The impressive Batu Caves, with the golden idol of Lord Murugan standing guard.

Well, we’ve been off to a bit of a bumpy start the past few days, but I have confidence that things will improve. We’ve been here for 3 days now, and although there’s definitely been a few amazing/gorgeous highlights to file away, it seems like a lot of our time has been spent driving in circles, trying to find things to do!

Fully divested of street clothes, I’m enjoying my snacks before my full-body massage.

My dear adopted sister Farahnush, whom I last saw on my trip to Tajikistan in 2009, met us at the airport with her Sudanese friend Beebo. We were whisked off by airport-city commuter train to Bin Bentang, a nightlife-neighborhood where Christine and I were first introduced to the glorious SE Asian massage. Farah and Beebo had never had one in their 3-4 years living as students in Malaysia, but their friends had recommended a place where the employees wore orange shirts. Armed with this knowledge, we scoured the street twice – our senses constantly both assaulted and allured by the constant throbbing music of the nightclubs surrounding us – before Christine’s sharp eyes picked out a single man standing in the crowds of walkers, handing out flyers and wearing an orange shirt. We looked at the flyer he handed us – it was for a place called Liang Xin Reflexology Centre. Good enough for us! We followed the little man into an elevator which took us up a single story, and into a beautiful room filled with wood décor, long curtains, dim lanterns, and the faint sound of waterfalls. The two of us were left to our massages while our hosts ran errands, and our masseuses, Ida and Anita, did an amazing one-hour Thai massage on Christine and I, in adjoining curtained cells. Afterward, we were served fresh fruit, juice, and dragonfruit ice cream. The bathrooms, Christine reported, “looked amazing. I kind of wanted to live in there.”

Farah and Beebo took us to a delicious Iraqi restaurant, where I had a chance to bone up on my Arabic with the servers (I already had been with Beebo, of course, but Sudanese is quite a bit different the dialects I know). The prices were refreshingly low compared with Hong Kong, but it didn’t matter; Farah had steadfastly refused to let us pay for anything so far. After a dinner of schwarma, Turkish coffee, and kebabs, Farah hailed a taxi for us to carry us back to her apartment in the nearby university city of Cyberjaya. The trip took about an hour and cost 50 ringgits, which at 3 ringgits to a USD, seemed quite reasonable. The apartment complex was named Cyberia Smart Homes, and with seven adjacent 15-story buildings, it seemed like it could easily host the entire population of my hometown of Brodhead. Each one looked identical and without our native guides, I would have easily gotten lost and slept on the concrete floor. I was tired enough to do so!

We slept well in the college apartment dorm that Farah had procured from us from another student, and the next morning, Farah and Beebo had a car rented for us from another contact. So far, so good! The car, rented to us by the somewhat oily and shady-looking Ajnan, was a cute and compact little white Proton Saga, a Malaysian car company that of course, both you and I have never heard of before. Beebo volunteered to be our driver, and as neither Christine nor I had experience driving in the right-sided British style, and Farah didn’t have a license, we immediately agreed. And we were off! The Malaysian highways were numerous and confusingly labeled, but Beebo confidently navigated us through the heart of Kuala Lumpur to our first destination of Batu Caves.

The first snag in our journey was all my fault. Batu Caves is a beautiful Hindu cave system hosting several shrines to the Lord Murugan, and has a massive golden statue to the man outside the front of the caves. However, besides being a monument and tourist attraction, it’s also the name of an entire city district in K.L. and when I searched for directions on Google Maps, I didn’t realize I was just getting directions to the district, not to the tourist attraction. Beebo, thankfully, was a master of direction inquiries, which he called out in friendly English to anyone who looked even slightly local when my directions proved false. Eventually, after politely refusing the offers of several taxi drivers to escort our car to the location for a small fee, we spotted the massive golden statue of Murugan from the highway.

