon realized that this is likely due to the insane heat and humidity here, which makes the thought of moving between the hours of 10 AM and 5 PM an utterly ghastly prospect. It seems it's high summer here, or on its way, building to monsoon rains in May and June. People have also said it's hotter than usual, which I also heard over the summer when I was in Israel and Palestine. (warming, anyone?)

Anyway, my time is short, so let me say, after two very mellow days in Fort Kochin, an old port/trading town, I hopped a train (which was only 30 minutes late) down towards the school yesterday. Thankfully, I booked first class, so I was actually in a separate car with only one other person. A two-hour train journey, 1st class, but not air-conditioned, cost 203 rupees, which is about $4 or $5.

The landscape was brilliant....much like rural Japan, China and Taiwan. But throw in cows, lazing and grazing and generally standing about. Rice fields, lots of palm trees, rubber trees, coconut, papaya and mango trees. Mainly it is the lush swaths of rice paddies that remind me of East Asia. Brilliant green everywhere.

From the train station in Chengannur, I decided again to be lazy and to get an autorickshaw instead of a bus, as I was lugging around a 22 kilo suitcase. So I arrived at the school, soaked through with sweat, at about 5 PM. Ahhhh, the town is small and the school, from the bit I've been here, seems like an oasis. It seems the students here are well taken care of, fed three times a day and given a tea break, and generally oriented, shown around, and helped out.

There are a number of houses around the school where we live and study. My house is near the end of temple road....I haven't made it to the temple yet, but will see soon which god it belongs to. But the road I turn onto to find home has another smaller temple to Ganesha (the elephant). When I went to my house last night around 9 PM, there was a puja happening at the temple, blocking our way to the road. Funny, as one of the attributes of Ganesha is remover of obstacles. :)

All my classes will be in the afternoon it seems. One on one yoga from 2-3, and then one-on-one singing from 3-5. I am mightily excited.

Now I'm about to head out to a nearby city to buy some proper clothing, both in terms of more suitable to the heat and more suitable to local custom. This seems to be a rather conservative town, as most small towns around the world tend to be, so the school encourages us to dress to fit in, which will mean covering up more, but thankfully with fabrics and designs better suited to the heat and humidity.

Oh, and last bit...school has a few computers with fast internet access. $1 an hour, so it seems I'll be in touch. :)

London, or, "I have two pence"

This will be short and tidy, but I wanted to share a brief update. I feel like time is going quickly, punctuated as it has been by opening up my suitcase and letting it spread all over the floor, and then packing it all up again for another trip to the airport. I left Vienna, where I spent the majority of my 9-day visit sick, sleeping and staying in, this past Wednesday afternoon.

I got to my friend's flat in Leytonstone, East London, late Wednesday evening after a surprisingly long eight hours of travel from Vienna to East London. The metros in Europe are awesome, putting to shame America's woefully underdeveloped public transport system, but traveling by metro is also exhausting, compared with sitting on one's ass in a car. My main form of cardio exercise while in Europe has been daily walks inside the metro stations to transfer from one line to another. The outtings I've made in London so far have all taken about an hour of travel each way to get to any particular point.

Thursday evening, we went to the obligatory pub, in the Angel district. Yesterday, I was in Westminster, which is a beautiful district, home to Big Ben and Westminster Abbey. Again, the architecture was just wow!! Today, Sarah, her girlfriend Jude, friend-from-Palestine Merijn and I walked around north London, and ended up in Camden, which is a horribly crowded Haight Ashbury-like neighborhood .

But perhaps most spectacular of all during my time here: it turns out the crew I've landed with are huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, so we gathered last night and watched the musical episode of Buffy. Since many in the group are musicians, after some exhortation, someone took the guitar off the wall, a few of us picked up the two doumbeks in the room (one which Sarah bought when we were together in the Old City in Jerusalem), and we started goofing around playing some music. I felt, for the first time since I left San Francisco in December, like I was back home with friends. Oh, and then I woke up at 4:30 this morning with a bad hangover from too much wine. Oy.

Tomorrow I take the bus, then underground, then train out to Coventry to visit Yimei, a very good friend from my year in Taiwan. I'll be meeting Yimei's son Nicholas for the first time, who I believe may be in his terrible twos. Dear god.

Then back to London Tuesday, another pub, Sarah will roast a lamb, and then I pack up yet again for a flight out of Heathrow Thursday morning to India. Is it possible, after 3 countries in twice as many weeks, that I will find India restful?! HA! I already have a homestay planned in Fort Cochin for my first two nights in Kerala, and then train to Vijnana Kala Vedi Center near Aranmula, where I will be staying for 7 whole weeks. Yoga, singing, and homemade vegetarian food every day for 7 weeks. Blessed stillness. Hopefully, without any long bout of illness. Pardon the rhyme.

More soon, and missing you at home.

