Many hello-goodbye’s, a culture shock, canyons and mountains

Before I start my blog, I want to thank everybody that took the time to read about Tashirat and Ixaya (my previous blog) and to you who even decided to make a donation to support these awesome projects. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! For the most up to date info you can keep following the newsletters on http://www.tashirat.com or email me of course and I’ll find out what’s the newest word about the children in Tepoztlan. Recent news I received was that my friend Antares worked hard to get an amazing (and free!) event to the Ixaya school kids: a full day of meditation practice guided by Vipassana meditaters! (The 10-day Vipassana silent retreat is where I met Antares last august :-) )

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Okay, ready?! Here we go!

>PLOP<    I’m packing all the wonderful goodbye notes of the Ixaya kids in my backpack and visiting the Tashirat kids for the last time before leaving Tepoztlan.

>PLOP<    I’m chilling in a hammock between two palm trees, overlooking Mazunte beach and the powerful Pacific Ocean.

>PLOP<    I’m in LA, South California… AAAAH Culture Shock!!!

>PLOP<    I’m driving through immense desert areas while having amazing and fun conversations with two old ( ;-) ) friends.

>PLOP<    I’m hiking the Grand Canyon, watching the Colorado River rage under my feet, coming closer and closer as I descend in this overwhelmingly beautiful wonder of nature.

>PLOP<    I’m overlooking a crystal clear blue lake, surrounded by snowy white mountain tops and green pine trees at South Lake Tahoe.

>PLOP<    I’m biking around the Berkley Campus, bumping into many young adults in robes, just having had their graduation ceremony.

>PLOP<    I’m doing a short-speed-version of the Awakening The Dreamer Symposium (http://awakenthedreamer.com/ part of the Pachamama Alliance http://www.pachamama.org/) with my super inspiring and awesome hostess Leila in Boulder (Colorado), and preparing to go “offline” for about 6 weeks.

Ok… that was the VERY condensed short version of the last, uhm.. couple of months?! I know I ‘left’ you lovely people a long time ago at the point in my story where I was still in Mexico. And as you can see, I “switched worlds” and am about to do it again, leaving for my next stop today.

First of all I’d like to see HI! to y’all from the Grand Canyon :-D :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SxqrbV4K7g (this is the only “longer” video, all the others are short)

Now, let me take you back a little more, to the end of February: the moment my son ;-) and fellow-teacher Jakob left Tashirat (he’s the German volunteer with whom I basically did everything together 24/7 during 3 months). We had an amazing goodbye party for him, combined with the celebration of Carnaval at Ixaya: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmWzIrR6dsw

To give you more of an impression what Carnaval looks like in the rest of Tepoztlan for 4 days long, check out this little video… it will tell you more than my words can ;-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md6wrd3fiS4

It was sad saying goodbye to Jakob and the children missed him (and his Ukelele!) a lot, just like I did. However, it was also very nice to have the whole house to myself and of course I had my wonderful neighbors, my friend Antares, the Tashirat kids and the guys working at Tashirat to talk to :-)
For my last 4 weeks at Ixaya (in which I was teaching English and Physical Education alone) I decided to make a special plan for the PE classes. The children never really had structured PE classes for a longer period of time and were mainly considering it as another “play hour”. I decided I wanted to give the kids more of an opportunity to actually develop their motor skills and explore new sports (since they are quite a bit behind in their skills). Therefore I thought of at least 9 different activities for each class that would challenge them, related to different sports. I put them all in a huge schedule (see pictures) in which I jotted down their achievements at the beginning of the 4 weeks (e.g. How fast do they run 2 laps around the field; how many balls caught out of 5; how many push-ups in 30 sec. etc.). During the weeks I introduced many games and exercises for practicing the different skills and we would end with playing a game of the related sport (e.g. Volleyball, Basketball, Handball, Hitball (trefbal in Dutch) or Soccer). At the end of the 4 weeks we measured all the skills again and the kids were in for a treat: when they advanced more than 4 points as a group (each kid earning a point for every skill they advanced on), we would go swimming with the whole class on my last day at Ixaya (of course we were gonna go swimming anyway, but we didn’t tell ‘m that yet ;-) ).