The statue stands in front of a large staircase, covered in tourists and macaque monkeys, that leads up to the cave shrine itself. A large and ornately decorated Hindu temple stands slightly to the left of the stair system, and in front of that, numerous Malaysian cart vendors helpfully sell small offerings of food and flowers that tourists can offer to the shrines and the monks within. The four of us selected some coconuts to offer the monks, reasoning that although they weren’t as pretty to look at as the ubiquitous yellow flower wreathes, the monks might be able to get more practical use from coconut meat and milk than flower petals. We offered our coconuts to a priest/monk in front of a particularly large shrine – there must have been at least a couple dozen in the temple – and then a few minutes later at a different shrine, received blessings of reddish paste, smeared onto our foreheads by a solemn looking fellow who helpfully rattled his collection plate in front of him afterward. I guess 4 coconuts weren’t enough for the Full Blessing Package.

Feeling lightened in wallet and spirit, we ascended into the cave, pausing to photograph the extremely playful and mischievous little monkeys who cavorted around the tourists, snatching food from their hands and leaping on each other the low hanging trees surrounding us. A few of them had babies, which prompted adoring coos of delight from the multitudes. In the temple caves themselves, we even saw one tearing apart an aluminum Diet Coke can with its bare paws. “Diet Coke: So good, a monkey will rip apart metal for it.”

Baby monkeys at Batu Caves have to get used to paparazzi from an early age

The four of us right outside the cave system. It stretches inward for about 200 meters, and the ceiling is 50-60 meters tall!

Besides the cute monkeys, some pigeons and roosters, and the a few more shrines and gift shops in the huge natural cave, there wasn’t much more to see, so we headed back into the city for what turned out to be a fruitless search for a perhaps-mythical Tourist Information Center somewhere in Kuala Lumpur. Without the internet, Google Maps on my phone was restricted to street maps and a GPS, so I couldn’t search for anything new, so we drove in circles around the famous Petronas Towers and begged anyone standing still for directions. Christine even jumped out of the car while we were stuck in heavy traffic, ran into a classy 4 star hotel and posed as a guest and scored a paper map for us. Not even that could help us, though, so we headed north to try to find an internet cafe that could give us some more ideas for plans for the evening.

Looking out over Kuala Lumpur from the top of the Batu Cave steps

We were in luck, as a shady and secluded public rainforest educational center called Kuala Selangor was only an hour and a half northwest of the city, near the ocean. We roared away in our little Proton through the palm tree plantations and misty mountains surrounding the city and were able to hike for an hour before the sunset, finding the park with only a little difficulty. The place was completely deserted, as it seemed to have closed for the day a half hour earlier, but we found the gates unlocked and unbarred so we helped ourselves to a free hike. The macaque monkeys knew that the tourist time was over, so they were in the process of retreating back into the jungle as we entered, but they turned and stared at us in curiosity as we followed them. Don’t tell on us, fellas!

“Wait, we thought the tourists had left for the day…!”

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In the drizzling rain at Victoria Harbor

I don’t think I ever have scheduled a trip with as many flights as this one has, and I hope I never have to again! Although I still like flying, I have to say that it’s lost quite a bit of its novelty to me and is much less exciting than it used to be. Yet, the plans are set – Christine and I are flying from Chicago to Hong Kong, then to Kuala Lumpur, then to Phuket, then to Chiang Mai. We have to figure out how to get to Bangkok from there, but we hope it will be on a train instead of a plane for a brief airline reprieve! But then, it’s from Bangkok to Hong Kong, to Los Angeles (probably just LAX; no time to leave) and back to Chicago. In fact, we were inches away from having yet another round trip flight purchased for us, from Kuala Lumpur to Penang Island and back.

I met Christine and her parents in Milwaukee, where they had kindly offered to transport both Christine and me to the Chicago airport. I’m not used to such things; I think I’ve been taking coach buses to the airport alone ever since the Britain trip in 2007 – the one that started this blog almost five and a half years ago! But they saw us to the airport, got us lunch, and waved us through security (not officially, unfortunately, we still had to be waved by people in uniforms, too). Christine managed to lose her toothbrush in all the excitement. We both felt vindicated to see that the Rapiscan (or Rape Scan) full body particle scanners were sitting derelict and unused in the International Terminal – I’ll never forgive them for making us miss our flight from Fort Lauderdale to San Jose last year.

