Finally Made It !!

Hi Guys !! Here I am, at the Yoga camp in Southern India. Yes, I finally made it!! The trip here was really a long one, with four different planes, each one running just a little later than the one before, but the really exciting part was the taxi ride from the airport to the yoga camp. Everything you may hear about Indian drivers disregarding every law (including the laws of gravity) is true. You really do need nerves of steel and unbelievably good karma just to survive a ride in the back seat, let alone attempting to drive here (which I wouldn't dream of). Also, I discovered that Scotland isn't the only place where it is customary for men to wear skirts. The guys here have little sheets wrapped around their hips, and that's all they wear. Considering the heat, you can understand them.
 
Other than the hair-raising experience of the taxi, and accepting that things may (or may not) happen several hours behind schedule, I don't know if you can really say that I'm having the "India experience", considering that I've holed up here at the yoga camp, and I have no plans of going anywhere else for the next six weeks or so. Interesting that I feel perfectly at home here from the minute I arrived. We get up (well, some of them do...) at 5:30 AM, do some chanting and meditation, then some yoga, and have breakfast only at 10 AM. I keep thinking of my son Eyal during meal times, because we sit on mats on the floor, eating with our hands off of plates that are also on the floor (a couple of people brought their own spoons from home, but the standard silverware is fingers). Eyal would fit right in. After breakfast, we get little odd jobs to do to help around the ashram (as it's called), at 2 PM we have a lecture, at 4 - more yoga, at 6 another meal (yogic lifestyle only allows for 2 meals per day), and then another lecture or music/dance performance in the evening.
 
The morning yoga sessions are done by the lake, which is actually a water reservoir created by the Neyyar Dam, here at the southern tip of India. Across from the lake is the Lion's Safari Reserve, and yes, those are real lions. At first I thought that those weird sounds were some pump or some other kind of machine behind the trees, but no - that's what a lion's roar sounds like. They like to express themselves most in the early morning and evening, so you can hear them when you're lying in your bed at night. How comforting that there is a lake between us. On the other hand, we will be going for a jungle trip this Tuesday, so we'll be seeing the lions up close and personal then. In general, the climate here is tropical, so all day long we hear all the cheeps and croaks and caws and cries that accompany any TV jungle movie, only we can see the birds that are making the noise - eye to eye. And sometimes we share our food with them, or at least you can tell that they would really appreciate it if we would... That's all I have for now.