Tuesday I had cause to celebrate.

Firstly (because it originally happened so long ago), it was my 28th birthday.

Secondly, we wrapped up shooting on our never-ending, but nonetheless fabulous, first project.

We shot our last interview in a hostel, home to 20 Indian girls who range in age from about 6 to 14.
They sang me happy birthday!

I’ll let my expression tell the story for me:

If for some reason the video doesn’t work, try following this link.

Tristan captured this on his 5d Mark II. We then compressed the hell out of it (read: ruined it) so the archaic Indian Internet could handle the upload.

While down in Dharamshala to finish filming, we bought more of the amazingly fantastic fireworks we purchased for the Fourth.

Here’s a picture our friend Eric from Seattle took of the explosive’s Independence Day iteration.

He has a blog. It chronicles his recent Tibetan adventures and continuing Indian saga. Check it out.

It’s hard to imagine a place further away from the land of root beer, apple pie and hot dogs, but Tristan and I were determined this fourth of July to celebrate in style.

This being said, we set out early on an odyssey to buy all things American, and some stuff to blow up.

On our way to Dharmshala we made a stop in McLeod for a soda and happened upon a true gem, an expired can of Budweiser. The red white and blue label called to us from the bottom of a cooler and heeding its siren’s call we shelled out the $3 US for one can.

The pictures alone may be worth the price. We tasted the sweet, skunky golden waters of St Louis, MO and savored every bit before offering the can up to the Indian countryside.

Verily, a taste of home.

Later, after an exhaustive search of the city we found what may be Dharamshala’s only cache of fireworks.

At our wits end, we asked the proprietor of the very last store we came to on the road back to McLeod if he knew where we could buy fireworks.

His reply was simply, “Yes, come in.”

Thinking he didn’t understand us, or may be joking, “No, fireworks, fire works, you have them?”

Indeed he did.

Handing over Rp.120 ($2.50ish) for each of six tubes of questionable explosive strength we headed out to find some kitsch.

I’m fairly confident we bought Dharamshala clean out of American flag bandanas.

They had fifty stars and we’ll ignore the number of stripes (25) but they nearly screamed our one-day nationalist fervor and they were ours.

Heading back we picked up a bottle of whiskey, had some apple pie with ice cream, couldn’t find any root beer and invited our new Israeli friends to an Independence Day party on the roof of our guest house.

As darkness fell our bottle of Pioneer whiskey became lighter and our excitement mounted. This was our first run-in with Indian fireworks, and quite a run-in it was.

Not sure whether to expect the shimmering disappointment of a fountain of sparks, or the exhilaration of some sort of pyrotechnic accident, we lit the first of the fireworks and it was glorious.

Shooting into the sky, tailed by a cascade of golden fire our rocket leapt from its cardboard home. Exploding with the dazzle and noise of a professional firework the blossom of light filling the sky left me speechless.

Well, nearly speechless, I was able to mumble a string of excited expletives in between chortles of amazed laughter.

As the last of our explosions faded from the sky our neighbor, Russel launched into a particularly rousing rendition of “God Bless America.”

Here’s a sample of his singing from one of the daily jams at our guest house:

Russel Jamming

Ultimately, we had a mixed bag of nationalities show up to  rather subdued, but fun party in honor of the birth of a country on the other side of the world.

Breaking free of the culture of perpetual jams, snacks and general laziness, Tristan and I began working in earnest Monday. We devoted an eye-taxing six hours in front of computers cutting up interviews and trying to overcome the notorious 5-D Mark II audio drift which has now become the bane of my existence.

Holed up in our guest house while the first day of monsoon struck Dharamkot outside, we learned a whole new vocabulary while trying to best technology’s shortcomings.

We synchronized audio at a subframe level,  streamclipped and learned all about keyframes. Meanwhile, just under our balcony our hebrew neighbors tried to lure us out to dance in the rain.

It was a tempting offer, but like the (insert manly diligent, probably military metaphor here) before us we strove toward our goal.

The fun stuff being mostly over, we’ve begun the first and most tedious parts of production.

While we toll away in dark rooms over brilliantly captured audio and video, the sounds of Hebrew folk music wafts in through our open windows.

You see, Dharamkot is little Israel here in Dharamshala. Most of our new-found friends are Israeli and I’ve learned far more Hebrew than Hindi.

Had someone told me a year ago I’d be hanging out in the Indian Himalayas with a bunch of Israelis, I would have been forced to question their sanity.

Life certainly is happily and wonderfuly bizarre.