It was time to settle in for our 15 hour (real time, at least – it was about a day when you take time zones into account) flight. Our seatmate on the massive Boeing 777 was a young Asian woman named, of all things, Christine. She originally had my coveted window seat, but offered it to us unbidden because she said she felt nauseated – before the plane even took off. The hours passed by uneventfully, regretfully spent watching fluffy movies and TV shows instead of practicing our Pimseleur’s Thai audio files. The flight was operated by Cathay Pacific, despite being under the auspices of American Airlines, so the movie titles on our personal tablet-screen-things included both Hong Kong and other Asian masterpieces…like Forbidden City Cop, which probably caught Christine’s eye due to her love of Jackie Chan flicks (the percentage in which he plays a cop is pretty high, I think). Needless to say, it was a low-budget Cantonese comedy, filled with rude jokes and references to Hong Kong pop culture.

Hong Kong was chilly when we arrived on December 29^th…but not as chilly as the half meter of snow that we had left behind in Wisconsin. The airport is pretty far removed from the main Hong Kong islands, so the air didn’t even smell that bad as we stepped out onto the curb. I stared in utter incomprehension at the “traditional” Chinese characters inscribed on every surface – but thankfully, English was underneath 80% of them, and I assume that the other 20% wasn’t anything that I needed to know about, anyway. Our bus from the airport to Argyle Street in the Hong Kong downtown was 33 HKD – Hong Kong dollars – a person, or a little under 5 USD apiece. And the bus had free wifi on it too! $5 apparently goes a lot farther in a land where you can be served a ball of squid on a stick for fifty cents.

Christine in the Sincere building…can you spot her?

Lodging, however, is supposedly pretty pricey in Hong Kong compared with other areas of Asia. Christine and I got a hostel room for 26 USD for the two of us, which I thought was pretty good, but relative to our pre-booked hostel lodgings in Thailand, it was easily twice as expensive or more. I immediately rejoiced in my decision to bring my Android from the USA with me – with some careful caching of Google Maps tiles on the bus, plus the always-active GPS system in the phone, I was able to easily find the Dragon Hostel – or the building it was in, at least.  It’s no surprise that space is in a premium in Hong Kong – in our 20 hours there, I didn’t see a single building that was less than 5 stories tall. We found the “Sincere Building” that supposedly housed our beds somewhere within its mammoth guts, but we had to paw our way through six floors of iPad minis (they sure do seem to love iPad minis here), cell phone cases of every color, and tight jeans, some of which were on display racks but the majority were on weirdly made-up Chinese men in the high school to university age group. Almost all of the guys were sporting skintight jeans, swooped and dyed hair, and long scarves. I had been worried that snatchers might try to take advantage of our heavily laden state (two bags apiece) to try to grab something off of us on the packed streets, but Christine pointed out that she was pretty sure we could punch out any twerp who tried anything. Welcome to Hong Kong!

We eventually found our hostel nestled into the corner apartments of the 7^th floor, and were able to unburden ourselves. It was exactly how I imagined Chinese tenement style housing would look – our building was in a U-shape, with the door to the block of rooms that included our own facing out over a dreary grey concrete open walkway filled with limply hanging laundry, happily moist plants, and chatting tourists. There were at least 3 hostels that we saw on two floors of the Sincere Building alone, and there could have been more somewhere above or below us in the 15 floors that comprised its edifice.

We decided to just walk around. It was around 9:30 and we had to leave tomorrow afternoon for Malaysia, so we wanted to make the most of it. Using Android and the GPS again, I quickly cached some more maps and we hiked the streets for 3 hours. Hong Kong near Argyle Street is basically…electronic stores, convenience stores, and restaurants – at least visible at street level. Who knows how many tiny attempts at businesses are lurking above us, desperately wishing that they were easily visible to the throngs of potential customers in the streets below. Well, we didn’t have time to explore vertically; we were filling our eyeballs enough as it was. Christine had been to China a couple of years ago, and had already warned me that that the food could be odd, almost like the Chinese were competing to make the strangest parts of plants and animals edible. We saw dead octopi sitting on trays under hot lamps, surrounded by weirdly tasseled plants…or animals; we weren’t quite sure. And every few feet beyond that, someone was trying to sell us an iPad mini, or there would literally be pallets of them sitting out on the street, in big plastic bags to protect their cardboard boxes from the thick warm Hong Kong humidity.

