Berkeley or Bust!

Yes, yes, it is true.  Catherine and i are moving back to the States.  Berkeley, in fact.  She was accepted to PhD programs at Berkeley and Harvard (a husband has to brag a little), and we decide we would both be happier in the Bay Area.  Better weather, better friends.  But first we plan to do a little traveling.  On May 5, we fly to Brussels to visit some Belgian friends, Benjamin and Nika, and then on to Oslo to visit Matthew and Bia.  From there, we fly to DC on the 14th, hop down to Charlotte, NC to visit my sister and family for a night, and then on to Virginy.  We will stay with Catherine's folks, Sara and Phil, for five days and then begin our road trip.

In a rented car we will drive to New Orleans via Birmingham.  We hope to spend a day there seeing the sights and checking out old cemeteries with Anna Vanderman's parents.  Anna is the spouse of Sam, a student here at RYI, in Kathmandu.  Connections are a wonderful thing.  Next, on thru Texas, visiting my old stomping grounds in Houston and friends in Austin.  And then into southern New Mexico.  We'll stop by White Sands to gather a little gypsum sand in our shoes and visit the wildlife refuge at Bosque del Apache, outside of Socorro (Help!  That's what socorro means in Spanish!).  Maybe we'll even stop by the old Owl Cafe for some green chili bacon cheese burgers.  That's at least what i would have.  Oh, the joys of flexitarianism!  And finally on to Albuquerque, where we will visit my folks for a spell.

More later...

Magik Sparkling Cider!

So, m'troubles and strife tells me that the new batch of sparkling hard apple cider i've just recently made is quite superb.  i got the recipe quite a while ago from this website.  Turns out, it was really easy.  I bought some simple brewing equipment online (a glass syphon, white wine yeast, plastic air locks, bottle caps and a capping device) for around $25 and had my mom send them to me here in Nepal ages ago, and i never did anything with it.  So now that Catherine and i are moving to Berkeley this summer, i thought, "This is my last chance!  It's now or never!"  


The biggest pain was buying preservative free apple juice in Nepal.  Most juice here is imported from Australia and is hence loaded with preservatives.  i had to go to a local juice shop that sold various fresh juices by the glass.  When i told the owner i wanted 40L, he still insisted on selling it to me by the glass.  That's how retarded business is in Nepal.  He wanted me to buy 160 glasses.  So after bargaining in vain for longer than i care to admit, i settled on buying 160 glasses with came to the ridiculous price of NRps 9600!  Thats $133!  I cajoled, wheedled and threatened to walk away (with this sale he wouldn't have to work for a month and we both knew it!) and finally he grudgingly agreed to give me a NRps 1600 discount from the 160 glass price.


I brought him 2 twenty liter blue plastic water bottles and he juiced like a madman telling me out of the side of his mouth that he would call me when he was done.  


I got the call at 9pm.  "Your juice is ready!" he triumphantly bellowed through the earpiece of my mobile.  "You can come pick it up now!"  Nepalis and Tibetans have this peculiar habit of shouting into their mobile phones as if they were calling out across an entire valley.  I suppose technically they are often calling from across the valley, but all the shouting gets on my nerves.  


"I'll come pick it up tomorrow," i suggested.


"No, no, must come now!"


"It's 9 pm.  How am i gonna carry 40 liters of apple juice three blocks to my home?"


"I don't know, but you have to come now!"


"Give me a break.  I'll come in the morning."


"No, no, must come now!"


"Why?"


"It will... how can i make you understand... after one hour, fresh juice goes bad!"


So i had to run over to the juice shop at 9:15pm, carry 40 liters of juice back to my flat (in two trips) and pasteurize it all in a massive aluminum pot on my kitchen stove.  


Sterilizing my 20L, blue, food-grade plastic water bottles with chlorine, i rinsed them out and then filled them with juice, my trusty white wine yeast and brown sugar (food for the yeastie beasties).  I then plugged the bottles with these air locks designed to let out the CO2 and to keep out the O2.  You see, the little yeasties gorge themselves on the sugar, breaking it down into alcohol and CO2.  So it becomes alcoholic as it starts to bubble.  I put in extra  brown sugar thinking it would make the cider sweeter.  I didn't realize the yeast would eat up all the extra sugar and just make it more alcoholic.  Ended up around 15%.   About as strong as a bottle of wine.  


