Last week while leaving the studio, our instructor, Evan, told us that YogaWorks plans to cut the Tuesday and Thursday Mysore session. Something about wanting 30 people in the room. At 6am? Evan has between 10-20 people daily, and most of us are studio members. What YogaWorks class would fill a room to 30 at 6am every day? Or even twice a week? Certainly nothing they currently offer.

Nevermind that there are two other empty practice rooms at that hour.

We were miffed. We need our practice, we need Evan, and we need them daily. There’s a possibility that YogaWorks will start to charge for Tuesday and Thursday, above the membership fees. The price of a class? $20? (I’m really not sure, and no one has clarified.) You want $40 more from each of us every week? That’s $2,080 more per person a year, which is almost twice what most of us pay for our current memberships. How strange. If anything, the room has gotten more crowded in the last year.

To lose two days a week (three if there’s a moon day), is to lose your practice, as well as two days of your membership, as we don’t take other classes at YogaWorks. This change will mean most of us will leave the studio for somewhere we can practice daily. Why is YogaWorks so willing to see us go?

We wrote letters. We sent them to the manager at our Westside studio, the regional manager, and the teacher manager. Within hours of the announcement, messages poured in from our group of ashtangis to the management. Not only are they are inspiring, they define what being a community is all about. Over the next few days, I will post them here, and on the yoga blog.

The first, from Rey:

Dear Jackie,

I’m one of the morning Mysore students that attends Evan’s classes on average 5x/wk. I’m currently out of town for work, but as you can see from my attendance when I am in town, I attend Evan’s and only Evan’s classes, like many of his students.

I recently heard from some of the other students that you will be cutting our Tuesday and Thursday classes. Respectfully, I am writing to ask that you reconsider. The whole point of Mysore practice is that it is almost daily—at the very least 4x/wk, and hopefully 6. To make it only 3x/wk basically means NOT having an ashtanga practice.

The grapevine says that it’s a measure to cut costs, but I’m not sure what savings you gain. When I first started attending Evan’s classes, there was no staff in the studio. Evan and his trusted regular students opened up. Evan took care of the towels. Whoever got in the room first would deal with the lights, the altar, and telling new students to sign up at the desk and observe the other students until Evan arrived to instruct and adjust them. Since that time it has felt like YogaWorks has been intent on destroying our community—taking away Guruji’s picture, then the altar altogether, then even a single candle; repeatedly locking us out in the morning; and now this.

It seems like such an odd move to make against such a devoted group of students. As long as Evan teaches daily, our unlimited monthly memberships will continue. And, to be frank, we kind of liked it more when you weren’t paying a staff member (who didn’t want to get up at 5 AM) to be there. We never got locked out back then. If you let him go back to running the place like a typical ashtanga shala (just from 6 – 8:30 AM), altar, student helpers, and all, we could probably get some of our friends who practice at The Shala or YogaSutra or Ashtanga Yoga Upper Westside to opt for YogaWorks in the AM. Especially with a little push from YogaWorks advertising their traditional morning ashtanga classes.

I love Evan; right now, I love him enough to go well out of my way to study with him (I live in Jackson Heights, Queens and work in the East Village—the UWS is nowhere near my day-to-day life). But ultimately I am committed to the practice. Without the ability to practice and grow daily, it doesn’t make sense for me to stay with YogaWorks. It would make more sense for me to study with Guy Donahaye or Eddie Stern, both of whom are closer to a neighborhood I go to daily, or to help Evan find a space that will let him teach with less encumbrances.

On behalf of us all, please reconsider your decision and work something out. We actually are the community YogaWorks appears to want to promote. We practice regularly and are living examples of the benefits of yoga; we see each other almost every morning; we know each other’s names; we Facebook each other; we have brunch; encourage vegetarianism and veganism; we know who is having trouble in what pose, what each other’s injuries are, when people are getting married, or having plays performed, or are teaching yoga classes themselves, or visiting their daughters, sons, or parents. Right now YogaWorks is an integral part of our morning, almost every morning. In the long run, I don’t think any of us want to change that, but we are all confused and even angry that you do.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. I’m back in town from Kentucky late Monday night, and you can bet I will be at Mysore early Tuesday morning—I’ve missed Evan and my fellow ashtangis. Despite being welcomed by the Yoga East ashtanga community here in Louisville, I’ve been anxious to come home. I only hope my home will still be there.