We had two things on our mind – food and drinks. Stephen, our hostel manager, had recommended a particular area for bars, and we were glad of it – there was nothing in our shopping area. But about a half kilometer north of us there was about two solid blocks of them. We were too late for happy hour, unfortunately, and drinks were expensive. We settled on an establishment amusingly named “The Piss Bar II” – we found out later that drinking the piss was more British or Australian slang for just drinking beer. We also got some tiny little peanuts, too, which we thought were complimentary but were charged for in the end, about USD 2 for them. The beer was good – both of us had Tsing Tao, which was the local beer from the region that Christine had lived in before. “They sold it to us to in plastic bags for almost nothing,” Christine recalled fondly. No such luck here – Hong Kong was expensive, all the travel books agreed!

By the time we were all pissed out, most of the restaurants had closed, with thick steel bars settling down over their glass fronts. Tiny little Buddhist shrines with incense were burning eerily in front of many of them, smoke curling the ankles of the late passersby and delicately scenting the air above the ever-present smog. A little soup place was still open though, although we were their last customers. It was here that we discovered the Chinese love of stuffing hot dogs in things…the English menu advertised a “pork soup” which sounded good to me, and Christine got a “Chilled Chicken Pieces” entrée. As it turned out, she got chilied chicken with lettuce, which she picked at sadly, and went after the tasty dark curly noodles in my “pork” (hot dog) soup. We didn’t polish off our bowls, that was for sure. I could almost feel my blood pressure rising.

Christine loves her Dan Tat…or Don Tot?

It was difficult to tell when morning came in our windowless hostel box. Our only direct connection to the outside world was through a gray PVC pipe protruding through the wall, and as the sounds of honking and traffic gradually echoed louder through it, my glowing watch face confirmed that it was 7am. Our flight was at 4pm, so we had the morning to sightsee. Christine and I found some Don Tot, a sweet lemony pastry that she had loved in Tsing Tao, and struck out to the subway to Victoria Harbor, to the Intercontinental Hotel and the Hong Kong Hollywood walk of stars. As Christine’s uncle had told us, it was a gorgeous view from the hotel’s massive picture windows across the channel to Macau to the massive corporate offices on the other side – Panasonic, Sony, LG…they spread out to the east and west and disappeared into the smog.

There were hundreds of stars in the Walk of Stars, and most of them had matching handprints from their owners. Of course, Christine knew a lot of them by name, and we posed with Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, and she with several more whose names weren’t familiar to me. A steady drizzle started above us, and I was happy to have brought my Costa Rica-era windbreaker with me…Hong Kong rain is only a few steps away from acid rain, I’d been told. We walked through a quiet park and playground on our way back to the subway station, the third of which I’d seen. I was pleased that the Hong Kong planners had seen fit to provide its citizens with so many outlets for their children to play on – in Jordan, such a thing was almost never seen.

He sure has little hands!

We picked up our bags from the Dragon Hostel, and headed back to the bus stop. Another 33 Hong Kong dollars for each of our bus tickets, and an hour back to the airport. Now that we were seeing the terrain in daylight, it was clear that we were island hopping, crossing over bridge after bridge between tiny mountainous islands with condos and houses dotting each one. I fell asleep in about 20 minutes. Looking forward to seeing my little sister in a few hours!

Back in my college dorm days, my friends and I were all at the mercy of the Madison Metro bus system, our bicycles, or our legs. If you knew a guy who knew a guy who had a car, you were king of the hill. Of course, once you get out of the dorms in your sophomore year on up, a few of your friends bring their cars from home to store at their new places (if they want to pay the often-ludicrous prices of parking), and once we all graduated and started slowly dispersing either out of Madison altogether or at least to off-campus locations, a car just became part of normal adult life.

