India.. week 3

Soo yea..I'm not really sure what to write about. I spent last week on an farm like 2 hours outside of Betul. We stayed with this family and lived in this mud hut type deal. It was pretty rustic and cool but kinda musty and so I ended up sleeping outside in my hammock by the peanuts. Oh yea, this place grew peanuts which was kinda pretty cool so we harvested peanuts and ate peanuts and yea..that kinda stuff. So other than that we dug trenches and ate awesome food and tried to begin to understand Gandhian philosophy. It was pretty cool. They did interesting things too. For example, we used ashes from the fire to wash all of our dishes. That was really interesting and it worked too. I mean I didn't get sick...it pretty much did the trick. Wow, I'm having a hard time thinking of things to write about. I mean like so much has gone on - it's hard to fit it into words. Another mentionable thing was the we ate a lot of roti (round flat bread), Dal (lentils), some type of jam made with an un-translatable fruit which grows in India, custard apples and various types of grain concoctions.

Now we're in Sewgram staying in/on/at? an ashram. The wikipedia description is as follows...

Traditionally, an ashram (Sanskrit/Hindi: आश्रम) is a religious hermitage. Additionally, today the term ashram often denotes a locus of Indian cultural activity such as yoga, music study or religious instruction.

Actually, if you wikipedia the term ashram ... it kind of maybe shows a picture of one of the buildings within the complex we're located in. That's kind of awesomely ridiculous. I guess I just can't really take it all in because I'm getting used to leaving a place every week and everything is mentally overwhelming. But I mean whatever, so is life. I'm just realizing that it's getting easier and easier to adjust to everything. I'm entering the homesick stage or whatever though. Sometimes I'm just like what the fuck..I have 7 more months of constant travel and change and mental overload.Which is indescribable and tiring at the same time.  It comes in waves. Also, it's strange because it's halloween today and I'm thinking about what I would be doing if I was home and I want to just like be in pj's all day and make strange food concoctions and listen to music and smoke cigarettes and watch re-runs of sunny or alyssa's bootleg costa rican planet earth and sleep.

So yea right now we're staying in the ashram and in like 3 days I'll be taking a series of planes to Manali, which is like basically an israeli slash hindi hippie commune in the Himalayas. I'm going to read and apparently be in snow and sit and meet like a ton of random israeli backpackers and meditate or whatever you do when you're in the mountains.

I'm having a hard time putting thoughts together so I'm done with this for now but I want to end with the list of books that I'm going to read slash am reading because it might be interesting to share and also if anybody wants to comment with book recommendations that would be awesome too!

The People's History of the United Sates by Howard Zinn (currently reading and totally reccommend)
A history of cuban agriculture (recommend just reading about cuba in general)
My Experiments with Truth by Mohandas Gandhi
Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
Tagore (great bengali poet) - we're bringing a couple of his collections on vacation

so yea that's my list of hopeful reading adventures for the next month. We'll see what happens I'm like 30 pages into people's history. I know that I'll definitely read my experiments with truth though because we have to for class.

yea and hopefully next time I'll think of fun stories to share. That's all for now though.