Respectfully submitted,

Rey P.

Lovely, right? I posted the whole story on the yoga blog.

Thank you for all the birthday love and wishes yesterday, especially those who braved my germs and came by. I had a wonderful day, and am feeling much better, finally. One thing I can say for facebook, it turns once-birthday-well-wishing-delinquents into merry makers. I see the magic every day and it brings me cheer.

I noticed, on walking to the store for some supplies yesterday, that the grin was still on. Not from the snow, and certainly not from the ten-foot puddles on every street corner. It was the birthday grin. Yes, I might be sick as a dog but still I love my birthday. And yours. It’s, for me, fundamentally a love of life, and age, and wisdom.

Happy birthday cousin Tony. And, of course, LeBron.

And do not forget: I will kick your ass at yoga. Namaste.

(If anyone knows where one might purchase this card, let me know and I’ll happily link there. I’d love a few myself.)

Yesterday morning, in Utthita Hasta Padangushthasana—perhaps my worst pose, because I suck in both standing balance and hamstring flexibility—the teach came over to lift my leg and support me, as he almost always does. When I lifted my leg, my standing leg wobbled. Ordinarily I’d stop and rebalance, but because I knew he was there, I kept lifting. I knew I’d recover balance because he was there.

“Oh. This is what it’s like,” I thought, “to be supported. To keep going even though you’re wobbly. To have the confidence you won’t fall flat, or have to be perfect before going up.”

One might argue, as I would because I’m like that, that I shouldn’t go up if I don’t have balance yet, or how will I find it on my own if he always helps? To that I reply: the body remembers and learns, and does so more gracefully without struggle.

It was a big moment, because it’s such an issue and theme in my life. The one I’ve been promising myself to write about, starting with that day back in Kazakhstan in 2004. I feel lucky to have had it yesterday, that little epiphany. The daily discipline of going there early and doing it every damn day, and coming to trust the teacher day after day, is part of what made it happen.

Last week a friend was talking about climbing a fence and stealing fruit off of trees when he was small. “We didn’t do it because we needed it. We just wanted to do it. It was fun. Nothing ever happened to us even if we got caught. You know, the poor kids didn’t do it though. They never did.”

His point was that they didn’t do it because they needed it, they did it because it was fun. But I heard something else, and replied, “Yeah, because if the poor kids were caught, that’d be the end.”

“Yeah, it’s true. We were just given over to our parents, but for them it’s another story.”

All this is what I mean by the psychology of having and not having, and the risk taking you can do when you feel the world is a safe place.

Yesterday, walking to the train after yoga, a guy asked me if I knew where a deli was. I raised an eyebrow, as there’s one on every block. He said, “I know we just passed one, but they don’t have phone cards. I need a phone card.” Even in the Skype age, I happen to know a lot about phone cards.

“Hmm.” I said, as we were on a stretch without delis. “Sixth Avenue will have some. If not, I know they’re sold in the train station.”

“The train station?” he laughed. “Where are you from?” he asked, with, I finally pinpointed, an Arabic accent.

I ignored his question and said, “The subway station. In the kiosk.”

“How do you know all this. Do you work in the subway?” he asked.

“Ah, no.” I replied.

“Where do you work? I am from Egypt. I work in hotels and design.”

“Hmmm.” I said. “Salaam Alaikum.”

“Wa Alaikum Salaam,” he laughed, “How do you know this?”

I shrugged.

“My people have something called Ramadan right now.” he explained.

“Already? So early this year!” I replied.

“How do you know these things? Where are you from that you know this?”

“I travel a lot.”

“Have you been to Egypt? What else do you know? You must know habiba, too”

I claimed I did not know habiba (babe, beloved, sweetheart, etc), hoping he wouldn’t translate. I explained I had been to Egypt, but had spent more time in non-Arabic speaking Muslim countries, like Iran, Central Asia, Pakistan.

“You’ve been to Pakistan? Did you dress like that?!”

“No,” I smiled. “It was too cold.”

I was wearing a not-that-revealing yoga tank and yoga pants, as I’d just been to yoga. It was 80º in New York. There were plenty wearing far less than I was, weirdo. This isn’t Cairo.

“I’ve just arrived in NY. I got here last week. Where have you been? You look like you have been at the beach.”

We were almost to the train station at this point. “I was at yoga,” I explained.

