Ghosts and apples and leopards, oh my!

I am so relieved that I wrote that long entry and now I can go into a bit more detail about things that happen. I wanted to write about the nunnery Dickyi and I went to visit because it was very touching. We went there because Dickyi had a specific nun that she had been very close to as a child. We asked all around for her when we arrived at the nunnery and we waited on one of the walkways in the nunnery compound for her to come out. When she came out, she was so happy to see Dickyi, but sad somehow, maybe because Dickyi couldn't stay for long. She was crying and I wondered what her life is like there, at the nunnery. And I wondered what her life was like before that--if it had been soaked in sorrow and what it was like now. Dickyi told me later that she had had a hard life and didn't have a family. I wondered if entering the nunnery was one of many choices for her or if it was her only choice. Another nun was very sad because she missed Dickyi's father, who used to run the nunnery. She said she couldn't eat because of it. While we were there they gave us mountain dews and bowls of vegetable with rolls that are ubiquitous in northern Chinese cuisine as well.

The food here in McLeod Ganj is different from in the rest of India. At TCHRD, they have a cook that makes everyone lunch. We always have dal and rice, some kind of salad made from cucumbers or onions, and either a potato or a meat dish. They often use turnips in their cooking, like us, but their spices are different. A Tibetan dish that I've had few times is this noodle soup. The noodles are shaped like flat nuggets and there are vegetables or meat in the stew. It's pretty good. Dickyi's cousin cooks at home and she cooks really well. The only thing is that I can't eat onions or too many beans, which kind of limits the food I can eat. I also stay away from curd and raw foods. Some things I really like here are the breads--I love Tibetan bread which comes round and flat but not without yeast--it is a very simple bread, but very good. I like the parathas, especially those made by Dickyi's cousin. Again, though, the parathas tend to have onions in with the potatoes. I really love the momos, or dumplings, here. That's probably my favorite. They have potato momos which are delicious and of course the meat momos are really good. The other thing I always get here is hot honey lemon ginger tea. It is the tourist drink because it's good for your throat but it's really good.

Sometimes Dharamsala feels kind of ghostly. There is one murder story in particular about three Punjabis that were beheaded at this hotel that is right by Last Chance. This actually happened not too long ago. Apparently the girl who was beheaded (along with two guys) was a prostitute. And there are a lot of ghost stories here that were, I guess, spread among the kids in boarding schools. There are a lot of stories here in general. People really like telling stories about how they got in trouble as kids and what kinds of beatings they were given and it's pretty interesting. Kunjodorje (sp), Dickyi's brother's best friend, told us a story about when he was small at TCV (the boarding school here that everyone goes to). There was an apple orchard near them where they used to go pick apples illegally all the time as young boys. One time, he and his friend went to go steal some apples and the owner of the orchard ran after them. K. kept running, but realized he lost his friend when he got back to the school. He was missing during class and at the meeting. The teachers kept asking K. where he was, but he didn't say anything. Finally, at night, I guess he told the teachers and K. and a couple of the teachers went back to the apple orchard. And strapped around a big tree in the middle of the orchard was K.'s friend. He had been there the whole time. Some punishments I heard of are literally picking you up by your feet and hitting you every which way, making you rub stinging (REALLY stinging--I know because I was stung) nettles all over your body. People were beaten arbitrarily for playing marbles outside or something ridiculously innocent. Nowadays, they say that there are nowhere near the number of beatings there used to be. But you kind of get a sense of how these people were brought up and why they are so like whatever and rarely surprised or pained by things.

