The Improvements

I had a neutral day on Day 4, nothing exciting to report. Just floated through the routine, feeling zombie in the afternoon, but controlled myself not to take a nap. It worked! I had more than 5 hrs sleep that night.

What a difference on Day 5--today! I had a funny bone, just about anything could make me come up with a funny thought...more later ;)

Instead of boring you with my daily routine, I would change a subject such as talking about the weather, the people...

Just a few highlights:

- good breakfast and dinner

- Bhooma gave us each 3 bags of nature almond, cashew, and raisin to have in the room. Wow! It was unexpected!

- there was a yearly festival in town to celebrate its establishment, so we had some interaction with people in town, observed some traditional ceremonies...

THE WEATHER:

I had not seen any rain yet. Therefore we were allowed only to 1-2 buckets for shower/day. I asked why and someone told me the ashram had to follow the town's rules just in case Kerala has drought. So besides hydro was turned on and off periodically, water was also on the same page.

So far, the temperature each day was around 26-30 Celcius, nice breeze until noon then the humidity took over :( Well no water, no fan running in the room sometimes, where do you think I should be? Of course, at the staircase where Wi-Fi signal was strongest   Couldn't be at the beach because there was not enough time between training sessions to get out far for a while. This Wed will be a day for outing--visiting another ashram, to the beach, and to another celebration at night time!

THE PEOPLE

- friendly but quiet, maybe we couldn't communicate much because very few speak English; and if they did, I still didn't understand because of the accent. I always had to ask them to repeat at least couple times. Or maybe because I am in an ashram setting here.

- I haven't met any mean people yet!  Didn't see or hear anyone yelling, arguing...even outside the ashram.

- yes, they do have siesta in the afternoon just like in VN. Avelino couldn't believe that when we were sitting in the lunch room at our fruit time 1:15pm, behind us there were ladies who were lying down sleeping on hard surface of the benches! I am not surprised though because I am used to that :)

- we asked Bhooma his age and had wrong guesses. Augh, he doesn't look 44! So his advice with a smile was:  "Keep doing yoga everyday!"

- I would like to ask Bhooma to go help in the kitchen as doing Karma yoga and learn the cooking at the same time (but the timing of training sessions may be a conflict?). For the moment, we only clean the big room for our practice and its hallway only. There is a young lady who cleans all other floors but not our rooms.

- Chanting is the daily ritual here. We chant to begin anything we do: eating, practising...with different verses. I start to like the singing chants called Kirtan (popular in US.)

- Indian belief: there is only one God, just with different names in different forms.