“At work?”

“At yoga.”

“Oh, yoga!” He threw his head back and laughed. “I thought you said work. Yoga! You New Yorkers have such strange customs!”

That made me smile. Yes, I suppose that we do. We passed a kiosk and I pointed it out to him as a place to get his phone card. He looked at it, then at me, then back at the kiosk. “Would you wait for me while I buy it?” he asked.

“No.”

“Would you have a tea with me? My people are very generous and we have this custom…”

“Yes, I know,” I replied, “and I’m sorry to refuse your kindness, but it’s not possible.”

“Can I have some way to contact you?”

“Nope. Sorry. Not possible” I smiled, as I waved and departed down the steps of the subway station. Strange customs indeed.

I’m excited about a number of things. There’s transition of sorts coming, and part of the preparation for that has been going through my stuff, which for me is mostly photos in various formats. Now that I’ve gone through 100CDs of photos and edited them down to 7DVDs, and started to go through my Sri Lanka pics, I’m ready to tackle the negs & chromes that go back to 1988. This was inspired by Ilona and Narimantas. When we reconnected on assbook, I realized I had pics I wanted to share with them from 1995. Ilona posted some of hers, so I found mine and scanned about 20 on an office copier (they look reasonable on a PC but way blown out on a Mac), and posted them to assbook and flickr. Because I’m picky about quality and because there are so many beloved photos I simply don’t have time to scan but would love to have digitalized, I did a little research.

Wow! I found scancafe and scan my photos, the latter reviewed in the NYT by David Pogue, their tech guy. While the thought of sending my negs off to Bangalore, India (scancafe) is a bit hard on the nerves, they’re actually sent via UPS to California, packed in a container with other orders, tracked and tracked again, then sent to India. For $.29 an image, it’s worth it. Taking them to a lab here would be at least $1 an image, if not $2–without correction, which scancafe claims to do for each image. That is tedious. I hope their people in Bangalore are photog lovers and well paid (for Bangalore). I’m going with scancafe because scanmyphotos, in the USA, looks like it’s more for people with old family prints they want scanned. Pogue recommends them highly and there are examples up on the site, but the quality is pretty bad. He’s a tech guy, not a photog. Some people aren’t picky and just want their snaps digitized. Scancafe looks a bit more professional, and their neg and chrome fees are much better. Wow. I started preparing them this afternoon. All the boxes in the pic above are full of negatives and slides (the bag of rice is used as a yoga sandbag, if you’re curious). I went through them a few years ago and got rid of about 40%. Now I’m not editing. I’ll send them all eventually. I think I’ll send 2574 images in the first batch (You can choose and pay for only the ones you want, after they’re scanned, 50% minimum). That will take me up to April 2000. Wow. If you were tired of my uploads before!

I’m also excited about Moo Cards. Yes, more paying people to do things I don’t have time to do myself. And because I don’t scan or print anymore, it would take me forever to do it myself anyway. Far, far more than the cost of these services. Moo Cards are business, personal, and greeting cards you design yourself online and they print. You can have up to 100 of your own images on the cards. The mini cards start at $19.99. And they are beautiful. I can’t wait. My business card is from my photog days because I haven’t had time to make new. Weird to give to my yoga students, but I’ve never had time to design and print new cards, and am too stubborn to have something generic. Found Moo in Tara Hunt’s book The Whuffie Factor, which has been great for stuff like this. (I also learned about the coworking movement here, which is an excellent option for freelancers who go stir crazy working from home. I’ll write more about it later.)

I’m getting a headache because my music is on louder than I’d like. I’m trying to drown out my retired-pharmacist neighbor who is hacking away at his violin, which he took up upon retirement and has only gotten worse over the years I’ve lived here. He’s been going for hours on end today. The screeching is unbearable. Ann inspired me with her (new!) blog to put on some dancing shoes and clean/dance to some tunes, CLONK CLONK CLONK. He stopped—for two hours. He’d been going from 2-4:30, then started again at 6 and I just couldn’t take it. Got some cleaning done at least. And dancing. What’s better than that?