After 3 weeks of percolating, the yeast finally settled out and out of 20L, 15 were drinkable with the bottom 5L being just a sludge of yeastie muck.  I syphoned off the good stuff on top, added a little more sugar, and poured it into sterilized 66omL beer bottles and capped them with my red plastic bottle capper and bottle caps.  Two more weeks later, the residual yeast had eaten that last bit of added sugar and in the process had carbonated my cider.  


And now it is gold and delicious.  And that was only one of my 20L bottles.  i have another that i've just left to clarify.  i hope to bottle it this week.  Just need to find more bottles.


WARNING:  Three bottles have exploded.  They were all bottles i gave to friends, and i guess carrying them around on the scooter or in my bag shook them up enough to bring the pressure to critical mass.  One blew up in Tracy and Kevin's office after i gave Trace-E her due (Tracy was one of our proud sponsors.  NRps.1000!).  Glad i wasn't there to witness Kevin's potentially Hiroshimic reaction.  But the stuff is still awesome!  Super tastey, says Catherine.

Fiberglass

Okay, so i finally broke down and got a fiberglass cast on my leg.  I found myself suddenly hearing way too many horror stories about poorly healed ankles. Wanna sign my cast?

It's been a while...

I know, it's been a while since my last blog. How many blogs have i read that started out like that? Instead of catching up with everything that's happened since last year, I'm just gonna start with the present. Because it is a precious gift.

School just ended at RYI and things have mellowed out a bit. Most of the students have already left for the summer. I, myself will be leaving in May to attend my brother's wedding in Alaska. I'm really looking forward to it. It will be a long flight but i have a two day lay over in Bangkok to make the flight worth while. Bangkok is always a good time. Maybe i can do a little shopping, and even visit a monastery up north.

I think I've even found a way to get bumped up into business class... I've broken my ankle : ) . Last Friday night i was rough housing with some of the shedra students and i tripped. My ankle then buckled and popped, and i fell suddenly to the ground. It gave me an entirely new perspective, as the stars were quite beautiful that evening. My ankle quickly became a deformed grapefruit in size and shape, and was exquisitely painful. I've since been x-rayed and have spoken to a Belgian Orthopedic. My tibia is fractured just above the ankle on the inside of my right foot. Doc says it may very well heal without a cast, but i will have to get another x-ray next week just to make sure. I'm hoping i can get by without one, 'cause a plaster cast just looks tacky at a wedding ; ) .

I'm really looking forward to seeing my two darling nieces and my super cool nephews. I haven't actually seen Kailey and Ethan since that cruise in the Caribbean a lifetime ago. They probably don't even remember me, but as their uncle, it is my job to ensure that they get into a little trouble now and again (sorry Gary and Cathy, but a job's a job).

Before i head out to Anchorage, i also intend to do a couple weeks of meditation retreat. That will be my real vacation. Speaking of retreat, Catherine is still in her five month retreat out in Pharping. She will finish up in June, a couple weeks after i get back. I was gonna do my retreat out in Pharping as well, but now with my ankle the way it is, i think i'll just do it at home in our shrine room. I finally bought that shrine everyone's been bugging me about not having. It's beautiful. 8' x 8', dark wood, nice carving. I'll try to get a photo of it online once i have it loaded up with all of our statues and texts. I'm really happy with it.

Enough for now. Leave me a comment to let me know what a slacker blogger i've been.

Love, Ger

RYI Summer Program

Since June 2009, we’ve been working hard. Busy days. Catherine is teaching two Tibetan language classes and running our Translator Training program, while I have been helping students find homes, Tibetan homestays, health and healing. From mid-June to mid-July I taught a meditation course at eight in the morning to the Buddhist Study Program students. It was fun, and centered around shamata, or sitting exercises in concentration and becoming calm (which are the foundation of meditation), as well as guided meditations on immeasurable loving kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. The twelve or so students who were in the class seemed to enjoy it, and even though I have no experience in teaching, I had fun. It was a good way for them to start a day of more complicated Buddhist philosophy and logic.