Of course, as my dear readers already know, some of us tried desperately to escape from adult life and the responsibilities therein by becoming fugitives in foreign countries on the other side of the world. By the time this particular escapee returned in 2010, the transformation was almost wholly complete: everyone in Madison that he knew had cars, and he didn’t. It was like high school all over again, except I lived in a city with an employer-paid unlimited bus pass and dozens of bike routes. Getting a car was never high on my priority list.

However, that’s not to say that I didn’t sometimes long for more readily available transportation. There’s only so many times a guy can get a lift from his girlfriend, or his little brother, or his buddies, before feeling somewhat emasculated. As far as I knew, my buddy David and I were the only folks left in Madison that didn’t have cars.

Ironically enough, it was on a trip to the Wisconsin State 4-H Fair in early August with David that the hands of fate conspired to end my lack of motorized vehicle ownership. I had borrowed Josh’s car to go to the fair, something I like to do every year on the Showcase Singer’s alumni day – I was a chaperone for them, after all – and afterwards David and I were wandering about the Expo Center, killing time and gazing with glassy eyes at various tawdry sales pitches. Suddenly, we happened upon a display of Chinese mopeds, sold by a local distributor – Propel Imports. A large sign hanging over the largest of the mopeds stating that one of them could even go at 60 miles per hour.

Although I’d never given mopeds a second glance before – why would I need to, when I have a bicycle? – this gave me pause. I didn’t know that mopeds could even travel that fast, and this one was being sold for around a grand and a half. I envisioned myself mopeding serenely to Brodhead, or to Florida. “She gets about 110 miles to the gallon, and about 110 miles on a tank of gas,” I’d say to the awe-stricken onlookers as they admired my shiny plastic vehicle. I’ve always prided myself on thrift, and a vehicle that could go 60 mph, get ~100 miles on a gallon gas would solidify my thrifty credits. I got the name of the Madison branch for Propel, and dreamt that night of my glorious new mode of transportation.

State Street Scooters was very helpful, and highly recommended. You have to hand it to the owner of a small store when he’s willing to talk himself out of a $1,500 sale and give an excited, enthusiastic buyer like myself the bottom line – the Daytona 150cc scooter is not what I wanted. In fact, he didn’t carry anything that I wanted. “Sure, you can go at 60 mph for a few minutes,” he told me. “But it sounds like you want to travel long distances on this thing, and at highway speeds, I’d worry that you might damage the engine. It just wasn’t meant to run that fast for that long. You might be fine on it, of course – but I wouldn’t risk it if I were you.”

I will admit to being crestfallen, and I probably looked that way too. The owner said to me, “Have you ever considered a motorcycle instead?” I told him that I had never thought about it; being from the land of Harley-Davidson, I’d always assumed that it was standard procedure for a motorcycle to cost as much as an automobile, on the order of 10-20 thousand. He laughed in disbelief. “No way, man! Check out Englehart’s or online; geez, you can get perfectly good used cycles for 2-6 thousand. If you were ready to drop $1,500 on the Daytona, you should look into going all the way.” Continue reading this post…

Verily, we cannot deny that mobile is the future of computing. So, after hunting through a few different plugins recommended by this page that would automatically display a mobile version of HeiseHeise.com, I decided on this one – the WordPress Mobile Detector. WP-touch, my first pick, seemed 100% broken on my site, but this one works. And has some nice stat tracking to go with it too.

I’ll be taking a trip down to Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park early next month – expect a hiking-related update about that. And if I get around it, maybe a quick story about the saga of the Motorcycle Shopping of August. That was a fun one!

And of course, Windows 8 comes out at the end of this month, and I’ll be looking into getting a Microsoft Surface as soon as possible. Between my Android phones and my Windows main computing systems, I think I’ve covered all the bases for operating systems out there!

This quick post is a followup to a rant of mine from several years ago, in which I talk about the 2009 ruling of the European Union that Microsoft be forced to advertise for other company’s web browsers in Windows 7, and indeed offer a “Browser Selection Screen” (BSS) on all new computers sold within EU countries. I pointed out that this is the equivalent of going into McDonalds and having a smiling employee tell me that they are happy to sell me Burger King’s burgers and fries instead of their own product, if I so choose.

Today, Ars Technica talks about the latest EU idiocy – to summarize: for the past few years, the BSS was working fine, the bureaucrats in the EU were placated, and then Microsoft released Service Pack 1 last year and accidentally stripped out the EU-only code (of course Americans don’t have to put up with this outrageous crap) for the BSS in the update files, and then pushed out the service pack to the world. I’m sure the EU shit its collective pants with delight at the prospect of suing Microsoft again.

Let’s be blunt. The EU is asking for as much as 10% of Microsoft’s EU sales (in the form of total annual turnover) as punishment for this failure. If you do the math, that could add up to about $6-7 billion dollars. All for what is obviously a mistake, not intentional sanction-breaking on Microsoft’s fault. It’s ludicrous for the EU to view it as anything else – the BSS is one of the most obvious things a new computer user could possibly see as soon as they turn on their computer for the first time. This isn’t Microsoft trying to slip the wool over anyone’s eyes, or replace the download links in the other listed browsers in the BSS with links to Internet Explorer. This was a simple mistake probably attributed to a lazy coder copy and pasting the SP1 code from the USA into the SP1 code for the world. Worth a $6-7 billion punishment? On what planet?

This is what you see when you click the "Big Blue Internet Button" for the first time, if you live in the EU. The order is randomized each time the page is loaded.

It’s worth mentioning that the EU total budget is approximately $157 billion dollars this year. A successful (pending) ruling of 10% of Microsoft’s profits this year would be no small chunk of change to them. This isn’t about protecting EU citizens from the big bad Microsoft monopoly. This is about stealing money from an American corporation because it’s part of their annual budgetary requirements. “What do we have lined up in income this year, guys? Well, we haven’t stolen money from Microsoft under the guise of “protecting our citizens” since the measly $1.5 billion sanction against them in 2009, let’s put them on this year’s budgetary agenda for 4 times that amount.”

I’ll say what I said in 2009 – The EU should be banned from selling Microsoft products until their government lowers antitrust penalty fines to reasonable levels. Microsoft is not a governmental cash cow. The EU is supposed to be getting revenue from Microsoft in the form of tax income on copies of the software sold within their borders – although the cynic in me figures that because the EU nations aren’t able to reign in their 13 billion dollar software piracy problem (and therefore not receive sales or import tax on sold products) they’ve decided just to hit the piggybank at the source instead. I’d like to see the EU’s reaction if Microsoft fined the government of Bulgaria for not properly cracking down on their citizens, who pirate 65% of their software, according to the 2011 article I linked to above. Could they do that? Of course not. Microsoft is a corporation, Bulgaria is a country. What they could do is stop selling their software in Bulgaria. Judging by these piracy numbers, it’s not like it’s going to hurt their bottom line much, anyway. What it can do is send a message that they won’t be intimidated by this bullying.

Microsoft has apologized and fixed the issue already – long ago – and they’ve offered to extend the BSS’s visibility on EU computers for another 15 months beyond what the sanction originally called for, which was December 2014.

After the excitement of the Shaver’s Creek theatrical show and the night hike last night, Christine and I deserved to sleep in a bit. But we didn’t dawdle at her cabin for too long; the other purpose of my trip to the east was to meet the Hindu guru, Amma, in Alexandria Virginia. Most Americans have probably never heard of her unless they follow Eastern religions, or mysticism, but the lady is extremely well respected and loved throughout the world (worshipped by some, but we’ll go into that later) and how can anyone dislike a woman whose primary method of spreading her own brand of peace and love is by hugging people?

Yep, Mata Amritanandamayi, or Amma as those of us with weak European tongues usually call her, is a hugger. She probably is the Hugger – the lady has hugged 32 million people and counting. That number goes up by thousands every week, and last weekend in a Hilton conference room for 10 solid hours, she hugged thousands more – Christine and I included.

Not this kind of Hugger, you nerds.