Well, dancing at Nini’s birthday party would have been, but the headache might also be the cold I only partially sweated off this morning in class. I’m feeling okay, but would love to avoid full fledged sick if at all possible. Alas, a little blogging, a little dancing at home will have to do. xoA

I’m slowly going though the Sri Lanka pics, only about 70 more to edit until I am done with the pics from ashtangalanka and environs. It’s taking a long time because they are all quite similar and I’m not sure which to cut. I’ve never mastered my digital camera, because I quit professional photog when film was still the standard, and I’ve simply not shot that much digitally by comparison, though my SLR is five years old. The way it reads light is still strange to me, which in Sri Lanka wasn’t helped by the fact that one of the two batteries I took with me was so old as to only hold charge for about 3 minutes, before the meter went mad. I discovered this when Andrea and I went to the surf beach (as we called it, because the waves were suitable for body surfing) and there were two sweet cows on the beach. I kind of fixed the exposures, but alas.

Cows on the beach in Tangalle, Sri Lanka

I’ve also been reading a novel in the blissful quiet of my home, the most vacation-y thing I’ve done this week. I can’t recall the last time I indulged. It’s quite good, though I’d have cut a hundred pages plus, easily, and tightened up the story (which you’ll be saying upon viewing all the ocean photos in the upcoming photo essay). I’m two-thirds through the book, A Trip to the Stars, and am waiting to get through the rest to see as if ends as I’ve expected since page 37.  I just want the separated lovers to reunite and kiss, damn it.

A week from now will be the eve of my return to the bread and butter job, and the next six days are full of yoga. The last 7 days have been full of yoga as well, lest you think I was clever enough to take the week to laze about my home and stroll in the park. Other than the novel and editing, I’ve been fulfilling the requirements for my advanced training, as well as teaching, and reading about php/wordpress, to see exactly what I can do in this realm. I taught five classes, did five hours of required, supervised privates, and assisted/observed other classes for six hours. That was my week off.  I did lunch with friends three times, squeezed in chats with a few others, and reunited with lost friends Ilona and Narimantas, whom I’ve searched for since I last saw them in Kaunas in 1995 (yes, of course it was assbook). Remarkable. I managed to clean and do laundry in <3 hours today and was delighted to have the rest of the rainy day to read, edit and finally write before it all starts up again tomorrow. I think this might inspire the next post on the yoga blog: what does it take to be a yoga teacher?

My mother told me tonight that Mr. Brown, Herb to my parents, died on Thursday, which was 10 years to the day that my paternal grandmother/namesake died. Mr. Brown lived across the street from us when I was a child. He was incredibly sweet and funny. When I went knocking with my girl scout cookie sales sheet each year, he’d tell me with twinkling eyes what a good girl scout he was in the day—sold more cookies than I would imagine. He’d also mow his lawn in the dark (when it was cooler) and sometimes in circles, walking around in the street to get the edges. The Brown’s daughter, about ten years older than me, was the town’s star softball player, which seemed very tough and glamorous to my eight-year-old self. Mr Brown often practiced his golf in the front yard for hours, and hollered jokes over while I mowed the lawn. “What??” Ah, memories. You were a great neighbor and you made us laugh, Mr. Brown. May you rest peacefully.

fullmoon at ashtangalanka

As I mentioned in the last post, the characters and vibe at AshtangaLanka had me thinking about the culture around ashtanga, with which I don’t have much experience. In my research for my yoga blog, I came across more ashtanga blogs than any other. Some were very theoretical, like the insideowl, who has an interesting post on ashtanga and imperialism (mentioned to Amanda in the comments of the last post). She referred me to an aussie academic who’s done anthro research on ashtanga as a daily practice, as well as others’ work on yoga. My foray into exploring the world through anthropological eyes put me in a place of too much separation: me observing them. Me experiencing them (and vice verse), and the argument that me/them was too a false a dichotomy to work from, was unacceptable in academia at the time. After years on the road,  it felt fake. In the end, though I’m great with theory, it put me way up in my head and way cut off from the world around me—even the world in me, as my own senses freeze up when my analytical mind takes over. So I opted for a different way. Nevertheless, I do love to flirt with these things from time to time.

Someone asked me about a posting from years back. 2006. I reread it last week and realized that when I have more time to myself, to rest and relax and just be, as I did then, I’m much softer. My writing was much softer. I imagine my teaching was much softer, my being was much softer. I miss that. In Sri Lanka I realized that I feel good, but not connected to my life. Something needs to shift.

Sri Lanka. There are about 400 photos to edit. A few highlights to share of the travels. Oh, to write as I travel, when it’s fresh, rather than four months later! To carry a laptop? Okay, the next post will be stories. xoA.