But back to ghost stories--A couple days ago we went to the waterfall and after that me and Dickyi went to buy momos and noodles to take to Tenam's house to eat while we watched Pirates 3. T. made shakes and we just watched the movie. Then afterwards we were sitting outside and we were telling ghost stories. Tenam had like 900 ghost stories at the ready. He told this one story that is from a Korean horror movie he saw where this guy has a pain on his neck and no one can figure out what it is except when someone takes a picture of him and there's this like freakin scary looking girl all in white crouched on his neck all the time. There's another one they used to tell in boarding school about a teacher at the school who walked down the road and saw a student crying. He shook the student and asked why he was crying and when the student raised his head, the teacher saw that he didn't have a face. The teacher ran away as fast as he could to the gate of the school. He was so relieved when he reached the gate and he told the gatekeeper about it. When the gatekeeper looked up, he didn't have a face too! I was totally freaked out. There's one more--the story is that someone is walking down athe road and stops in at this house. While he's eating dinner, the lady of the house sits down and she starts telling this story about a lady who died and was buried. Her husband, for one reason or the other, dug up the grave and cut off her finger with her marriage ring on it and then threw her into a well. The person listening to the story realizes that the lady is dripping water and missing a finger and the lady grabs you (the person telling the story grabs you here) and is like "why did you take my ring?" There was this other story where a guy gets out of bed at night to go to the bathroom and when he gets back, there is someone in the bed and it's himself. Then we started imagining what would happen if you were walking down the road at night and saw yourself. Needless to say I was totally freaked out by this point.

Then Dickyi suggested we all take a walk and that it was light enough not to have a flashlight. Meanwhilst it was pitch black. And the walk was kind of scary, but it was ok. When we got back Tenam gave us a ride back to our house and we were like omg what if you were all alone on the bike in the dead of night on these mountain roads and you turned around and there was someone on the bike behind you?

It was surprising that I could sleep at all that night, but I slept fine.

Yesterday I met up with Rinzin to walk down to work and in the middle of the morning it started raining so heavily it was crazy, but it really cleared the air because it had been oppressive. We were a little disappointed because we were going to go to the waterfall yesterday after work. We left work fifteen minutes early. I didn't know why we left work so early, but I was told later that someone died in Ghanki yesterday so all the governmental offices got the afternoon off. After work I met up with Tso mo, Dickyi and Japan at a cafe but I was tired even after drinking tea so I went back to rest, but instead decided to do all my laundry. So let me just describe the layout of the house. Our floor, like all the floors has a little balcony where there's a clothesline. We face a little ravine and a small hill. After the small hill there is a road and then a continuation of the hill, which is where Tenam's house is. This whole area is a bit bizarre because in the middle of all this trash and stuff in the middle of the hill is this old Indian guy's like shanty house, where he's always banging around on pots or something. It's odd. That road below Tenam's house is the most dangerous one, he says, in McLeod. And one night, I heard all this commotion outside. There's always commotion because there are giant packs of wild dogs all by our house, but this was human commotion. Dickyi wasn't in so I was scared to go out and check, but when I peeked out, I thought I saw people in a fight. The next day I asked Tenam and he said that actually someone on a motorbike had fallen down the hill. He wasn't injured, but he was very worried about his bike. Typical. Ok, anyways, this Indian guy has a little shack and a little makeshift fence that I guess encloses a kind of backyard in the ghettoist sense of the word. So i was wringing out clothes over the balcony when I saw A LEOPARD prowling around this guy's backyard. I think it was a leopard. It was a sandy color and its spots weren't totally bright, but they were there. It was not a dog, but more like a cat. But it was like nothing I've ever seen. It was the size of a large dog, but flatter and longer. It was stealthy, oh it was stealthy. I was totally excited and ran into the room to get my camera. Of course it was out of batteries. When I ran back outside, the leopard wasn't in the backyard anymore and I thought I had imagined the whole thing. I was tired and I hadn't taken a nap like I was supposed to. But then I saw it again! It was winding up the hill in its stealthy fashion. I ran downstairs and told Dickyi and we tried to see it again but couldn't. Momo wasn't sure it was a leopard because there were dogs nearby and they hadn't run away, but Tenam said that leopards come down here sometimes and if they are very quiet, the dogs don't know they're there.