Susan’s Blog

I’m off to India!

I'll be gone the entire month of November, when I go on a “spiritual tour of Southern India” with my sister, Melanie. While I am gone, there will be no classes offered, either in person at the yoga studio or on Zoom.

India is the birthplace of yoga, and I have always wanted to go there. I have provided thumbdrives of videos of my yoga classes, to those of you who want them in order to continue practicing while I'm in India. I can also e-mail those videos to those of you who would prefer to have the classes wherever you go.

If you’d like to keep up on where I'm going and what I'm seeing, please follow along on the tour with me in this blog. I will be posting images and videos, and writing a travel diary, while I'm in India. Stay tuned...

Greetings from Chennai, Tamil Nadu

After 23 hours of flying, I landed in the capital of Southern India - Chennai, formerly called Madras by the British. It's on the Bay of Bengal, and it's home to 12 million people. Who knew? Here are some of the amazing things I saw on my first full day:

Sacred cows (literally) all over the place

Ancient bronze and stone statues of gods & goddesses in yoga poses

Diwali, India’s “Festival of Lights”

Today is the start of a major Indian holiday called Diwali (or Deepavali), which means Festival of Lights.

Diwali is a spiritual holiday which refers to moving out of darkness into the light. It could mean emerging from ignorance into awareness, from negativity into positivity, or from delusion into reality.

Diwali is celebrated with firecrackers, candles and fireworks (see video below). In the north, the partying lasts for 10 days and includes singing and dancing. Here in the south, it lasts for just a few days and consists of worship in temples.

Yoga Day in Mamallapuram

Today was yoga day! I was able to enjoy the pleasure of being a student, rather than the teacher, in today's yoga class at Mamallapuram. Hopefully, I will come back here some day to go deeper into my studies with yoga master Magesh Kuppuswamy, visible in the photo.

We visited several UNESCO "world heritage" sites today. One of them was a 7th century bas-relief sculpture called "Arjuna's penance." It is the largest in all of India. Here's a portion thst shows several (headless) yogis, one of whom has a yoga strap around his legs:

Tomorrow, we visit a yoga ashram and a French colony!

Greetings from Pondicherry!

This was a former French colony. We are staying in a boutique hotel which used to be an official's private residence. Here's our room:

Monsoon rains, mud, crowds, and a couple of noteworthy sights: You know you're in the tropics when you see snails as big as your pen!

The bicycle rickshaw is not my favorite form of transportation - but it's a way for some folks to earn a living and it fits these crowded streets. Our entire 18-member tour group rode around in them. And here's a photo of my sister and myself in ours.

That's all for now. Tomorrow: Temples. Temples. And more temples.

Greetings from Thanjavur

Greetings from Thanjavur, the "rice bowl" of Tamil Nadu state. This place is a lush, inland rural area filled with rice paddies, cashew-nut orchards, banana trees and sugar cane. The bird-watching from the bus was incredible!

We had an immersive experience early in the day, getting caught in monsoon rains while visiting the awesome Nataraja temple complex in Chidambaram. Here's a photo of me and a sacred cow inside the temple:

We ate a veggie lunch at a local restaurant, on a big plate called a thali that is lined with a banana leaf:

Our last stop was a maharaja's palace that is now an art museum and a rare manuscript library. Here's a statue depicting the kundalini rising up Lord Brahma's spine; note the yoga strap around his lower back:

Tomorrow, the biggest temple in India!!

Pilgrims and Puja at the Kaveri River

Today we saw two big temple complexes (like, 23 towers on 150 acres of land) built between the 9th & 11th centuries, and a place called a ghat on the Kaveri River, the longest in South India.

Websters defines a ghat as follows: a broad flight of steps that is situated on an Indian riverbank and that provides access to the water especially for bathing.

Here, pilgrims are ritually cleansing themselves before entering the temple and/or performing pujas, or ritual ceremonies, with priests in remembrance of dearly departed loved ones. Here's what we saw:

Here's a video of what it was like walking to the temple complex in India:

And we lived to tell about it!

Did You Know . . .?

South India has the perfect climate for growing cashew nuts, and the country of almost 2 billion people is self-sufficient in producing its own cashews for consumption. India also processes cashews for East Africa, which grows them as well. All of the processing of cashews in India is done by hand. Maybe that explains why they're so darned expensive! Here are some photos of how it is done:

Raw cashew nuts in the shell,
straight from the tree.

Dry-roasting the cashews to make the shells brittle
enough to remove. The fuel for the fire underneath the
cauldron is the discarded shells from the nuts.

Pouring the blackened, burning hot, roasted cashews onto the ground.

cooling the cashews — Covering the cashews with ash to make them cool off a bit,
so that the shells could be smashed off with a brick.

the finished product — The finished product. We bought a pound
of freshly roasted cashews for $5.

