How is Colin doing on out big adventure you may be wondering, Well he can be a bit grumpy sometimes which we can understand being 10 and all, and not having all of his familiar surroundings around him. but he has really started to have some fun! Colin is surviving on Mcdonald, PBJ, Dominoes pizza and his ultimate favorite Dal Mahkani, Colin is also hooked on the Adventures of Tin Tin book series. I do have to update some of the outdated opinions in the stories but that is ok and his Nintendo DS......worth every penny we spent!!! He is also taking Tibetan Language classes from Lunrick who teaches the little monks . Colin knows the alphabet, the suffixes and even some potty words in Tibetan............ of course.
We are in Dehradun now and since we mixed up some dates we will be here about 9 days. We are right across the street from the Sakya Center and we go do Kora in the mornings when we can.
( this means to circle around a holy building which contains sacred statues of the Buddha or other holy relics while reciting mantras/prayers , doing this creates lots of merit : ) we also took a ride up the mountain to Mussourie the views of the Himalayas were incredible. Yesterday we went to the TIbetan settlement called Clerment town and were amazed to find two big monasteries one with a giant Stupa
( a building that represents Buddha's mind and usually contains holy relics and other important holy items) . we were allowed to go into the Stupa and were lucky enough to catch the monks doing a tradional Buddhist dance called the Phurba dance very cool!!!
The next monastery had a giant Buddha it was amazing! and there were at least 100 prayer wheels probebly more! In two days we will be joining many Lamas and Monks for the last day of a long life celebration called a Tenshug for a very high Lama, Luding Khenchen Rinpoche ( I need to check his name to make sure I wrote it properly I don't think I did) In honor of his birthday. After this wonderful opportunity we will head back to Delhi and leave for Nepal on Oct 26th.