And guess what?! We all went swimming in the pool on the Tashirat terrain, Friday the 23rd of March :-D I’ll never forget this day: I’ve never had such a incredible, awesome, touching, fun goodbye! First I handed out self-made medals to all the kids for their achievements on both English and PE; then we went swimming and had tons of fun playing in the water; then we returned to Ixaya and had the rest of my goodbye party, including cake for everybody and many many presents and hugs and sweet words and more hugs for me…. WAUW! After that I went out for lunch for Antares and Ivan and in the evening we played Jungle Speed and ate cake with the Tashirat kids!!

Before leaving Mexico completely, I had decided to take a 2 week “vacation” in the state of Oaxaca. WOW, what a beautiful state is that! Three mountain ranges meet here, there are beautiful beaches on the pacific ocean, lots of indigenous culture, fun cities and delicious food. I spent a couple of days relaxing, dolphin-turtle-sting ray-whale watching and swimming on the hippie Mazunte beach. Then a day up in the beautiful mountains, overlooking the mountain rims from the little town San José del Pacifico. Spending a couple of days in the capital Oaxaca City, I took the opportunity to explore this fun town with a local; enjoy and dance at a small awesome 1-day festival; visit the huuuuge Tule tree (see pictures), nature park Hierve el Agua, the ancient historic town of Mitla and visit the beautiful Zapoteca ruins “Monte Alban”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90BMt7vRdH4 (for a quick look around this beautiful archeological site!)

Getting into the USA, Los Angeles specifically, after 8 months of laid-back-Mexico was quite the trip. Never thought I would experience such a culture shock! Luckily there were plenty of Mexicans around to speak Spanish with (and by that I really mean plenty: LA has the biggest Spanish speaking population after Mexico as a whole!). It was really wonderful as well to have such great hostesses during my acclimatizing process: I came to LA to visit my friend Liv and got to meet her sister Natalia too (who Liv was living with at that time). I met Liv over a year ago during our volunteer-time at the Option Institute. What also helped reintegrating was the presence of this amazing project in LA: http://streetpianos.com/la2012/
For 3 weeks there were 30 pianos on the streets of LA, spread out over the whole city. All of them were beautifully decorated by artists and they all said “Play Me, I’m Yours”. And that is exactly what it was!! Everybody could sit down and play, as much as they wanted! Through Couch Surfing I got in contact with 2 musicians from London (pianist Fabio from Italy and saxophonist Borek from Czech), who flew in to LA to play all the pianos. It was truly amazing and inspiring to see how music brings people together and we had SO much fun playing on the streets.
To see me play at Union Station, the biggest train station in LA:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBjWdyEkQ28

Playing the piano at Olvare Street (the very first street of LA), these two Chinese-American guys (both only 17 years old!) walked by, stopped, sat down and turned out to be incredible piano players!! Check this out, with Borek improvising on the sax: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTDIFcGQvN8
(And this was not the only thing the Chinese boys were good at… if you want to see something really funny and silly, check out this record-setting video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-48z_5b4B2A)

The most amazing thing was the improvisation session we had on the second day we met up: Borek started playing his sax spontaneously on the street with people that were busking (= playing music in the street, normally to make money). Right before heading home Borek started playing with Jim, a trumpet player who seemed to have had to many beers to drink. They completely connected on a deep level with each other and were playing, talking and scatting away amazingly. Jim started telling parts of his life story, in which it became clear he was a Vietnam vet and had had all these great experiences before that, even including playing music almost professionally! It turned out that Jim’s friend who was with him that night, Jeff, had played the piano professionally in several countries! The plan was quickly made: we took them to the street-piano that was close by… and oh my, how amazing it was so see these two man and Borek improvise -jazz, blues, funk- reviving again, remembering the life they once had, seeing that tremendous joy in their eyes while reconnecting through the music… and then the guard came to close the piano (with a cover, for the rain) after he had been listening for a long time, and it was time to go home… and Jim and Jeff went back to their drunken state of being, roaming the streets…
To see them improvising check this short video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvvBw-tkJV0

After an awesome camping trip up to the immensely beautiful coastline and Red Oak forests of central- and north-California with Liv’s sister Natalia and some of her friends, it was time to go on another adventure with new travel companions. And these new companions I think are to be introduced in a little more dramatic kind of way… so: *scraping throat and putting on a loudspeaker voice* (which shouldn’t be too hard to imagine I think :-P ) HERE AREEEEE >>HOLLY, HUBS, SPECIAL K, WILSON AND RAHAAAAA<
Hmmm.. maybe it’ll get more interesting when you check out the pictures under “Foto’s” in the album connected to this blog “Mexico and USA” ;-)

Holly and Hubs I also met while volunteering at Option last year. They are two amazing, inspiring, funny and, well… pleasantly crazy people ;-) that took off from home and have been traveling in their big motor home called Raha for the last 8 months. They invited me to come with them, so of course I said ‘YES!’, hopped on and got to meet their other travel companions: Special K (the 14y old cat) and Wilson (the perky and somewhat mysterious little monkey that came into their lives recently).

