Buckley's

When Canadians hear the word Buckley’s, the first thing that normally comes to their mind is “that sh!@ is awful” and then it is followed by “but it works!”.  There was a Buckley’s ad campaign years ago that poked fun at their own disgusting formula that tasted like mouldy socks dipped in steaming hot garbage (see video link).  Louisa and I have spent the last month, yes a month, doing Yoga Teacher Training (TTC) in an Ashram in Vietnam with Sivananda Yoga.  Our experience was just like Buckley’s – it was awfully hard, but it worked!

Meditating by the pond

We had zero expectations coming into our first Ashram community.  We knew we would be doing a lot of yoga, meditation and not sleeping very much.  These are all true, however, some of you are probably thinking – how amazing is that, all you do is eat, sleep, yoga and meditate?  It is going to be very hard to describe our experience in words as Ashram life has to be practiced first hand –here are a few stories to give you a better understanding:

• Morning bell – for those of you who have ever lived with Louisa (Gigi, 2na, Toma, Anne, Sawatzky’s, etc), you all know how much she loves mornings.  Every day at 5:30 am our great German mate, Jonas, would ring the wake up bell.  The bell was an ear piercing mini-gong that would make you want to cry that sleep time was over.  It took about 2 weeks to get used to the early rising.  Louisa not only stopped spitting venom at me in the morning, she was the one waking ME up!!

The Scorpion

• Yoga addiction – since we were at the Ashram for the TTC, we actually had to do yoga daily – 4 hours a day to be exact.  Yoga originally was our way to "keep fit and have fun" – however, it turned into an intense experience that drug addicts would compare to pure heroin.  Our new drug of choice is yoga – if we miss one day, we are jonesing for our next fix like Anthony Kiedis did "Under the Bridge".
  

• Yogic diet – the schedule for food at the Ashram is similar to that of jail – 2 meals a day in reward for not shanking fellow inmates.  Brunch was served at 10:00 am (remember, we woke up at 5:30 am), and dinner at 6:00 pm.  However, instead of gruel, we were served delicious, amazing and diversified vegetarian meals that could resemble Jamie Oliver`s, had he been born in Asia.
  

Enjoying the view of the lotus pond!

• Satsang – the term ‘Satsang’ literally means “company of the wise”.  Out of our 16 hour daily schedule, the first 2 hours of the morning and the last 2 hours of the evening were reserved for Satsang – a combination of daily meditation and philosophical lectures or readings on all of life’s problems (stress, illness, anger, etc.).  At first, Louisa and I thought we would not enjoy Satsang as it cut into our sleep time.  However, just like our yoga, we are itching for our daily dose of this medicine as well.  Our “company of the wise” went from 70 fellow students, down to 2, however, Louisa is still practicing Satsang with me and her inspirational speeches would put Dr. Phil out of business.

As you can see, Yoga training and Ashrams aren’t for everyone.  We didn’t know what to expect arriving 30 days ago and we sure don’t know what expect moving forward.  What we do know however, is that this experience has had, and will continue to have, an influential positive impact in our lives.  We will leave you with one yogi quote to sum the Ashram’s secret to life – “health is wealth, peace of mind is happiness, yoga shows the way”.

If you’re interested in hearing more about what we learned, we’re happy to share.

Om, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti

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Chúc Mừng Năm Mới

Our arrival in Vietnam was perfectly timed for Vietnamese Lunar New Year, Tet (see link).  Even after repeatedly receiving advice to avoid Vietnam during Tet, we managed to arrive two days before the country’s biggest annual celebration.  You might be thinking to yourself - everyone loves parties, why would people recommend missing a country-wide party?  One simple answer, NOTHING IS OPEN DURING TET!

Discovering our misjudgement and error in timing, we frantically tried to book flights and hotels to the prime sun spots - such as the beautiful beaches, Nha Trang and Phu Quoc.  However, all flights were booked and all hotels were booked.

Tet is a very special time of year in Vietnam.  In brief, it is the celebration of the Lunar New Year – this year, it was the year of the Dragon.  The locals leave the big cities and go home to relax with family and friends to carry on traditions and bring/attract ‘luck’ for New Year.  With everyone hanging out with their families, all stores, businesses and services are closed.  However, Tet isn’t for one day, it is a week long celebration… therefore, instead of soaking the rays of Nha Trang, we ended up in a “beach” town call Vung Tau for 6 days before our Yoga Teacher Training.