Bharatanatyam - Classical Dance of South India

There are several different classical dance styles in India. They are all centuries old. The one from the part of South India where we are (in the city of Madurai) is called bharatanatyam.

We visited a school where bharatanatyam is taught to girls as young as five years old. They learn the steps gradually: first the feet, then the arms, then the hands, then the head & neck, then the eyes. It takes several years to learn, as you can imagine.

Here's a video snippet of the dance teacher invoking the Lord of the Dance, Nataraja, Lord Shiva:

Spices, Monkeys & a Wild Tuk-tuk Ride

We are in the state of Kerala -the spice capital of India - located on the southwest coast. We toured an organic spice co-op plantation and will get to watch another form of classical dance tonight.

Here are some images of the trip:

Video of Mr. Toad's wild ride in an auto-rickshaw in Madurai

Spices of Kerala

Resident monkeys at our resort in the Cardamom Hills (video)

Kuchipudi

There are 8 forms of classical dance in India. I've already showed you the bharatanatyam style from the state of Tamil Nadu. Here are a few video snippets of another form, kuchipudi, from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.

Tea Harvesting

Here's a video of tea leaves being harvested in the Malabar hills of the state of Kerala.

In the past, the women (overseen by a man) used to pick the tea leaves by hand. Now, they cut the leaves with clippers that have a tray attached underneath. When the tray gets full, it is dumped into the large sacks carried on their backs.

When each sack is full, the overseer weighs it. The women are paid by the weight of what they harvest.

Heres a photo of a tea bush:

The Backwaters of Kerala

Here's a short video taken from a houseboat that we
traveled on through the backwaters of Kerala:

Here's a houseboat identical to the one we traveled on.

Here's a 180-degree view of the backwaters.

A hilarious video of a drawbridge on the backwaters.

Sights of Kochin

We are staying in an old private residence in the former European Quarter of the port city of Kochin. Here's our gorgeous room:

We walked to the nearby waterfront, where Chinese fishermen used these kinds of nets to catch fish from the Arabian Sea:

They catch Tiger Prawns in this waterway. Here's an unbelievable photo:

We got a real rainstorm last night, and the local Catholic/Protestant/Anglican church got flooded. Here's how they drained the water out:

They love Christianity here in Kochin, which has been under European influence since 1498, when Vasco de Gama sailed into the port and found spices galore (from the Cardamom hills). There are churches and parochial schools everywhere. But, the Hindu influence prevails. Here's St. Francis of Assisi with garlands, in the basilica:

Tomorrow, another form of dance . . .

Kathakali Dance from Kerala State

The third form of classical Indian dance we got to see is from Kerala state and is called Kathakali. It's done entirely by men, including women's roles, like Kabuki in Japan. It is a very slow and stylized form of dance-drama, based on classical Sanskrit texts, and no wonder -- the weight of the costume and headdress alone for the male role is over 60 lbs! Here's a video snippet of it:

Leaving India!

We are leaving South India and flying to Singapore for a day and a night. Stay tuned, for those of you who read and/or saw Crazy Rich Asians.

Kochin restaurant — Restaurant decor in Kochin. An ascetic
cushion in a very posh place to eat.

Just a little poolside entertainment provided by our hotel.
Sounds like something we'd listen to in yoga class (video).

Melanie by the pool — Waiting to go to the airport. My sister
Melanie cooling off in the hotel pool.

high tea at poolside — High tea by the poolside at our hotel. Cauliflower *pakoras*
(fritters) and *elaadai*--banana leaf *idli* (fermented rice flour)
stuffed with smashed dates, *jaggery* (palm sugar) and coconut.

Kochin Airport — Inside Kochin International Airport, from which
workers from Kerala fly to and from the Middle East.

Scenes of Singapore

Here we are in a first-world country which seems to be the Switzerland of Asia. Everything here is about finance & money. Two cups of coffee in our hotel lobby this morning cost us $15! In India, it would've been $.83 apiece!

Some photos showing how different Singapore is from India:

Muslim Cemetery — A Muslim cemetery. Lots of Malaysians live or work in Singapore, which sits
at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, so there are lots of Muslims here.

Photo museum — Some sort of photography museum or college?

Eating at a Chinese fast food restaurant where you choose your
ingredients from a selection of over 100 items; they either stir-fry
it for you or cook it in broth to make it into a ramen.

Raffles bar — Today, we visited the famous Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel, where the
Singapore Sling was invented in 1915. Here's my sister with her
$33 Planter's Punch and me with my $39 Singapore Sling.

Next stop: Auburn, CA . . .

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