Dakshina Chitra

About 15 kids from the ship went to a two day yoga retreat. We stayed at a place called Dakshina Chitra which was basically a Southern Indian cultural center. For two days my schedule went something like this: wake up at six, yoga, breakfast, nap, meditate, nap, yoga, lunch, nap, meditate, nap, dinner, read/relax, sleep. Meals were all vegetarian Indian food, which was super good and extremely spicy. This food gave spicy a whole new definition. Pretty much everybody on the whole ship had some bad reaction to the food in India. Here they call it “Delhi Belly”.

The accommodations were pretty fun. We slept in dorm style rooms, with a common bathroom that both guys and girls used. It had two buckets for showering, and two stalls with squatter toilets. They were the nice squatters that had a tank and flushed, and even came complete with TP. Evacuating in a squatter toilet tends to be pretty noisy, and it was a little awkward to be playing my morning music with a bunch of chicks brushing their teeth in the same room. Whatever. The rooms were brick, with three fans swinging from the ceiling, and were hot as hell. My watch said it was 93 degrees in there (And yes, I know I’m a dork for having a watch that tells temperature.) The beds were five to a room and had a super hard one inch thick mattress. Supposedly that is good for your spine, but my back hasn’t been this sore since racing the Six Hours of Glen Helen. We were lying in bed the first night, and Taylor said “Doesn’t it feel like we are being punished?” We both started cracking up. It really wasn’t that bad. My personal standards have dropped considerably, and this was nice compared to other places I’ve stayed on this trip.

After two days, I was feeling super mellow and relaxed. It was pretty nice to just chill out on land for a while.