Age of Aquarius

Hey guys, Sorry it has been about a month since I have last updated and have missed out on telling you about Cambodia and the last days in Thailand, although there are some pretty ridonculous facebook pics if you dare to see those. I just wanted to let you know I am alive and well in India!! We are at a community filled with WOOFing workers way down south in a town called Auroville
that is called Sadhana Forest. It is a vegan community which focuses on alternative construction, solar energy, and water resource management. The types of work we can choose to do include tree planting, indigenous plant nursery care, contour bunding, organic gardening, fence building and installing, compost and soil management. Yesterday I helped to build a dirt path from one structure to the other, it was dirty and hot, but felt good to be working and contributing to something. For showering we stand in a bucket of water that we have pumped ourselves from the well and then soap it on up. The toilets are totally Argentina finka style with just a hole in the ground you have to squat over and hope nothing flies up your butt in the process, and im gonna put up pics soon.

We have made friends with a few fellow traveler friends already, my favorites being two guys from Seattle who Liz actually saw at a party a few years ago, some guy from Belgium who is totally awesome, and another British girl named Jenni. We work in the mornings from 6am-830 am, break for breakfast for an hour then go back to work from 930-1130am then have the rest of the day to hang out or go into town, read, or talk or just climb around in this awesome tree house type structure. So there are about 70-ish volunteers in total right now at the forest but since a 5 week agriculture workshop just got over with I think a bunch of people are going to take off and in the next few days it will be a much smaller group of about 30, although we are staying for 2 weeks for sure, they offer all kinds of agricultural and environmental workshops so I was thinking of jumping in on one of those. Its a really chilled out place with a bunch of western volunteers, actually a lot of Americans, and some are WAY too hippied out for my taste, those are mostly the Europeans, but others are just really chill and cool and willing to discuss all kinds of viewpoints and world issues. Im thinking about picking up a book on Buddhism and taking a look at that since I am in such a spiritual atmosphere. Also they have a huge library. We sleep in wooden/thatched huts under mosquito nets and in the daytime it is probably around 100 degrees but at night it gets so cold I feel like I need two blankets. The community we are at doesn't allow games involving conflict, so games like chess or cards are out of the question. That is still really weird to me. Instead we have non-talent shows where people get up and just goof off and do stupid lip syncs or weird "talents" like arm pit farts. Or otherwise we do drum circles around a bonfire. There is also a very nice mud pit near by for swimming/ mud fights.

So we haven't actually experienced "real" India yet since we have just been volunteering at this hippie community, but in two weeks we are thinking about going to Goa where all the beaches are and then maybe farther north to see the Taj mahal, meet up with Liz's friend Anna and maybe meditate and do yoga for a few weeks at an ashram. There is a phone you can call and the numbers are:

00-91-413-2677682
or
00-91-413-2902655

The time difference is subtracting 10 and a half hours, so when it is 12:00pm my time it is 10:30pm your time, but on the weekdays im going to be getting up at 6am my time to work, and you can call during work/volunteer hours thats fine. Im going to try to get a new Indian cell number soon so ill give you guys that too.

Love you guys,
Juli