1st Day in Mysore, June 30, 2008

June 30, 2008

I woke up at 3:30 this morning. I thought it was 5:00. My travel alarm was set for Thai time and my alarm still set to wake me up for departure from Phuket. Hang on you say...why did it wake me up at 3:30 if the alarm was set for 5:00? Yes indeed, Mysore is in one of those crazy time zones that changes by the 1/2 hour and not a full hour so we’re an hour and a half behind Thailand.

Anyway, I didn’t cotton onto that fact until I lay awake for almost 2 hours waiting for the sun to rise and the household to wake up. It was lovely though, listening to the rain in the coconut palms and the blissful quiet.

No one actually got up until 7AM local time so I laid there for awhile too excited to sleep. My house mates include Peter and Jude, my friends and yoga teachers from NZ and two single women, Isla from the UK and Rachel from Houston (originally Connecticut). Both much younger than the three of us but lovely. Rachel had my room for the previous two months but I’d booked before she did so I booted her out of it.

My room is indeed on the roof. It’s not as nice in my opinion as Peter and Jude’s but it’s more private. I have coconut palms growing outside and I can see the whole neighborhood as ours is the tallest house in the neighborhood.

Rachel, Peter, Jude and I went to breakfast after Rachel’s practice. Tina’s kitchen. We had a wonderful fruit salad of the best mangos I’ve ever had along with papaya, banana and figs, fenugreek roti and a veggie omelette.

After breakfast Jude and I went shopping for fruit and veggies for our dinner (heavy breakfasts and lunches with barely any dinner is the routine here). I then did some laundry. The have two young girls here that come in to clean every day and they do laundry as well, but apparently in India they still beat the clothes against rocks so anything you don’t want pummeled to death you do yourself.

For lunch we went to Nalpak which is traditional Indian and apparently off the beaten track for most western yoga students. I can’t even tell you what we ate but it was delicious! Rice and some sort of unleavened break with a number of different sauces and soups.

At 4:30, excited as I could be, I walked down to the yoga shala (school) with Jude and paid my money to practice for the month. It was actually pretty uneventful. Guruji was in his office but was with someone. His daughter, Saraswati, was there and asked me if I’d sent in my form. I held my breath and said yes, in February. This is what I was afraid of; I’ve come all this way and they won’t have received my form. You send it via snail mail and they never acknowledge whether or not they’ve received it. For the last few days I’ve been coming up with different scenarios of what I could do now that I’m in India if I can’t practice. Peter and Jude told me it would be fine, that they’d vouch for me.

Lo and behold, not to worry, they didn’t even check. They just took my money (a big wad of rupees) filled out an ID card and off we went.

Fruit salad for dinner.