Sunday, I struck out with some Israeli friends I met at our guesthouse.

After eating Japanese in McLeod, we trekked up to Bhagsu. There, I was privileged to watch and take part in some sort of ruckus sunset ceremony.

The Japanese restaurant (a couple of weeks ago):

Taking place inside a colorful temple, the general aim of the observance, as explained by a fellow onlooker, was to make noise.

Bells of every timber cascaded off of the granite walls and floors of the temple. Ringing, banging and clanging the bells were a small group of children and an Indian man.

The temple itself was a two-story building with two stairwells which went into a fake cave filled with statues of Hindu gods. The stairwells were made to look like those who entered were walking into, or out of a lions mouth.

Inside inside the dentured gate the walls of the stairs became a cave a-la Disney or Casa Bonita. Accompanied by the man and two small girls, one of which attempted to jump out and scare us, my friend Shae and I were forced to crawl at one point inside the cavern.

Still ringing bells the man paused before each idol bathing them in pungent incense smoke.

After finishing this ritual he and the children sat to sing and chant.

Overall an interesting experience.

Here’s a photo Tristan took today.

Visit his blog for more.

Nearly a tenement due to neglect, I plan to dust off the cobwebs of my blog and start writing again.

Since last I posted here, Tristan and I started on a story and my guts fell victim to another attack.

This time it seemed a whole troupe of trolls donning golf shoes decided to put on a season of “Stomp” in my stomach and intestines.

I’m recovering slowly and nearing the end of my 10-day course of amoebacide. After receiving rave reviews for their performances, the gaggle of trolls have moved on to a larger stage.

For our first story, we’re following Chris, a self-styled circus performer, as he trains children how to juggle, walk tightropes and all other things clown.

His pupils hail from a tent-city slum in Dharamsala. They have been taken out of the slum and given the opportunity to attend school and generally be children. Tong Len, the program with which Chris is allied, provides room and board for the children as long as they don’t make any money.

In the slum’s families the primary earners are often the children.

Today we watched the students perform for their families outside of their homes.

The slum is largely comprised of huts, tents and lean-tos with black tarp roofs and general detritus serving as walls. The entrance to community is a hole in the brick wall off of one of Dharmsala’s main drags, It is probably a square mile, has its own network of paths and even a small general store.

The first thing that sruck me as an American, is the sense that, yes, your pocket may be picked, but the threat of physical violence — perceived or otherwise —doesn’t exist.

Tristan caught a small child with its hand in his back pocket on his wallet. Otherwise the people were helpful and friendly.

The Tong Len children, despite being from the slum, were easy to pick out amongst their peers. Those that stayed to earn money or otherwise were caked with a layer of filth. Many didn’t have pants and some had hair which bordered on dreadlocks.

Despite their situation, the children played, laughed and were just as adorable as children anywhere else.

The biggest and most humbling surprise, however came from an adult and requires a bit of back-story.

About two weeks ago Tristan went to the hospital with amoebas of his very own. While we were waiting for a doctor, Tristan was waiting for a bathroom to empty so he could tend to his overwhelming nausea.

A genuinely caring and kind Indian man helped him up to the second floor bathroom. He wasn’t an employee of the place, and he had nothing to gain. Just a true and simple act of compassion.

He even asked how Tristan was twice, before saying goodbye on his way out.

Fast forward to today in the middle of the slum. The same man was helping set up the stage.

Despite crushing poverty, chief among his concerns for the day we spent in hospital, was making sure Tristan was okay.

Things are beginning to look up.

I’m not yet 100 percent, but I’m feeling well enough to explore McLeod, be generally personable and indulge in a bit of circus training.

We haven’t begun chasing any stories in earnest yet, but we have made some headway by laying groundwork.

Today, I tried my hand at tightrope walking and juggling.

Tristan and I met Chris, our patient and enthusiastic teacher of the arts circus, at a park in McLeod.

There, after having my shoes darned by Deepak, a local teen, we partook in a pre-performance stretch routine then learned the basics of juggling.

Along with a small group of others I also, with the help of Deepak, attempted a bit of tightrope acrobatics.

No, amazingly, I didn’t manage to hurt myself.

It was inspiring to see Deepak afforded the opportunity to act like a kid.

A resident of the nearby Dharamshala slum, Deepak told me that his mother pulled him out of school after his father died. The family needed additional income so, Deepak took to the streets with a mobile cobbling station.

Today however, he was afforded the opportunity to juggle, tightrope walk and generally play in the park.