I’ve also been organizing various field trips, from hikes and bus rides to distant monasteries and tours of cultural centers of Kathmandu, like Patan, to movie nights and Fourth of July parties. And, as usual, I’ve been doing my fair share of counseling students through the ups and downs of their brief time in Kathmandu.

These days Catherine and I end most of our days feeling exhausted. Of course some of that is due to the muggy, oppressive heat. You sweat and it just sticks to you all day. Nothing like New Mexico. I miss dry heat. Dry heat and good beer.

Vacation in Thailand- May 2009

Wow, I’ve been so busy of late. Here’s an over view of our last few months. Last May Catherine and I flew to Thailand for three weeks. It was heavenly. Cather was asked last minute to translate for Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche in Malaysia just before our vacation, so she met me in Bangkok. My first night there (the day before Catherine arrived) I met up with some old friends from Nepal, James Hopkins (Virginia), Andy Kilchmann (Swizterland), and Jonas Doctor (Denmark). We went out for dinner together at street diner/café with a live local rock band pounding away inside, and afterwards we all went out for luxurious hour-long Thai foot massages. I stayed the night in a dinky little dive of a hotel near Kao San Road. The next day I met James and some friends of his for lunch at the Jim Thompson house/museum and then sped off to meet Catherine in town and take her to an expensive hotel in China Town which I managed to get at a 50-60% discount online at Last Minute Deals. After a night of luxury, we caught an overnight train to Surat Thani in the south, eating Dunkin’ Donuts and sandwiches. In Surat Thani we took a bus to the pier and boarded our ferry to Koh Phangan, me drinking good Thai beer all the way. We opted to stay on one of the more remote beaches on the island, and since it was off season, we had a mile of pristine white sandy beach mostly to ourselves.

I spent mornings kayaking in the bay and would meet Catherine for breakfast around 9am. We even found this great little beachfront restaurant called the Dolphin where I could order lox on French bread and Catherine could have fruit, yoghurt and muesli for breakfast. We often strolled around after breakfast, later hid from the midday sun, and in the afternoons would drink beer and read on the beach or in a hammock on the porch of our simple thatch-roofed bungalow. And thus we spend two weeks, sometimes tossing a Frisbee, sometimes sitting at the bar, sometimes swimming in the bay. One day we even rented a little Thai power boat and went snorkeling, explored hidden waterfalls and saw over ¼ of the island’s coast. My favorite part was definitely kayaking up and down the coast in the early mornings and exploring a little three –pineapple-tree island.

For the last week of our vacation, we ferried down to Koh Samui, where our friends, Greg and Anne Whiteside, gave us a one week stay at their extremely posh tropical summer home on the southern coast of the island. There we relaxed in air conditioned comfort, took in the awesome view, and occasionally rode in to town on a rented motorbike to pick up groceries and amazing Thai food at a local market in Lamai.

Finally at the end of our trip, Catherine and I Flew back to Bangkok. Catherine had to fly back to Malaysia immediately to translate for Chokling Rinpoche. I, however, had a few days left in BKK and spent them making friends with locals. Lat, a taxi driver, said he felt some kind of a connection with me and invited me to meet his family in the Bangkok suburbs and to stay with them. It sounded fun, so I accepted. They called all their friends over for two nights in a row and we had a seafood and pork BBQ. Boom, Lat’s wife, was an amazing cook and made countless spicy home-style Thai dishes for me to burn my mouth up on while Lat manned the open fire BBQ (as it should be). During the day Lat drove me all around Bangkok on his motorbike, showing me the Royal Palace which I have visited once before with my Dad (George), plus special shrine rooms that were only for the King and his ministers (Lat had a friend who worked for Royal Crown Property Management and who possessed a large ring of magical keys). I had such a fun time with them. My new friends even drove two cars to the airport to see me off. What a sweet bunch of people.

And then I re-entered the Kathmandu Grind.