In a little over 2.5 weeks, we cruised through parts of California, Arizona, the Navajo Nation Reserve, Nevada and back into California. Next to the great talks, laughs, sharings, ceremonies and learnings, we also got to make some awesome adventures together in amongst other things the area surrounding Sedona (amazing red rock formations), Canyon de Chelly and the Grand Canyon.

Driving back into California, we had a wonderful goodbye lunch before they dropped me off at my friend Jay’s house at South Lake Tahoe, this incredible outdoor Walhalla around a gorgeous lake on about 2200m height. I met Jay over a year ago at the It’Skool project in Guatemala (the first project I went to when arriving in Guatemala for 2 weeks, doing after-school activities with young children) and we spent a super fun 2 days exploring his beautiful living area.
Then we drove down to Berkley together (next to San Francisco) to visit Christine, who was also volunteering at It’Skool a year ago. After saying goodbye to Jay I stayed with Christine until I flew out to Denver, Colorado last Wednesday. It was awesome to get a glimpse of this wildly interesting area (the whole Bay area basically = San Francisco and surroundings), with all its consciousness/awakening movements, students and liberated-hippie-laid-back atmosphere. When exploring San Francisco downtown on Sunday, I unexpectedly ran into this super awesome “How Weird Street Faire” festival which was going on a couple of blocks in the middle of the city! Dancing on my favorite kind of electronic/techno music with all these crazy, dressed up people… YAY!! :-D

Now I am in Boulder, where I went to directly after coming into Denver’s airport. Boulder is a little student town close to Denver, with the only acknowledged Buddhist university in the Western world: Naropa. Also the big Colorado University which is based here and Boulder seems to be a magnet for many outdoors, new age, spiritual, homeless, athletic and many other kinds peoples and initiatives. Interesting place! I’m staying here with a wonderful lady called Leila and we’re having tons of fun and learning loads together :-)

Now it’s almost time to leave you wondering and exploring for yourselves again, since I’m pretty much going offline for about 6 weeks:

Today I’m heading up to the Shambhala Mountain Centre (SMC: http://www.shambhalamountain.org/), which is located in the Red Feather Lakes area in the Rocky Mountains (about 2700m high up). Shambhala is a branch of Tibetan Buddhism and has centers all over the world. When I was living in Tepoztlan (Mexico) I started meditating here and took a course which really spoke to me… I’m very excited to learn more about this wisdom, this way of life, and deepen my meditation practice!

SMC is the biggest Shambhala centre in the world and they have courses all year round. In the summer there are even more courses and a big amount of people are coming and going to the centre. The first 3 weeks I’ll be joining the “Set-Up Crew”, which means I’ll be setting up tents and preparing the terrain and living/practice areas for the summer. The last 3 weeks I’ll probably be helping out in the kitchen.

From friends who’ve already spend time at SMC I already learned it will be a very busy, fun, intense, valuable and powerful experience. Also, my cell phone will not be working up there and there will be limited internet availability (and probably even more limited time to use the internet). So… please do keep sending emails when you feel like it, I LOVE reading them and will try to get back to you when I can (keeping in mind this can take about 6 weeks :-P). In case there is a real emergency, you can reach me through +1-970-881-2184, ext. 0.

AND – als klapper op de vuurpijl (hmm… never mind, I don’t know what that would translate too :-P):
I booked my ticket to continue the journey….. the 5^th of July I’m flying to PERU!!!
I am SO thrilled!! South-America and in particular Peru has been “calling” me for a long time and I decided to take the opportunity and go explore NOW....  ~ to be continued!

Wishing you all love, light, strength, clarity and JOY!!!

And of course a fantastic summer and amazingly fun vacations, festivals, terrace-times, sunbathing etc to you all! :-D

Love and hugs,

Rianne

PS.  If you’re not tired yet of watching my youtube-videos, here’s one more to top it off, titled “Everything 1 dollar”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKlRrsBsem8