It's Good to be Back?

Well I'm back everyone. Luckily my parents were nice enough to come pick me up in Chicago when my flight to Detroit was cancelled. Right now I am trying to figure out where in the world my luggage is. Hopefully it is not still in Detroit and at the Lansing airport instead. We shall see won't we. Well beyond the last leg it was a nice trip back, it's nice to see everyone again. I suppose this is proably the end of this blog to. So I thanks everyone for your support and it's been fun. I'm glad this worked out well and I could keep in contact with everyone during the experience.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

Hey all, well this may or may not be my last post in India. I might get on in Delhi. Tommorow is my birthday which I suppose is exciting but not because I am leaving Bodh Gaya. I don't know how I feel. I am happy I will see my family but not that I have to leave India to do it. I don't know what it's going to be like to be home. I'm a little scared frankly. Not only that but I am really going to miss the people I have lived with here. I am going to miss them like crazy. I have to say goodbye to most of them tommorow which is going to be very hard. Very very hard. I'm going to try my best not to cry. This week has gone by so fast! By the way we had a meeting with the Karmopa the other day which was cool. Plus now I have blessed pills to aid in meditation. Yep, I'm going to miss things like that. I am going to miss seeing monks and making friends with them. I'm going to miss being surrounded by Buddhist temples. I am going to miss being woken up by Burmese pilgrims hawking up phelgm to spit every morning. I am going to miss a lot of things but it will be nice to be home. I think that will be my mantra for the next few days, "it will be nice to be home." I won't cry tommorow hopefully. Damn I'm turning twenty but that seems to be mute in response to all the other changes going on tommorow. Well I hope this finds you all safe and sound and possibly I'll be writing from a computer near you at my next entry. Well I'm missing a party so I'm going to sign off. Love ya!

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Hey everyone! I'm back in Bodh Gaya! The travel with nice, happy to get back. Everyone here has some great stories! I can't beleive it's only a week until my birthday which is the day I leave Bodh Gaya which is sad. I have one week though to cherish the moment. Well it will be intresting seeing everyone and being back. Being back I am still a little torn about leaving. We got off the plane and the taxi driver pulled one of those games and I was pissed because we were too tired to deal with in but then my favorite Bollywood song came on and I had to dance and it was like I was back into India mode and I LOVED IT! Man okay seriously I'm just going to travel after college. I'm just going to show up every four years or so say hello and then I'm gone. It will be amazing. I mean I am looking foward to coming back I just really love it here. It will be fine though. Yey!

The Beach!

So this is my last post in Thailand and proably there are only a couple more until I'm home. I went to the beach which was frickin' amazing. Seriously hard to come back. Tommorow I leave for India which I have mixed feelings about. I mean it will be very nice. The one nice thing is the closer the looming date of my departure back to the real world comes the better I am about handling it. I think I will be okay coming back to Michigan and then in two weeks moving back to Baldwin. It should be fun. It will at least be nice to see everyone. My mom is in Staunton this past weekend and she's bringing back choclates, it's a small thing but it made me think about the stuff I miss, the Visulite, the Woodrow Wilson, Blackfrairs, Shanandoah Pizza, Celebrate, Cranberries, etc. It will be nice I think. I don't know we'll see when I get home whether I die of culture shock or I'm relativly okay. I mean I'm not going to be old Robyn anyway but it would be nice to be the Robyn who can just cope with living another few years in the place she was born and raised. Anyway it is only a few years. No problem. So it will be nice. I actually too am looking foward to being back in India. I miss Bodh Gaya. Kolkata is going to be nice and I have a day and a half. Maybe I'll go to the Kali temple or the Mother Teresa house. Something cool like that. I'm going to miss Bangkok though and Thailand in general. Great place. Oh man I can't beleive I will be leaving tommorow. Should be interesting. The beach was amazing though. Some intresting adventures on the way there and back that I will share at a later point in time. The beach was beautiful, white sand, aqua sea. Laying out on the beach in December is not something I have ever done and it was really really nice. Swimming too! Oh I miss swimming so much and it was so nice just to lay in the surf. I love water. It was so relaxing and carefree. I really wanted to just live in a hut forever but now I'm here and it's good. The next few days are going to be crazy but it will turn out fine and before you know I will be in Bodh Gaya again! Yey!