Kathmandu BBQ!

I would just like to announce that I recently bought a little BBQ grill and i am having a blast with it.  Last month Catherine and I invited Mort and Fuki and Arthur over for some grilled veggies.  We made colorful and delicious shish-kabobs, after which Mort commandeered the grill for a batch of chicken wings soaked in various mouth-watering marinades.  We must allow adults their toys as well.

Honeymoon in Vietnam

I suppose this is a little late in coming, but here are some pictures from our Honeymoon in Vietnam last December and January. We had a good time. First we flew into Hanoi in the north via Bangkok and found it to be colder that we expected and had to buy Catherine a coat. We roamed around Hanoi for a couple days and were slightly put off by the blocky communist architecture and war monuments depicting soldiers firing AK47's. 

Next we travelled east to Ha Long Bay and Cat Ba Island. We hired a large cruising junk with several other tourists and boated around these amazing limestone islands that rose straight out of the water, exposing shear cliff faces. There were thousands of these islands and we just sailed between them all.  It was a two night/three day tour. The first night we stayed on the junk and on the second we celebrated Christmas in a luxury Hotel. During the second day of our Ha Long trip, our guides took us on a delightful bicycle tour of one of the islands, and later that day we went sea kayaking through a hole in a cliff and found ourselves in a quiet, enclosed salt water lake. It was really beautiful.  Possibly the most worthwhile trip you could take in the north.

Afterwards, Catherine and I took both trains and buses south down the coast, stopping in various scenic towns and resorts along the way. Hoi An in particular had escaped the bombing of the American War and was very picturesque, with beautiful temples, a wide river through town, excellent restaurants, and many colorful tailor shops. I ended up having a pair of pants and a jade-green silken robe made, and Catherine had them make her a pair of pants, an exquisite black and red traditional Vietnamese dress, a bright red jacket and a pair of cute brown leather shoes. Tailoring in Hoi An turned out to be addictive. 

Of the other places we stayed, the north end of Mui Ne Beach was most note worthy. Quiet with a busier beach community to the south and beautiful clean beaches. We spent a lot of time drinking beer and lying in hammocks on the beach. And at the end of our trip, we flew out from Saigon (Ho Chi Min City), stayed a couple days in Bangkok which is always nice, and finally flew back home to Kathmandu.

I want to help the environment, but it's not always clear how to do so from KTM.

I suppose I'm fairly worried about the environment, but there just doesn't seem like there is a lot i can do from Kathmandu. I use energy-saving lights and we recently bought this little scooter that gets great gas mileage (if only gas were consistently available in KTM).

We have solar hot water, which is very common in KTM simply because it's cheaper that gas or electric heating, but we also have on-demand gas heating for the shower. Interesting to note is that these days the average Nepali in Kathmandu often has both solar heated water and electric solar panels on his roof or on the ledge outside the house. So Kathmandu is definitely going green, but not by choice. The government shuts off power to all parts of Kathmandu in a 16 hour a day load shedding schedule, leaving residents with only 8 hours of electricity a day. We broke down and bought a back up battery and power inverter. Not as environmentally friendly, but more dependable.

I also try not to litter, but it seems like a totally futile pursuit in such a garbage filled part of the world. I once asked a Khenpo (monk Professor), "Paltrul Rinpoche said sexual misconduct results in being reborn or having to live in very dirty places filled with excrement, while Dakpo Rinpoche said it results in being reborn in a very dusty place. Since Kathmandu is VERY dusty and you can see cow, dog, and human shit EVERYWHERE, does that mean we have all committed sexual misconduct in past lives?" The khenpo replied that Kathmandu was only dirty because of "economics" and was therefore exempt from the above statements. He went on to explain what a Holy city Kathmandu was, but i'm not sure i see this distinction of "economics." Dust is dust, and shit is shit.

I suppose using the outdoors as a toilet could be seen as a boon to the environment, tho, as it is a type of fertilizer. Just be careful not to step in it.