For ashtanga fans, Sharath is on flickr (thanks elephantbeans).

Hector, Alberto, and Stephanie were all on visa runs from India, where they’d been practicing Ashtanga in Mysore. Indian visas are good for six months, after which many yogis head to Colombo to apply for a new one. It takes a week, so some go to the south coast to continue their practice at AshtangaLanka.

Together with Fred, Jacob, and Cathy (the teacher), they’d talk on and on about the Ashtanga scene, Mysore, the Jois family, etc. When it wasn’t terribly boring, it was fascinating. Long before Sri Lanka, I’d done a bit of Ashtanga in a small shala. There were never many people there, so I didn’t realize what a scene it was. They talked about the ashtangis of the 70s, who they studied with, where they stayed in Mysore, what the practice was like, what it meant to them. On and on.

While ashtanga is amazing, this chatter was more interesting to me from an anthropological standpoint—much more than the yoga gossip itself. Jois’s shala in Mysore attracts hundreds of students from around the world, who take up residence in Mysore to study Ashtanga at the crack of dawn (they said class was at 5am), then have the rest of the day to conduct themselves as they like. It’d be fascinating to go there and see what percentage of the town they impact. Or is it just the small area around the shala?

It might also be quite annoying. When I was in Pune (in India) years back, out of curiosity I went to the Osho ashram (or the “Multiversity” as it now seems to be called) for a tour. The neighborhood of the ashram had a western bake shop, many stalls selling maroon robes and Osho books, and lots of white hippies roaming about. It creeped me out. I happened to take the tour with a group of visiting american christian missionaries who asked probing questions like, “why do you insist commune members take an HIV test before they are allowed in?” Osho was known for his questionable sexual practices and group orgies were thought to be common. Osho is the guy who had the 20 or so Rolls at his commune in Oregon before he was deported for tax fraud. This has nothing to do with Ashtanga other than my wondering what Mysore is like with all the international yogis. I suppose it fascinates me because yoga usually adapts itself to the culture it enters (like Chinese food, as yoga teacher, Mona Anand, says). But astangis from the US, europe, isreal, australia, japan, etc, all come together to practice as Jois has laid it out (see the videos in the last entry). That must be interesting. My friend Jamilya, in Kyrgyzstan, is very into Ashtanga. She went to Thailand for a retreat and training recently. You get the idea.

Ashtangis aren’t hippies, for the most part (though Fred certainly is/was). Hector, who overlapped our stay for only a day before he went back to Colombo to pick up his visa for his return to India, is in real estate in Miami, and teaches vinyasa on the side. He told great stories about his kids, India, and life in general. Alberto and Nicolai were there almost our entire stay. Alberto is a serious ashtangi and a fine artist based in Paris. When he was in the mood to talk, he was quite funny and opinionated. He was known to take off on long ocean swims followed by juice and espressos at the Amanwella next door, and often did not return until after dinner started. Nicolai is a quiet German engineer who would wander off and juggle when the chatter became too much for him.

He had never done ashtanga before, but had taken many holidays at different yoga places in India, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. He avoided going into town, but did so to get skirts and other gifts to take home for his daughter. He lives a 9-6 life (the only person we met there, I think, who did) in Germany and isn’t happy with it. He deals by taking vacations. Most of us know this doesn’t work (but haven’t figured out another way). Ben & Katrina are Brits who work in antiques. Ben bought a place on the beach a decade ago, and they holiday there whenever they can. We didn’t learn much about Stephanie other than she prefers to take local transport to Alberto’s private cars, likes a bit of exploration to Alberto’s beeline to the beach, and doesn’t look forward to trying to find a job in Paris when her money runs out. (There’s a theme building here.)

The characters at AshtangaLanka inspired me. It was wonderful. In the three weeks I squeezed away from work, teaching (2nd job), and training, I met people who reminded me that there are much, much more interesting ways to live a life. Maybe not easier, but much more alive. I realized how disconnected I feel, grinding my days away to put 56% of my primary income toward rent, running uptown and downtown, almost always too exhausted to give my best to what matters most, when I’m able to give anything at all.

March is the last month of the season in southern Sri Lanka. The rains come and the ocean gets too rough in April. As we were settling in, the others were leaving. After everyone else took off, it was only me, Andrea, Fred, Mira, and Cathy. With fewer stories to hear (over and over), a strange family dynamic developing, and no curtains on our open bungalow windows, we opted for some couple time. After ten days, we moved on and explored Sri Lanka. Thank heavens we did.

