The world already feels like a different place

We woke up at 6am to watch the election returns with other Americans at an American-owned bar. Cheers, tears, champagne - we just wish we could have been in the United States to experience this momentous event with all of you.

The owner of the bar later that night.

Still celebrating late into the night. Yay, Obama.

Since bars in Luang Prabang close at 11:30pm, we spent the rest of the evening jumping for joy in our hotel room (notice the cool wall art) and taking photos of ourselves.

5 days later and we are still devoting every drink to Obama. We really do feel like we can be less ashamed of being Americans. In nearly 10 months of travel we have not met a single person, be it Thai villager, Indian rickshaw driver, or fellow traveler who was not rooting for Obama. Here's to continued American hope and mobilization toward change!

Laos: Untitled.

In eastern Laos we visited the mysterious Plain of Jars where there are fields and fields full of huge . . . jars. Why are they there? No one knows . . .

This area is also one of the most heavily bombed areas in the world. To see the jars, we had to walk along specific paths that had been cleared of unexploded ordnance. The unexploded bombs are left over from continuous US bombing between 1964 and 1973. Apparently the US dropped an average of one bomb every 8 minutes during these years. This is half a metric ton of bombs for every person living in the country at the time.

Laos people continue to be killed and injured by the bombs every year. In an already impoverished area that survives off of farming, the people's livelihoods are seriously inhibited by the bombs that lie hidden in much of the farmland.

In the local villages, military shrapnel is used for fencing, housing material, and flower beds. The villagers also sell the shrapnel and it is converted into all kinds of things such as forks and spoons. Recently, an increasing number of people are dying in the process of trying to salvage shrapnel to sell. To give you a sense of how little they make off the shrapnel, one side of a cluster bomb (what you see forming the fence) earns US $15. This is a lot of money for subsistence farmers.

Our tour guide, whose two cousins were killed by an unexploded bomb just last year, invited us into his home and shared with us some traditional Laos whiskey - poured out of his grandfather's military canteen. One side of our tour guide's family worked for the CIA during the war and the other side worked for Pathet Lao, the communist resistance group that eventually succeeded in gaining control of their country.

We were lucky enough to arrive in Vientiane during a big festival. The area surrounding the national monument was jam-packed with carnival rides, souvenir shops, food stalls, and lots of stages with singing and dancing performers. This wonderfully inventive man was selling special pancakes for kids. He first used colored pancake batter to draw cartoon characters in the pancake. Then he would write the kids' names in sweet chili sauce, add fried fish sticks, and lots of sweetened condensed milk. We know this combination of sweet, savory, and seafood sounds too good to be true, but the kids loved it. And so did we. So much we nearly vomited.

We visited "Buddha Park" outside of Vientiane. Basically a park full of all kinds of beautiful and strange statues of the Buddha and an assortment of various other gods and creatures. Here two novice monks are posing inside a statue. The park was full of novice monks looking for fun on a Sunday afternoon. This was a photo they were taking of themselves and we just asked if we could take a snap, too.

Novice monks trying to take a photo of us on their cell phone. Even monks have camera phones.

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!

Our Ten Day Vipassana Silent Retreat

Today we are heading out to a Vipassana Meditation Retreat. Ten days of silence. Ten days of meditation.



Here is our schedule:
4:00 am Morning wake-up bell
4:30-6:30 am Meditate in the hall or in your room
6:30-8:00 am Breakfast break
8:00-9:00 am Group meditation in the hall
9:00-11:00 am Meditate in the hall or in your room according to the teacher's instructions
11:00-12:00 noon Lunch break
12noon-1:00 pm Rest and interviews with the teacher
1:00-2:30 pm Meditate in the hall or in your room
2:30-3:30 pm Group meditation in the hall
3:30-5:00 pm Meditate in the hall or in your own room according to the teacher's instructions
5:00-6:00 pm Tea break
6:00-7:00 pm Group meditation in the hall
7:00-8:15 pm Teacher's Discourse in the hall
8:15-9:00 pm Group meditation in the hall
9:00-9:30 pm Question time in the hall
9:30 pm Retire to your own room--Lights out



Vipassana is one of India's most ancient meditation techniques. Long lost to humanity, it was rediscovered by Gotama the Buddha more than 2500 years ago. The word Vipassana means seeing things as they really are. It is the process of self- purification by self-observation. It begins by concentrating the mind and observing the natural breath. This creates a heightened level of awareness which allows the practitioner to proceed to observe the changing nature of body and mind and thus experience the universal truths of impermanence, suffering and egolessness. This truth-realization by direct experience is the process of purification, a purification which allows one to face life's challenges in a calm and balanced way. Ultimately, Vipassana meditation aims at the highest of spiritual goals, total liberation and full enlightenment. (All of this is taken directly from http://www.dhamma.org/en/application.shtml, the site where we registered for our retreat)



Not only will we be silent for the upcoming ten days, we will not be able to read, listen to music, journal, or even practice yoga. We also need to abstain from killing all living beings (including mosquitoes), refrain from making eye contact with anyone, and refrain from using gestures. Apparently, after Day Three we will be asked to not move or adjust ourselves (no itching, scratching, picking split ends, wiping the sweat from our brow...)



Last thought: Yesterday we met a monk, of nine years, who mentioned that he did a Vipassana Retreat a few years ago and that he wanted to quit numerous times. What are we getting ourselves into...