Vung Tau is to Nha Trang, as Edmonton is to Calgary, Albany is to New York or Brisbane is to Sydney.  The City of Champions is not a city at all, Albany is not New York and Brisbane does not know fashion – Vung Tau is NOT a beach town.  Louisa and I found a great hotel on the port side of Vang Tau – great sunsets.  However, on the other side of town, the “beach” side, it was a completely different story.  Only pictures can describe the chaos and craziness this beach experiences during Tet – thousands of Vietnamese, fully clothed, frolicking in the dirtiest oil polluted water reminiscent of the BP oil spill.

Despite our misjudgement and lack of planning, Tet was an amazing experience.  Vung Tau showed us the local experiences that we would not have seen if we were in the touristy areas.  The most amazing thing we saw was locals stopping in the middle of a crazy busy highway at midnight to give money to an elderly homeless man – this wasn’t only for their own luck, but to give wealth and prosperity to him, as it's said that the first thing you do in the New Year is what you will be doing for the next 365 days. We followed suit and ran after him to give him money ourselves as our first deed of the New Year with hope that we will cultivate more generosity towards everyone around us.

In true Tet fashion, Louisa and I decided to start fresh for the New Year and put the past behind us… some of us were more drastic then others ;)

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới! (Happy New Year!)

PS.  This is the song we still find ourselves singing daily – sooooo good, but sooooo bad! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yxlQ8kodBU

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Dollarama

During our brief stopover in Cambodia, Louisa and I had one major realization – Cambodia is the best dollar store in the World!  Now nicknamed, Dollambodia, Cambodia is bursting with deals and scams just like your local “Dollarama” store. 

Bottled water, the refreshing ionized liquid source of life, is the same price as a 30 minute foot massage or even a hand carved Buddha.  Just like all dollar stores, there isn’t any consistency with the pricing.  In Canada you can get a pen for $1 but you can also get a 10 litre stainless steel pot for $1 – how is this possible? 

Cambodia, or Dollambodia for these purposes, uses USD notes as their main currency.  With nothing lower than a $1 dollar bill in circulation, it makes it difficult to charge anything less.  This makes from some amazing deals and funny-ish stories:

• Throughout Siem Reap, a Tuk Tuk taxi ride will cost $1 if you are going 500 meters or going for 25 KM.  Louisa and I paid the same price to drive 25 km out of town to see Ankor Wat as we did to drive 5 minutes to our hotel.  We couldn’t figure out if the hotel tuk tuk was a rip off or the Angkor Wat tour was a deal – we still don’t know.

• Siem Reap has an amazing market filled with a lot of t-shirts and foot massages.  For $1 you can get a one hour massage, however, for $10 you can get a highly cheap ball point pen – we all know that this pricing is backwards by a mile.

• Like all of SE Asia, Cambodia also has great artists with many paintings and spiritual carvings.  Sucked in like the majority of tourists, we ended up buying several different hand carved Buddhas as gifts for family and friends, however, since we don’t have room in our 60 litre packs for a 6 pound Buddha, we shipped them home.  The shipping box, made of 1/100 of the wood one Buddha is made of, cost twice as much as an actual Buddha – just to be clear, a cardboard box costs as much as a carving that would have taken hours of labour to complete. Huh?

• The most surprising thing in Cambodia was the shooting range – shooting guns that were used during the war in the 70’s (I would hope that the guns used actually didn’t kill anyone – some things are better left unknown).  Shooting an M-18 in the middle of dodgy-town, was not only crazy, but was also very dollarama-like.  The bullets, worth pennies, are sold for $1 each - $60 dollars later and twenty seconds of fun, we had spent more than we had in three days in Cambodia combined.  We felt so bad that we had to give our taxi drive an enormous tip for driving us 2 hours to fulfil the “white-man’s” obsession with gun shooting.

Cambodia is a great country with so many great aspects that are just being realized by the rest of the world.  We both wish we could have spent more time touring the rest of the country as the people are just amazing and every single Cambodian we met was so genuinely nice!  If you are going to SE Asia, head to Cambodia and see what the rest of SE Asia was like 15 years ago – Dollambodia! 

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