Sangla 3

I keep making these posts short because I don't have a long attention span. So here it is, after I've had my big dinner, and I'm posting again. I must have confused 2 different restaurants in my head, because the place I went to didn't have Israeli food or anything like that. The menu was typical of this region -- Chinese and Indian -- but it did have drinks, so I decided to stick around and have something a little nicer than normal plus a drink. I had an incredibly good vegetarian spring roll, chicken curry, and I ordered rum but it was some sort of whiskey. All in all it was pretty good. I had another rum (whiskey) after the meal, with some instant coffee.

This is the first time since I've left Tucson that I had an alcoholic drink, because generally they aren't too inspiring with the drinking here. There are a few Indian beers which I have already tried in the US, plus this weird confusion of hard liquors. I was assuming that they might have a rice wine or something, but the drink menu was strictly Indian. They did have a choice of 'beer' or 'strong beer', and I might have tried one of those, I guess. I hear that there is a local brew, very low in alcohol, called 'chang' that might be fun to try, but I just haven't had a good opportunity. Jessie doesn't drink alcohol, so when we were traveling together everywhere I had no real motivation to try beers or other drinks, and now that I'm traveling alone, I still don't really feel it's a good idea. Today was an exception because of the holiday, and it was quite nice.

I should explain how Jessie and I have parted ways for now. We talked about it the first time we were here in Sangla, because I felt like there was a lot for me to see and learn here, and his project angle turned out to be a disappointment. He wanted to come here in order to photograph some leftover Tibetan Buddhist artifacts, such as stupas, but he found that all of the ones he had seen previously (and had not had the chance to photograph) were gone by now. So he was pretty much in the mood to leave. We stayed for 3 days all together, and then went back to Chandigarh. I would have stayed then, but I wanted to find something I could use to take water samples, and there was nothing to be gotten here.

When we got back to Chandigarh, things changed quite a lot, because Jessie's aunt from the US and his mother showed up. They were trying to get things ready for the wedding. I think I may not have mentioned this yet -- Jessie's sister decided to get married in India, right before the time when we were ready to leave. Therefore a bunch of extended family were coming to stay at the house where Jessie and I had been planning to make our headquarters. He assured me that there would still be room for us there, but it was obvious once the vanguard arrived that I was resented. I spent a rather uncomfortable 4-5 days there, doing research, looking for my water bottles, and trying to help out a little bit around the house, and then Jessie told me that he wanted to go back to the village (that would be the village where he grew up, near but outside Chandigarh) with his mother and do some stuff there.