Later in the afternoon, while purchasing a some soft-serve, a Tibetan nun grabbed my arm.

As an already jaded traveller, my first reaction was to say no to what I assumed was an entreaty for money.

But, as I turned around the elderly nun  pointed to a cone, asking me to buy one for her. I couldn’t find it in the deepest hollows of my heart to say no.

So here’s a picture:

Tristan took all the photos on my blog today. He also snapped this photo of me languishing in the hospital:

Check out his blog for more, even better pictures.

It’s been a second since I last blogged.

Since then, I’ve spent two days at a hospital, and a couple languishing in our hotel room.

Thursday, Tristan awoke under gastrointestinal duress. The kind of duress that sent us directly to the nearby Tibetan Delek Hospital. Saturday, I awoke under similar circumstances and the trip was made again.

The facility was built with Italian money to directly serve Tibetans in exile. It staffs at least one western doctor and resembles slightly, a miniature US hospital. It sits on a hill overlooking lower Dharamshala, across the street from the Tibetan Congress.

We took our places in what appeared to be a chaotic waiting room, after paying Rp.10 for a seemingly arbitrary number to be seen by the doctor.

In classic Indian fashion, appearances were deceiving, as the whole thing operated more efficiently than most U.S, emergency rooms.

Not to weigh the post down with details, the long and the short of our combined visits is, Tristan and I have Amoebas swimming around in our guts.

This not only makes it difficult to concentrate but magnifies homesickness and inflates the abject disdain I have for the Indian teenagers playing soccer just outside my window.

Their game follows three days of Indian girls chatting and screaming just outside our guesthouse door.

The universe alined, and Tristan and I fell ill just as an Indian tour group of children and teenagers descended upon Paul’s house in otherwise quiet Dharamkot.

In between ear-plugged naps, I’ve had the pleasure of trying to read while listening to Hindi screamed over English, yelled over some sort of mixture of the two.

All the while, I’ve tried to suck down hydration salts, which taste as if someone pissed in your Tang before bringing it to the moon.

As I finish this post, the children outside argue whether a goal was scored and I resign myself to quietly sipping stale-flavored salty citrus water and trying to ignore the tumult.

Monday, Tristan, Adam and I made the rickety rickshaw ride from Dharamkot down to McLeod to buy some warm clothes, and ended up catching a movie.

We each payed Rp.100 to watch a pirated version of the new “Star Trek” movie.

A quarter of the movie was cropped off and occasionally a Russian subtitle flashed across the bottom, linking to the bootleg online. The title screen read “tar tre”

The theater itself was a series of office chairs situated on metal crates. The walls were lined with blue fabric and the screen was illuminated by a projector which read “please replace bulb.”

Despite this, I nearly forgot we were in a theater in India. It wasn’t until the lights went on and I looked down to see a metal framework through a torn burlap sack that I remembered where I was.

This interlude was especially welcome because it came on the heals of my first serious bout with homesickness.

On my way to use the internet I found a child wrestling with his goat. The goat won and escaped up the street. The child, ran the opposite direction crying while the local men laughed.

What an odd place.

For you pleasure, here’s the last known picture of my umbrella alive. It succumbed to the pressures of being used as a walking stick for a week, falling to pieces.

Tristan took the photo, go to his blog for more.

It has been a long few days since I last wrote here.

Excuse the long post, but here’s my epic in three parts.

Part I: Against my instincts

The first day we entered Bhagsu, Tristan Adam and I were handed a flyer by a local man advertising a three-day “Trance Party in the Jungle.” Scoffing, we joked about going. Not being a fan of techno, contact dance or glowsticks, the event seemed to me like a loud open-air prison.

So, after a few day we had all but forgotten about the rave..

Thursday, about an hour after Tristan and I had returned from breakfast, Adam burst into the room. He was excited.
He said quite a few people were going to this party and going would advance our story. So, Tristan and I reluctantly, but hurriedly head out with little more than a a camera and a flashlight to find out more.

We have two hours to prepare for the event which promises tents and sleeping arrangements, music and a daily buffet.

Looking around to see how many people are going we fight our first instinct, which is “stay the hell home, this is clearly a scam.”

Waffling, the whole time, it takes us up until the last taxi is loaded to decide to go. After running all over town we literally jump on the last vehicle as its preparing to leave.

We have with us a sleeping bag and one liner, stupid looking stocking caps and dumb medieval-looking linen shirts, two bottles of whisky, a flashlight, a camera and some toilet paper.

Stomachs churning our SUV-style chariot embarks.