I'm onto There--Step 2--Vienna

Vienna. I am now in Vienna. There is nearly nothing to report, as I have been in bed most of the time. Sick. Hack hack kerpluf hack.

I could report that, actually, instead of being in bed, I am laying on a trisected arrangement of couch cushions on the floor, trying to remain stationary enough that the cushions don't separate from each other, leaving me to droop uncomfortably between them. As we settled in for sleep last night, my friend Alys was kind enough to inform me that the cushions were stuffed with horse hair. Ewwwww. Somehow, that just feels very ewwwwww. Which reminded me of the fact that it seems the French eat horsemeat, which reminded me of a conversation with a friend about the time I ate raw horse in Japan, which then reminded me of the picture I saw in the photographic exhibit of Robert Frank's "The Americans" while I was in Paris. This amazing collection of 1950's Americana as seen through Frank's eyes was paralleled by a second part of the exhibit called "Paris." There was an awful photo of an entire horse, presumably dead, hanging upside down in a butcher shop, being bled or dried or whatever butchers are doing with animal carcasses when they hang them upside down on hooks. Again, ewwww. And, sweet dreams.

Let not that image of grotesquerie sully you on the French, though. As I walked through the Paris exhibit, also shot in the 1950's, I noticed so many photos with flowers in them, that I walked through the entire collection two more times so that I could calculate the ratio of photos with flowers in them. 21 of 70 photos of Paris in the 1950's showed flowers, as compared to 1 photo in the American exhibit, which consisted of about 100 photos (these I did not count). There were bouquets of flowers being bought on the street, vases of flowers on coffeeshop tables as seen through the window, men holding flowers behind their backs before presenting them to a lover, flowers tacked onto a bridge across the Seine, and vendors selling flowers. In the case of the Americans, the one photo featuring flowers was taken in a cemetery in Chinatown.

But back to Vienna. Really, I have not done much, but there have been a few particularly sweet moments over and above the reconnecting with friends. The first night I arrived, I walked for awhile outside around midnight, in the extreme crisp cold. My companion and I climbed some stairs and entered into a kind of town circle, featuring St. Stephen's Cathedral, which is a huge gothic cathedral from the 1300s. The moon looked nearly full, and again, I was forced to stop, let the dumb smile spread across my face, and enjoy the fact that I was seeing a gothic cathedral with its long spindly spires rising up against a full moon while standing in a cobblestoned square in the middle of one of Europe's capitols.

The second sweet moment occurred today, when I made the decision to make my way outside on my own in search for food, The foraging instinct is surely the most strong of all our animal instincts....or perhaps, that is the case with me. In me, is is stronger than the urge to nest, to stay warm, to be comfortable, to stay safe, and to not appear a complete buffoon due to language barriers. Basically, I was sitting home reading and trying to get rid of my cold while Alys was out studying. The hunger was rising, and I knew Alys wouldn't be home to put food in my beak for a few hours. I remembered where the local grocery was, and figured I wouldn't need to speak to buy something a simple at the store. So I ventured out, and lo and behold! I looked in a storefront before reaching the supermarket and what did I see but....Fried Chicken! Yes, fried chicken, being kept toasty warm under a heat lamp in a lovely steel basin near the window. Those of you who really know me understand how this would have made my heart flutter. But still, I hesitated. I could forage safely at the grocery store, not worrying about my complete lack of German language skills, or I could forage rapturously for some truly satisfying fare, but I would have to verbally interact with the large frightening Austrian man behind the counter (who actually turned out to be Romanian).

I went for the chicken. I walked in, gave a hearty "Gross Gutt" for a greeting, and was greeted back quite naturally in, yes, German. At this point, I looked bashfully at the man and said "Ich no sprechke Deutsch." You see, I know the word for "I", the word for "speak", and the word for "German". But how to negate the verb? Or, as Alys instructed me later, how to negate the noun, for in fact, in this sentence, you negate "German", not "speak". Anyway, everyone knows the word "no" in English, right? Hmmm. The man looked at me dumbly for a second, as I shook my head slowly back and forth to further indicate that I didn't speak German, and then asked me what I would like in English. I pointed gleefully to the fried chicken leg/thigh combo, asked the man for a few language tips, completed the transaction with giggles, and scuttled back home as quickly as possible with my chicken in tow. This was the highlight of my day, and what a high point it was!

I am hoping I will be better tomorrow, as Alys and I will begin our cultural excursions then. We bought awful, can't-see-anything seats for the Barber of Seville tomorrow evening for about $12 US. For that price, I'll be happy to just listen, as opera tickets at home are so prohibitively expensive that I have only seen two operas in my whole life. Sunday we will go to the symphony, where standing room tickets cost about $6. This means we will listen to Beethoven and Mendelssohn while sitting on the ground in the back of the concert hall, which again, is just fine by me.