Ashtanga is hard. Students come together in a school/room, called a shala, and do a series of poses. Instead of calling out the poses, the teacher individually instructs each student on the postures and the order they are done. When practiced this way, it’s called Mysore-style, after the city where guru Pattabhi Jois has his shala. Ashtanga is also practiced as a class (though not traditionally).

The series are memorized by daily practice, usually early morning, rather than reading about them or writing them down. As each student moves through the series at her/his own pace, the teacher walks around, teaches, and corrects. First the primary series is learned, and when that is mastered, the secondary, and so on.

Ashtanga was created by Krishnamacharya for his student, Pattabhi Jois (featured in youtube link above). Krishnamacharya taught the three Indians whose styles of hatha yoga have had the biggest impact internationally: P. Jois, B.K.S. Iyengar, and T.K.V. Desikachar.

Many Ashtangis, including Jois, claim that the series of postures weren’t created by Krishnamacharya but are ancient and were outlined in the Yoga Korunta, which no longer exists. The lore is that this ancient text was written on palm leaves, and after Krishmacharya learned it, the leaves were eaten by ants (source: Enlighten Up!).

It’s argued by others that the system isn’t ancient at all, and that sun salutations were adapted from Indian martial tradition in the late 1800s, when the Hindu masculinity movement was strong (Joseph S. Alter, Yoga in Modern India).

I imagine the truth in somewhere in the middle. Yoga postures have been done for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The seminal text on physical yoga is the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, written in the 15th Century, and texts on yoga as a classical philosophy existed before the Common Era. (Yoga is not simply physical postures and breathing exercises. This is only hatha yoga, a bit part of yoga, one of the six classical systems of Indian philosophy.) Edwin Bryant, a scholar of Yoga and Hinduism at Rutgers, believes that, “The origins of yoga are in primordial and mythic times.” I like this. Yet physical yoga as we know it, even the more traditional schools taught by Indian gurus who demand a certain orthodoxy, is certainly a very modern phenomenon.

Because of this orthodoxy and the intensity of the practice, Ashtanga attracts some interesting people. Ashtanga Lanka was founded by Fred Lewis, a once-hippie septuagenarian from California. He bought a guesthouse in Sri Lanka ten years ago and expanded it. About five years ago he added the shala (yoga room/school). He brings in a teacher when he’s there for the tourist season from November through March, and lives in California during the off-season.

Next: ashtangis and other guests

After almost no sleep, we got up at 6:45a and walked over a few bungalows for ashtanga yoga. This was how we greeted the next 10 days. The hot and sweaty (demanding, hard, fun) practice somehow helped me recover from the sleepless night and our first full day in SL was amazing.

Our schedule at Rocky Point was beautiful. Its absence from my life makes it almost painful to recollect now that I’m back to the grindstone: We woke around 6:45am. Yoga from 7:30am to ~9am. After yoga, a quick shower, then a snack of fresh coconuts. First we drank the juice, then cracked open the shell and ate the flesh. “It’s delightful,” said the venerated coconut. We shared this ritual with the owners and other guests at Rocky Point, before heading to Silent Beach for a swim.

By 11:30a, we returned for breakfast. After a few days of trial and error, Andrea and I settled on the “Sri Lankan omelet” and the coconut pancake with treacle (kithul palm syrup), which we shared, with toast, jam, and two lovely bowls full of papaya, pineapple, banana, and mango. After breakfast, we sat, drank tea, chatted with other guests, read, and relaxed until three or four, when we prepared for a swim and surf at Palm Beach. This joy lasted until dusk, when we returned for dinner, usually an amazing spread of veggie Sri Lankan curries with rice. The bugs became unbearable by 7:30, so we were rarely outside past 8p. And because we’d moved the beds to be under the fan (which Samantha, the Sri Lankan manager, thought very wise), we were nowhere near the reading lamps, nailed to the wall by what had been the sides of the beds. They gave us a mosquito net, which somewhat solved the bug problem, but it was too dark to read in the room on the bed, under the protection of the net, and we couldn’t take more than an hour of the mosquito swatting required while seated on a chair under a lamp. We were usually asleep well before ten.

Next up: the yoga.