And popular? That too. Even though Christine booked our hotel room in Alexandria a month in advance, we were still unable to get a room in the Hilton itself; it probably has been booked solid for that weekend since Amma’s North American tour schedule went live half a year ago. We contented ourselves with the Marriott, a mere 10 minute walk away. They had a free shuttle, anyway, although Christine warned me that if history was any judge, we probably would be hoofing it for certain trips between hotels.

Christine has seen Amma several times, including at her ashram in India. According to her, wait times for a hug can be as long as Amma herself is sitting in her chair, hugging people – as long as 9-10 hours for most of her visits. There’s never not a line stretching around the block to embrace her (they use a token/ticket system these days for that very reason) She told me that once she hugged people 22 hours straight. The woman probably has arm muscles that could crack a coconut, or at least in her younger days. Amma apparently has been doing this for decades now, ever since she was thrown out of school (and subsequently beaten by her ashamed parents) in primary school for collapsing due to religious hysteria. It was soon after that that she began preaching in her small hometown in India, gaining a small train of followers who thought this little girl with the wise words was really something. These days, those followers number in the million.

And worshiped? Yes, also that. Like I hinted at earlier, there are some people who go farther than just viewing Amma as a kind, wise old Mother Theresa of India. I’ve heard estimates that 15% of Amma’s devotees actually view her as the incarnated spirit of the Hindu goddess Kali. I don’t know how spread around this is; Kali kind of gets a bad rap in America thanks to a somewhat inaccurate portrayal of the goddess in the first Indiana Jones movie, The Temple of Doom.

I don't know how people got a bad vibe from this.

But most importantly – and generous. Amma’s charity system “Embrace the World” is pretty amazing, regardless of religious beliefs. She’s founded free universities, built free housing, and fed millions of India’s poorest children. Here’s a full list from beholders.org (not affiliated with her) of what she’s done, and that’s just the stuff on record. Incarnate goddess or not, she definitely should be officially sainted by someone ASAP so that she gets a little more mainstream publicity in the western world. India and the world at large are better off because of her.

Anyway, Christine and I checked in, and I changed into clothes that were more “conservative” (i.e. long pants) and didn’t smell of mosquito repellent and campfires. Christine herself wore flowing white Indian clothes that she had bought while staying on the Ashram, and after comparing her lovely outfit with my own, and then the similarly-fancy men and women we shared the shuttle bus with, I felt distinctly underdressed. “Khakis and a plaid shirt will be fine” I muttered to myself. “Maybe you’ll be mistaken for a charity case and get an extra hug.”

You are now entering The Amma Zone. This is a "no shoes, get service" area

We got tokens labeled “S-2″ in the conference center, and were funneled into a dining room that was referred to by one of the official Amma aids (looking resplendent in similar flowing clothes, except with the addition of green, blue, or red sashes) as “overflow seating.” Christine seemed momentarily disappointed, and she explained to me that when she’d seen her in previous trips to Chicago, they were in exposition centers so large that thousands of people could see Amma meditating, praying, and preaching from the stage. We had to content ourselves with a big-screen HDTV on the wall. Amma herself was in the largest room, the “dance hall” and there was at least one other overflow hall. We were handed small plastic cups of “blessed” water, and instructed not to drink them yet.

On the television, Amma began speaking in her native Malayalam, which was occasionally translated into English by a bearded and bespectacled South Asian man with a deep and resonant voice. I saw several of the younger people around me nod off as his rumbling voice filled the room through the large speakers next to the TV. The sermon preached love, understanding of others, tolerance and peace. This didn’t exactly seem groundbreaking to me, as a Christian, but I’m sure others would disagree. I had to hold in a snort when the man reminded us “You can take this cup of blessed water and add a few drops of it to a larger container of water throughout the year. Then the entire amount of water will become blessed.” But I worship a guy who confused his entire founding religious body when he said “eat my body and drink my blood” (original Catholics had apparently never heard of metaphors or symbolism) so I guess I shouldn’t talk. Then we spun in circles a few times while saying “Ohmmmm” as Amma and her translator watched us silently through the television. I became lighthearted, and also lightheaded.

There's Amma on the screen! And this is the closest I got to photographing her; no pictures were allowed in the ceremony room

Continue reading this post…