Next week, we may take a quick drive to Bratislava, which is only about an hour away. As Alys put it, why not go see another European capitol, though Slovakia has only existed as an independent nation-state for 16 years!

And then, next Wednesday, I continue on to the next stage of my 8-month plan and fly to London for a week. But more about that soon.

Where to Start When You Wait Until the End?

I have not written since the Louvre, largely because I have ventured out more the last few weeks, as the initial awkward timidity I suffered from when I first arrived in Paris has gradually lessened. This is not to brag that my heartbeat doesn't still accelerate noticeably whenever I walk into a restaurant to order anything more complicated than an espresso, but overall, I have reached a less-than-neurotic comfort level here. This happy progress, though, has been mirrored by the increasing closeness of my departure date and the knowledge that I am soon moving on to two new language zones, whose languages I am a complete stranger to. There is German in Vienna, though my friend there is fluent, and Malayalam in Kerala, though I insulate myself with the naive expectation that the aftereffects of British colonialism still linger there in the form of basic English. Nonetheless, despite the foreknowledge of more awkward timidity to come in more new places, I have been enjoying Paris here and now.

There is another less tangible reason for my not writing, which is the wordless awe I have felt at many of the things I have seen and heard. And wordless awe, surprise!, is a difficult thing to do justice to through words. Sages and mystics throughout time have phrased and rephrased this simple fact, with my favorite formulation coming from the Tao De Ching. There are as many translations of the opening lines, which consist of only 6 characters, as there are translators, but it amounts to this: The Tao that can be spoken, is not the real Tao. Feel free to substitute almost anything you like for the concept of "Tao", and there you have it.

None of this is to say that my life here has been so sublime that I cannot express it in words, but rather, that to actually write every amazing thing seems unlikely and overly time consuming, to the extent that I eventually decided to just enjoy more, and write less.

But now I'm leaving in two days, it is snowing outside, and I would like to remember briefly the checklist of things I have most enjoyed here as I look out my window at the tall narrow buildings with red tiled roofs.

The Musee D'Orsay, a museum of modern art, whose contents pick up approximately where the Louvre leaves off, housed in a train station from 1900, which fell into disuse due to the fact that trains grew bigger and the station consequently found itself too short by 1939. I believe this was my favorite western art museum, if for nothing else besides its uniquely picturesque setting and design.

The Musee National des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, whose holdings are at least half composed of Buddhist statuary and artwork, spanning across the entire array of countries in which Buddhism developed during the first 2000 plus years of its life. From India in the first century, through Cambodia's lush, spiraling, full-bodied Boddhisattvas, into Tibet's dark rich painted scrolls depicting myriad manifestations of Boddhisattvas, dancing dakinis, consorts and lamas, to the calming, down-home poses of Chinese Guan Yins seated with one leg up and her elbow propped there, chin resting in hand, to the thick, hearty, very masculine warrior-like visages of Boddhisattva statues found in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the impossibly narrow, lean gold Buddhas of Thailand, to austere images of Japanese Zen monks in their padded cotton robes, and on and on. I love Buddhist imagery with its calm and serenity. Seeing so many beautiful representations of the exemplar of this path of practice reinstilled in me my deep respect for this belief system.

Yesterday, I visited the Institut du Monde Arabe, which was also stunning, but whose contents I was much less familiar with, and thus a bit less prepared to fully appreciate. Most beautiful were the many pages of the Koran, in different calligraphic styles depending on the era and country of origin: Iran, Iraq, India, Syria, Egypt. The pages called to mind the illuminated texts produced by monks in medieval European monasteries. The pages of the Koran displayed incredibly small, precise calligraphy, elegant gold leafing, and circular designs throughout whose meaning I could not guess at. There was also a section showcasing Arab developments in math and science, where I saw the most beautiful multilayered golden discs hanging one after another in their display cases. They were astronomical tools used both for astronomy and the more esoteric practice of astrology.

And the music here! There are free classical concerts in Paris every afternoon and evening at multiple venues, many of which are churches. I have not availed myself of nearly as many of these as I should have. I sat in one church during lunch listening to two young female vocalists sing duets from Purcell and Bach, accompanied by the church organ. The soprano's voice simply soared and filled the entire nave of the church. Prosaic as it may be, if you closed your eyes, you could imagine yourself in heaven. Another concert I saw featured a male Lebanese cantor, singing over four male voices harmonizing in the style of Gregorian chant. I sat with my eyes closed, and found myself crying. These were the most beautiful sounds I could imagine. My only regret was that I couldn't jump up and sing with them.

These are a few of the highlights, not including the personal highlights of unexpected friendships I have found here, which have made this too short stay truly rich. So tonight I will drink absinthe and say a temporary goodbye to one of these friends, and tomorrow, another goodbye with my landlords and neighbors. Then on to Vienna for a week to see one of my oldest and dearest friends, Alys, and a few of her friends who I have come to know.