72 hour vow of silence complete! *

If I told you that I had a catchy jingle called "staaanding staaanding staaanding intending to turn" in my head -- could you guess where we have been for the past 4 days? If you're thinking a Buddhist monk led meditation retreat, you would be on the right path (but not necessarily the 8-fold path). The overnight retreat was recommended to us, but being the "jumping in head first" people that we are, we chose to commit to the 3 night option. Needless to say, we didn't know what we were getting into -- I honestly didn't think you could meditate for 12 hours a day, nor did Jess think that taking a vow of silence meant that we couldn't talk. As you may imagine, the group of people who find themselves in Chiang Mai, Thailand and THEN choose to go on a 4 day retreat are a rather eclectic crowd. Jess and I are professional speculators, but with a vow of silence in the way, we were left to ponder our new theories alone. We both agreed, however, that a stand out moment was when Michael, the overweight, middle-aged German man's white pants (we had to wear all white) fell to the FLOOR ever so slowly as he tried to clear his plate from dinner. Clearly the passive Buddhist thing to do was to stare at the table, breathe in deeeeply, exhale slooowwly, and try not to laugh.
I am now realizing that most of what I would say in this post would only be funny to Jess and myself so 1) please accept that if it doesn't make sense to you, it does to us 2) I will give a little rundown of what we did: A gong woke us up at 5 am, we started chanting at 5 30 am, ended chanting at 9 pm and went to bed shortly there after. The day was filled with meditation, no surprise there, which varied from sitting, walking, and lying down meditation. Whenever we were left to choose our own type of meditation, I consistenly chose to lie down in the back of the room and maybe take a nap. The meditating was punctuated by mini lectures by our leaders, meals, and yoga which was taught by our very own Jessica (the * in the title is used to denote that Jess had to break her silence in order to teach the yoga class --we'll let it slide). A priceless scene was having all of us on one side of the hall in warrior one and then seeing the monks waaay on the other side following along in their orange robes -- one of Jess' talents is adjusting your body while in a pose, but the monks were not privy to this due to the potential enjoyment that would result from a woman's touch and thus lead them away from the path of righteousness, too bad as Prat #2's shoulders were up all near his ears. Due to the said vow of silence, the lectures we received from the monks were a bit one-sided. When Prat # 1 was talking about the difference between being a proper Buddhist and being one just out of tradition, the combination of lacking confidence in his English and a non-responsive audience led him to tell a "joke" about joss sticks, praying for health, and lung cancer due to too many lit joss sticks. I could continue, but I have an inclination that our experience is not translating to this medium so well. Suffice it to say that the past few days gave us ample thinking space to reflect on what an incredible experience we have had in southeast Asia. The temples, the food, the weather, the landscape, and most importantly the people have made this all an unforgettable experience. We now have a few days to make it down south to Bangkok, which is just enough time to eat some more delicious Thai food, see some old temples, and prepare for our next (sub)continent -- INDIA!