Part II: The path to hell…

Despite being packed into a car like sardines, the ride to the “party” is delightful, I’m crammed into the car next to two Israelis and another American journalist. We have polite conversation for the three-hour ride up the mountains.
Along the way, I see some of the most beautiful mountain terrain I’ve ever had the pleasure of viewing, nothing short of spectacular.

Along the way locals wave, along rural mountain roads.

As evening falls we arrive in a small town situated on a Himalayan stream.

We leave the town on a small path formed by years of donkey and goat travel up steep grades and over rocks. After about an hour, we walk through a genuinely rural Indian hamlet, no roads and very little electricity just brick and slate homes surrounded by farms and hills.

The townspeople line the path waving and greeting us with “namaste” and hallo.
In short, I was left amazed at how they managed to be so happy with so little.

Really excited for the first time, we trek onwards for another hour, as night falls completely.

Part III: One hell of a party…

We finally arrive in pitch-black night.

In front of us there’s a pile of dirty mattresses in a cow patty-covered field buttressed by thorny brambles. There are no tents, no lights and certainly no dj.

There is a dj booth and a couple of speakers, but here we find ourselves surrounded by about 100 people speaking languages we don’t understand, tearing down everything they can find to start a fire.

The promised buffet on arrival? This  consists of a group of shepards crouched in a corner cutting onions and ttomatoes and throwing them into a pot on top of a pit fire.

After building a small fire of our own, which attracts a decent crowd, we eat shepard stew. It for some reason tastes of wasabi.

For some ongodly reason, however, our fire is the one which attracts all the Indian men. This group includes a number of rumored undercover police officers.

Smoke and laughter drift from all the fires around us.

We, however are surrounded by people speaking heated Hindi while we sip our whiskey.

By now its midnight, we’re trying to falll asleep. We just want to make it to morning and leave this place.
The Indian men keep sitting on my feet, flashing lights in our faces and yelling at each other feet away from us.

Eventually our fire starts to die and we give up. We move our mattresses to the front of the valley, away from most other people, which proves to be the best decision we’ve made all night.

Here we don our stupid hats, genie shirts a scarf and wrap ourselves in pieces of fabric we bought along the way. To keep warm Tristan and I are forced to sleep back-to-back under the one sleeping bag we have in the middle of a shit-strewn field somewhere in the middle of the Himilayan mountains.

Here, you’d think things couldn’t get much worse, right?

Well, around 2 or 3 maybe 4 after finally falling into a shivering sleep we are awoken by about 30 Indian police officers bearing sticks, flashlights and  guns streaming past us into the cow patty and bramble meadow. Tristan and I just kind of stay still and they roll past us.

Tristan is facing the rest of the camp and can see them rousting and searching everyones bag.

So, we’re laying there ass-to-ass in a field, in the mountains, in northern india, dressed like assholes with a cadre of Indian police officers feet from us. But, for reasons which will forever remain a mystery we are not bothered by the police other than the occasional flashlight glare.

We wake up at 6 a.m. to see that the police have not only taken the dj equipment, but as if to add insult to injury, have flipped the table over.

One giant scam.

We make back to the larger town after a starved buhtan-style march through the mountains and a crowded taxi ride back we’re back.

Here’s a picture Tristan took along the way, check out his blog for more.

Worried and dressed like an idiot on the road to hell

After climbing countless stairs and taking a few death-defying rickshaw rides, we have found a place to lay our heads.

We are staying at Paul’s Guest House in Dharamkot a town perched on the side of a Himalayan foot hill. From afar it resembles a small Swiss hamlet. Closer it becomes an obviously Indian town.

Misspelled signs dominate the open markets and dusty roads. There exhists a major difference here, however.

For every sign in English or Hindi there is one in Hebrew. As a direct result of the influx of Israeli travelers here many of the locals speak all three languages.

It serves as an interesting backdrop for the new-age mentality that seems to dominate the place.

Just last night, after dining in neighboring Bhagsu — also an Israeli dominated berg — I sat on the steps of our guest house awaiting a glass of freshly squeezed mango juice. The sounds of a flute and tabla music cascaded off the hills to compliment the slightly smoke flavored mountain air to create an almost mystic feeling.

Contrast this with the large barking, ostensibly feral, dog that continues to enter the Internet Cafe from which I currently write. Now, add hundreds of spirituality-seeking tourists talking about energy and then, perhaps, you’ll get a feel for the place.

For pretty photos of the past few days, check out Tristan’s blog.