Come On, Drink for the Children

By posting this, we have automatically offset 350 pounds of carbon!

And this isn't the only thing we've been doing to make the world a better place . . .

We have now made it to Laos. The mountains are really beautiful and the children are refreshingly unjaded. We are staying in a city called Vang Vieng that sits next to the Namsong river. We spent a few days helping out at an organic farm. You would be surprised to know that what they really needed help with was selling mojitos! Of course, we happily rose to the challenge. It seems that the city's main attraction is a wild inner-tubing drink-a-thon designed especially for foreigners (imagine rope swings, zip lines, mud pits, slides, and free shots). The organic farm is situation at the inner-tubing starting point so they wisely set up a bar to raise money for their local education projects. They specialize in organic mulberry mojitos (they're good, trust us) and all the proceeds go towards education. One of their main projects is a bus to get rural children to school. Since no one can resist a slogan like "Drink for the Children," we spent two days convincing passing foreigners into getting drunk for the sake of making the world a better place. Apparently the farm can raise as much as 5 times the profit when a foreigner works the bar. We are proud to say that on our first day we raised 1.5 million kip for the farm (never mind the conversion rates, just think about how big the number 1.5 million is! It's huge!).

While on the farm we also sat in on a Lao children's hip hop class, helped milk goats, learned how to make goat cheese, and ate mulberry pancakes, mulberry fruitshakes, mulberry tea, deep-fried mulberry leaves, and, of course, mulberry mojitos. So far Laos is treating us pretty well.

Look below Amritsar

We just posted about our time in McLeod Ganj, India and our posting will appear below our Amritsar posting...

Amritsar: Home of the Sikhs

We arrived into Bangkok yesterday and we are now in northern Thailand in a city called Chiang Mai. We are already loving the amazing Thai street food: mango sticky rice, pad thai, fresh fruits, thai iced tea, and crepes!

We still have a lot to share about India. Here are some photos from a city called Amritsar that we visited in August.

Note the "Horn Please." It does not seem that anyone here needs a reminder. This photo was taken on our way to Amritsar - another overnight bus ride in a bus with one of the world's worst horn systems.

The Golden Temple. This is the holiest place in the world for the Sikh religion, and after visiting numerous holy sites in various countries, Alisa and I will be so bold to say that this is our favorite. It seems to us that it is hard to find the fine line between serenity and earthliness. Some places are so serene they feel sterile - the police men and soldiers make the serenity seem so forced that it is no longer human. Then other places are so "human" they can be suffocating - when people can sell merchandise, pee, or take photos on temple grounds in can be harder to find the serenity. For us, the Golden Temple, which receives tens of thousands of visitors a day, still maintained a satisfying balance of the sacred and the profane.

The community kitchen, or langar, is a good example of this balance. Every Sikh temple has a kitchen which serves all who enter, regardless of caste, class, or creed, 24 hours a day.

There were lots of volunteers hard at work to keep everything running very smoothly.

Everyone sits on the floor to eat, partly as a symbol of all people's equality. Even the prime minister of India has eaten on this floor.

Anyone is allowed to sleep inside the temple.

They have rooms with beds for a small fee, but also free accommodation on the floor. The temple also has free accommodation for foreign visitors, like us, in a special dorm room. In this room, we met people from all over, including Mexico, Spain, Malaysia, Korea, China, Ireland, and Argentina. We even randomly ran into Sean Andrew, who goes to Santa Clara University, but we had never met before!

A shoe salesman getting his beard curled.


Hindu gods, Sikh gurus, Indian movie stars, and white babies. This man has it all.

We had the following conversation with this man:

Man: To which country do you belong?
Us: Amerrrica.
Man: Ah, I'm going to Germany next week.
Us: Uh . . . wow, sounds great!

A similar type conversation with a young Indian woman we met 3 weeks ago:

Girl: To which country do you belong?
Us: Amerrrica.
Girl: Ah, my uncle lives in Australia.
Us: Uh . . . wow. We hear Australia's really nice . . .

Usually, though, the conversations are pretty much always like this:

Indian person: To which country do you belong?
Us: Amerrrica.
Indian person: Ah! Amerrrica! Good country! Very rich. My uncle (or aunt or cousin brother or friend) lives in Texas (or Washington DC or California or New Jersey or Chicago).

Until last week, when the conversations suddenly took a sharp turn:

Indian person: To which country do you belong?
Us: Amerrrica.
Indian person: Ah! Amerrrica.! Very bad economy. Very big problems.
Us: Oh . . . uh, yeah.

A man giving tattoos on the street corner next to a man making dentures.

Who wouldn't trust this face with their permanent tattoo?

We went with our new Malaysian friend to watch the nightly showdown at the Indian-Pakistani border. The Indian soldiers were looking pretty sharp.
Hundreds of Indians gather every evening at sundown to watch their soldiers have a dance-off with the Pakistani soldiers. The soldiers shout, high-step, and stomp and the crowd goes wild.

One last shot of the beautiful golden temple at night.

We know you've been on the edge of your seats . . .

waiting to find out if we achieved mental liberation at our 10 day silent retreat. We actually achieved so much mental liberation we've been sitting in meditation ever since. Today's our first contact with technology in a month. Not knowing what to do first, we hesitated, turned to each other, and said at once, "we gotta update the blog."
The Vipassana retreat was the actually incredibly exhausting, both physically and mentally. We both agree that it was the most painful experience of our entire lives. Not being able to speak, read, or write was really wonderful, but sitting cross-legged for 10 hours a day meditating on the physical pain was brutal. It was also really hot. There was one day when we spent the whole day meditating on the sensations in the triangular area above the upper lip and below the nostrils. I literally spent the entire day meditating on the bead of sweat that clung precariously to the upper edge of the top lip (I never knew how resilient that upper lip is! All day I was like, "just fall, drop of sweat, fall!").
In the end, it was a transformative experience for both of us, but in very different ways. You'll have to ask us more about it when you see us in person. Let's just say, when we could finally make eye contact on the 10th day we both immediately started crying because the feeling of release was so overwhelming.

We are now in southern India in a state called Kerala. We just spent 24 hours on a supremely peaceful houseboat in palm tree-lined backwaters. In 5 days we head to Bangkok, where the Tessa-Alisa chapter will end and the Tessa-Alisa-Audrey chapter will begin. We'll tell you about it later. Get excited!