Chillin' in Samsara

Well the King's Birthday was yesterday and it was fun and crazy. I got up around 9am to work on my paper and to figure out what was going on. I found out the king is giving a talk at the Grand Palace at 10:30 and rushed over to see him. Well obviously you can't just walk in and see the king but I found out you could see his car as he was leaving so I staked out a place. To bad it was in the wrong place so I didn't get to see him. Oh well it just means I have to go back to Thailand some time in the near future to finally see him. Or I have a few more days in Bangkok and crazy stuff happens to me here all the time. Like during my time waiting to see the king a woman sat down next to me. She spoke English and talked to me and we had a conversation. She was so happy I was interested in Buddhism, not paticularly surprising most Thais are. Then though as we were walking to get a better seat to see the King she told me today was also her daughter's birthday who was the same age and that I must have been her daughter in a past life and thus I have come to her when she needed me. Crazy huh? Well anyway the fireworks were great and it was a splendid day. Yesterday I finished seeing everything I wanted to see in Bangkok like the National Gallery and I saw the Buddha movie which was really disappointing and there were no nuns in the entire movie. WTF! They didn't show the beginning of the order even though Maha Pajapati was displayed throughout. I couldn't beleive it, I really couldn't. Anyway I'm running out of time. I'll be off to the beach so next time I post I will proably be back in India!

The Dhammaraja and I

First really big event I've attended of the King's Birthday was tonight which was a lot of fun. There were all these stands set up along the main street and you got this little booklet and you went from stand to stand and they stamped your booklet and gave you a picture of the king. I got nine pictures total! How cool is that? I know it's really cool. Anyway I got all nine and I bought a CD of the King's favorite Jazz music preformed by Thai people and I actually go it signed by one of the artists. I'm going to go searching for a schedule to figure out what exactly is going on these next couple of days. Friends of mine are coming back in to Bangkok tommorow for the celebrations and it is all and all going to a blast. I mean last night was so much fun! It was great running from place to place with these Thai people to get pictures of him. I can't really explain what was so fun about it but the energy. It's going to be a great couple of days, I can tell you that. I went for a little bit of Christmas shopping yesterday. I didnt come back with too much but it was a lot of fun. I'm waiting to hear back from my mom on a couple of things and then I'm going to hopefully finish up shopping. It should be really amazing. I love Bangkok shopping malls. Anyway things are superb here, really. I did hurt my elbow really bad falling of a moving bus but it is healing, I think and it's not too serious. Tonight I think I'm going to go out with a friend to a Mexican Resturant in town that I hear is good. It will be a adventure either way. It's always a adventure in Bangkok.

There and Back Again

Hey everyone. Well it's been very crazy couple of days. Last weekend was Loi Krathong which is where they pay respects to the river and they but these boats made out of banana leaves in with little candles. That day I went out with Bea, a friend who I met in Bodh Gaya and now is here in Bangkok, yeah it's a small world, to a concert at cool little section of one of the shopping malls. The guy was half American and half Thai and a DJ and a acuoustic musician. He started by playing the guitar and sang songs from Death Cab for Cutie and tons of other American band which was really surreal. There is are so many American things here. Not only are 7/11 at every cornor but all sorts of American chains. The new Celine Dion song plays at all the bus stops and most theaters show more Hollywood movies then Thai. It's kind of sad. However it is Bangkok and once you get out of the city it is a little better. Well the guy at the concert was good and we got a signed CD and now I have some funky Thai music. His Cd is a mix of his two passions which is every bit as wonderously strange as it sounds. Anyway afterwards we got some cheese and crackers and we were just going to have picnic when we stumbled upon a beauty pagent. The ushered us in because we were Western and we were treated to feed food and drinks while we watched the most bizarre beauty pagent I have ever seen. It was intresting though. After that it was getting late so we went to a interesting resturaunt in our area and then to bed. I woke up nice and early to go back to Ven. Dhammanada's monestary which was very nice. I got to have some good discussions with her and with the other bikkhunis, samerinis, and maechi. I only spent one day though because I stopped there enroute to Petchaburi this province to the south of Bangkok known for it's temples. I arrived there late and met a German girl who was also looking for a room. So we spent a couple days there and I did see a lot of people there but translators were hard to come by and I only met 2 monks who spoke English. If I do decide to come back and do research in Thailand I am most certainly learning Thai. I feel so awkward not knowing the language. Anyway it was fun, I met some other travellers and it was a nice little vacation from the hustle and bustle of Bangkok. It was not a good couple of days for my project but I'm ahead of schedule anyway. So it's one of the people I'm travelling with's birthday today so I think I will go out and celebrate with him and then tommorow I will get back into the project. Actually I'm really excited for Sunday because I'm going to go on alms rounds with the nuns at Ven. Dhammanada's monestary which should be a very intresting experience. Intrestingly enough even though I spent the last months surrounded by monastics I haven't actually seen any go on alms round so that should be very interesting. Well that's it, sorry I had to be a little short and sweet, I'm trying to finish up my paper by Tuesday so I can spend the King's Birthday without worrying so I want to get a little typing in today.