Gaia

woke up after a very very long nights sleep. my cold is really needing a lot of sleep. i felt soooo much better today. and that was good because we had a very full day.

i got up and did my new prescribed yoga practice which included asana (good for my hip) and breathing along with some mudra chanting. it took a little more than one hour and it was sooooo wonderful. again. it is strange for me to be doing something different from my usual ashtanga practice, but ashtanga isn't working with my body right now and i need something a little different for a while (well at least til we get back to mysore). we went to breakfast, i read the morning paper and j read about our next location.

from there we found a rickshaw. it's so weird here .we are staying a "nice" hotel and the rickshaw drivers stay outside the hotel and want to stay with us all day and take us all over and if they take us to certain places they get coupons for 50rs (a little over a dollar) for gas, which costs 50rs a liter (more than in the US). anyway, we found this driver, he took us to the train station, we were going to get a train to pondicherry for tomorrow night, but everyone told us to take the bus, which neither of us want to do, but will b/c it seems to be the way to get to pondicherry from here. we did get reserved train seats for our journey a week from now which is good and we don't have to worry about it anymore. from the railway station we went to the marina beach, which is the longest city beach in the world. it really did go on forever. from there we went to the theosophical society. it was soooooo great. it has wonderful streets and gardens and one of the oldest banyan trees in the world. it also has an extensive library of very old and very rare religous texts. it was great.

we then went to the yoga center and had a pranayam philosophy class. it was amazing..... i am getting a one on one pranayama, asana, meditation class tomorrow to put it to a little use.

this is only a taste, but we are really enjoying the krishnamacharya yoga mandiram. india is wonderful and we are really exhausted after long day of wandering and learning. it's time for some sweets....