Kathmandu Wedding

Yes, the rumors are true, Catherine and i have gotten married. Back on December 12, two days before my birthday. I guess i have no excuse for forgetting our anniversary, now. Our parents all flew in for the occasion, Charlotte and Gary Carlson, George and Mary Kay Prindiville, and Phil and Sara Dalton. In addition, my sister Kelly, her husband (my brother) Tom (Reddig-Carlson) and my nephew and niece, Nate and Zoe all flew out as well.

The Carlsons and Daltons both flew out early to get a chance to see what Catherine and I looked like when we were up to our gills in work, running around frantically in our surprisingly busy schedules. We put both families in neighboring rooms at the Valley Guesthouse in Boudha. The Prindivilles arrived a few days later and opted to stay at the Hyatt Recency on the outskirts of Boudha. Reddig-Carlson Clan arrived the day before the wedding (the parental units wanted Nate and Zoe to miss as little school as possible... go figure) with just enough time for the ladies to have their never-before-seen saris fitted for the wedding the next day, and to then run to the rehearsal dinner.

It’s always nice to have a fancy rehearsal dinner. Even if there was no rehearsal. We all taxied out to the Garden of Dreams in Thamel and feasted at their Kaiser Cafe, along with friends Mort and Fuki, Arthur, James Hopkins (whose sister’s son plays soccer with Nate in NC as it turns out), Joanne, and Prachanda. We had a wonderful Indo-Continental buffet prepared and many of us thoroughly stuffed ourselves with food and wine before wandering out into the Garden for moonlit strolls. Nate wandered out into the darkness to practice his photography skills. He took some nice contrasty photos of the garden. However, we didn’t wander long, because many of us were exhausted from travel (Reddig-Carlsons) and wedding planning (Catherine and i).

On the morning of the wedding, Catherine ran off to have her hair done with an army of female support. I met her later at the Monastery where we entered the main temple hall during a White Amitayus long-life ceremony. The day before, Catherine and i sponsored the ceremony on behalf of the long life of our marriage. We sat on cushions on the left side of the hall with our parents seated behind us in chairs and guests seated on cushions towards the doors. Catherine and i walked up to Rinpoche in the center aisle and he blessed our rings, blessed us with long life, gave me a statue of Guru Rinpoche and Catherine a silver butter lamp. He then gave us a brief talk saying that we were entering into a spiritual marriage, not a vehicle for further samsara and suffering, but a vehicle for learning and spiritual development. He identified me as skillful means and Catherine as wisdom. Then after a brief photo session, everyone else came up to offer prayer scarves first to Rinpoche and then to Catherine and i. In the end we found ourselves buried beneath mountains of white and yellow scarves. Digging our way out of them was like emerging from the womb all over again. Then came the photo session in earnest. And of course tea on the monastery’s front yard.

In the evening Catherine and I drove out Dwarika’s Hotel in a heavily decorated taxi for the wedding party. We served dinner for 140 people with endless drinks and laughter around Dwarika’s sky-blue pool with stone tiger water spouts. Ryan Conlon and Prachanda’s band Inner Groove played jazz and funk in the early evening and were later replaced with Leo Brauer’s 80’s ipod hip-hop, while people danced, drank and ate themselves into oblivion. Phakchok Rinpoche and his mother, Dechen la, and sister, Mingyur, even made an appearance and schmoozzed with the guests. Catherine and I slipped away to our private room around 11:30 and it did indeed seem like we were the only people at the party who were not intoxicated. Guests called the event the Party of the Century, and the best party they’d ever been to in Kathmandu. We were pleased that it went so well.

A couple days later Catherine and i took the family to a traditional pottery village in Timi, east of Kathmandu where we saw how old school Nepalese pottery could be. Afterwards we drove up to Nagarkot for two days and one night to give our families a chance to get out of Kathmandu Valley pollution and see the Himalayas for a change. It was a nice, rustic little place and we spent our time hiking, eating, talking, reading, and drinking hot rum punch around the wood-burning stove in the main lodge. The views were Spectacular.

Then over the next few days every left for home or further travels. It was wonderful to have every one there and to spend so much time with family that we don’t really get a chance to see that often. And now that they had left, we finally had a chance to breathe. Hallelujah!