After SECMOL we visited a
small village called Domkhar which is a little south and east of Leh (the
biggest city in Ladakh). We each stayed with host families there and split our
time with our homestays and the group. My homestay was the loneliest in that
there were no kids (at least before the last day). My host mom and host dad
were not actually a couple as I had originally thought, but rather sister and
brother-in-law. My host grandmother was my host mother’s biological mom, but
not my host father’s. Most days I came home and did work either in the fields,
with the livestock, or in the forest. We peeled off the bark of trees so that
the trees could be used in the construction of the second floor of my house and
the bark for fire kindling. Due to the Zanskar River flooding, the electricity
was out for three days. At night, we would all huddle around the solar lantern
and woodstove and chat in Hindi about the day’s events (well, me and my host mom
because my host dad had left to get his real wife and kids and my host grandma
only spoke Ladakhi).
In Domkhar our group did a
couple of hikes – one through a valley that reminded me of AZ and one to a
village across the river. Both were super fun and we took tons of pictures
(especially at the village where the lighting was good). At our homestays, we
all got to try yak butter tea (which is more like soup than tea), eat TONS of
dried apricots, try consuming straight barley flour (it’s not as bad as you
might expect), and expand our Ladakhi food vocabulary. On a rather unrelated
note, one of Jenny’s homestay residents was actually the head lama at the
largest Buddhist monastery in Ladakh!
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