Right.So anyway…
As this was all of our firstChristmas away from home, we were feeling a little homesick and were determined to retain some of our Christmas Traditions during the holiday season. A week before Christmas we ventured to Mangalore to scope out supply options. After scouring the city we returned home (the ashram) triumphant with some exceptionally tacky decorations and the ingredients to make gingerbread cookies (well, with some creative Indian substitutions). To supplement our purchased decorations we also convinced some of the other guests to make paper snowflakes with us to decorateour ‘Christmas Tree’. Well actually we were told it was a ficus, but if we have learned anything from travelling in india, it has been flexibility and adaptability (and not just in the yoga sense). Decorations in our room included a tacky wreath that resembled a pipecleaner and our quasi-clean hiking socks hung with care at the ends of our beds as stockings.We even made tags for the stockings with each of our names on them and some festive drawings. Oh, and we played Christmas songs non-stop. Please take the following moment to appreciate how cute we are….
…Done? Good.
Christmas eve also coincided with one of the boys at the Ashram’s Birthday. Fun fact about India: birthday cake here is not for eating. Its purpose is for shoving in the face, ears, nostrils etc, of the poor individual who’s birthday it happens to be and anyone who is standing nearby. This tradition is accompanied by a full thronged silly-string attack and shaken pop bottle spraying.It was take no prisoners; none of us escaped a smattering of icing as the evening escalated into a full on food fight. Gaura, whose birthday it was, took it all in good stride, however it seems like in India the term‘birthday’ is a synonym for ‘day of abuse from your friends’.
We began Christmas day like any other year… opening our stockings! Santa brought each of us some chocolate, cashews, and an orange. Although the swell was really small we still went out surfing… with our Santa hats on! That day we forfeited our daily nap to make ginger bread cookies. We, along with some of the other guests pining for Christmas (and one Jewish girl celebrating for the first time), made and decorated over 50 cookies, including gingerbread surfers. The boys at the Ashram and their friends loved the cookies, so much so that all the cookies were gone by the end of the night. After our Christmas dinner and cookie dessert we added to our list of unusual Christmas activities by attending a water buffalo race. Yes, you read right, water buffalo race. It’s a pretty simple concept actually, fill a drag track full of mud and water, harness together two buffalo, attach a rope for the driver to hold on to and let them run! The driver doesn’t so much drive them as run as fast as he can while being dragged by the buffalo. Needless to say it was quite the spectacle and made for an exciting end to our Christmas day.
While recovering from Christmas celebrations, ie hanging out on the dock one afternoon, we befriended two of the local ninth grade girls who were neighbours of the ashram. They invited us to the highschool dance recital that they had been practising for. And so, with a few of the Ashram boys, we attended what turned out to be a pretty big event with half a days worth of performances that ranged from traditional Karnataka dances to a fedora clad Michael Jackson tribute.We sat with our neighbours in a sea of 9th grade girls who were whooping, cheering, clapping and screaming for their classmates on stage. It was a fantastic, albeit sweaty, afternoon of facepaint, brilliant costumes, shimmying, Justin Beiber and dancing with swords… ya just don’t see sword brandishing incorporated into our own highschool dance performances back home.
By now, all of the guests we had spent Christmas with had moved on, many of them leaving to party on the beaches of Goa for New Years. The real party, however, was back at the Ashram. It was a terrific morning of surfing on the 31st,the swell was once again cooperating, presenting us with some fun, clean breaking end-of-the-year waves. After our daily nap, we were recruited to the kitchen where the boys were preparing a New Year’s feast for everyone including a few of the local boys who usually hang out at the Ashram. After hours of chopping, grating and deep frying, we all indulged in a huge spread of dishes from Gobi Manchuria to pasta to chapattis… needless to say we were stuffed. Now the party moved down to the dock where the real party began with a bonfire and dance party. While the fire was fueled by petrol and coconut fronds, the boys were fueled by soda, 5 tubs of icecream and some bumpin Indian dance music we were blaring out across the river with the help of a few extension cords. We rang in 2012 as loudly as possible and enjoyed the fireworks across the water, complements of someone else’s new year’s celebration.
New Year’s day itself, however, was bitter-sweet for us. We were moving on from the ashram that has been our home in India and we had to say farewell to the boys who have been our family this past month. We hate to leave but we hope to meet again someday and are trying to convince them to sport some 5mm wetsuits and come for a visit and a cold water surf in Tofino!
