Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center – Bloomington, IN

One of the last things I expected to see on the Trip Advisor site for Bloomington was a Tibetan-Mongolian Cultural Center. I have a slight bias towards Tibet because I had participated on a 15-day hiking and camping trip with some Tibetan ethnic minorities in China back in 2008. I wanted to work in Mongolia for the Peace Corps but that didn’t happen, so I can’t say much for Mongolia, but I was pretty stoked… and I finally found the time to visit. I guess the area had a sizeable Tibet-Mongolian population since there’s a Tibetan restaurant within walking distance of campus and I heard some Tibetan spoken at one of the coffee shops I visited.

It was about a 20-minute drive from IU campus and my phone’s GPS wasn’t saying the directions to me, so I was constantly glancing from the road to my lap to make sure I was headed in the right direction. Good thing the speed limit was 30 (or 35 mph) at the most since I was going through some residential areas or it would not have been a good idea. Along the way, I spotted Feast, an awesome little eatery that had good reviews and I made a quick stop for lunch before continuing on.

First thing’s first, the grounds of this place are pretty big. Second thing: I don’t know why but it seemed like I chose the hottest day to explore outside. The buildings were familiar to me and there were strings of Tibetan (Mongolian?) praying flags hung around.

It’s an actual Buddhist temple are there are monks that reside on the grounds. I’m not sure if they know much English, but I encountered two of them. They smiled at me and continued walking up to this main building. They were holding a large pot of rice so I’m guessing they were preparing for lunch. I imagine they should because they hold classes and meditation sessions that people can join.

I walked around the grounds, looking at the stupas, praying wheels, etc. There were a ton of bugs flying about and, to be quite honest, the grounds weren’t maintained too well. Even so, I enjoyed my walk. I finally got up to the main building where the two monks entered. Here, you have to take off your shoes and it looks like it’s also a visitor center as well. I could see the main worship room within with the Dalai Lama’s large portrait hanging up (he apparently visited). I found it interesting that they also included various religious articles from other religions of the world.

Apparently, these are Americanized Tibetan-Mongolian monks, because when I was in China, there were certain rooms females couldn’t go into. Something about being “unclean” due to one’s menstrual cycle… not to mention how I was wearing shorts at the time and shorts aren’t appropriate. However, here, I was briefly welcomed in when someone saw me peering through the window and told that I was welcome to look around before left to my own devices.

It was a nice walk (and a good sweat) to break my mundane routine of working and walking back and from the hotel. Also, I got to get sustenance off campus! I sadly couldn’t visit the gift shop because they were at lunch, but it did make me think of fond and amusing memories of when I stayed in those Tibetan villages, eating tsampa, drinking yak butter tea… and not showering for days on end.

But that’s a different story.

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Bloomington: What Exactly is There?

As predicted in my first post, Bloomington is a quintessential college town. Because I was there during the summer break, it was apparently a sleepy college town, as well.

Apparently, a lot of the places I frequented (way too many independent coffee shops, of which the town has in abundance) would have hard-to-find seats once school was in session. Although I was on a trip, I was still working, so I would wake up early and knock off a coffee place or other eatery on my list where I would set up my work station for the day. I soon became pretty comfortable with getting around on foot.

So comfortable, in fact, that I overdid it my second full day there and got blisters. Three of them. Needless to say, I wasn’t so enthusiastic to walk everywhere after that. See, I collect those Starbucks collectible cups so wherever I go, I try to find one to take back as a souvenir. I’m not much of a souvenir/shopping person, but I like those cups. Plus, they end up being my smoothie cup in the morning so it’s also practical, which is a must. I found a Starbucks on the west edge of campus but they didn’t have it so they said the ones on the eastern outskirts of campus may. It was only a rough 40 minute walk, plus the summer I was experiencing wasn’t as hot as Houston’s. I was confident I could do it!

I did… But I arrived looking (and feeling) like I ran a marathon. Long story short: I sweat easily and I had a backpack with all my work things and my 7-lb laptop. Either way, the highlights:

• The campus itself is beautiful and very nature friendly. There’s a patch of woods right in the middle that there are trails that you can walk through. Other than that, there’s also an ‘arboretum’ on the north side.
• They have awesome animals. And darn those chipmunks (which remind me of hamster-squirrel hybrids because this was my first time seeing them in person… no similarities with Alvin whatsoever) – I could never get a photo of them!
• I love looking at the architecture. I just love old buildings.
• The amount of independent coffee shops there was awesome. I LOVE INDEPENDENT COFFEE SHOPS.
• Other than campus which is situated right next to downtown, home to some of the more popular eateries, there isn’t much else in the city.
• There’s a small mall southeast of campus that I walked to after my Starbucks trek… and I continued past that once I walked through it (it’s rather small) to the Kroger.
• Their Kroger rocks. They have a soil plot where you can pick your mushrooms. I love that mushroom plot and was intensely sad that I couldn’t buy any because I had no kitchen to call my own at the time.
• There is a Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center about a 20 minute drive from campus! I may make a separate post on that.
• Most of the ethnic items are on the north side of town near the main library. There’s also a boba stand, to my surprise. However, there’s a specific street to the west of campus where there are Korean, Chinese, Indian, and Tibetan restaurants all lined up together, which I found interesting.

Like I said: small town.

Even so, I found that I enjoyed my morning walks to wherever I was going. It was definitely an escape and I did a lot of walking… but because there wasn’t much to do in terms of entertainment when I wasn’t working, I would be thinking of the next eatery to try out. Basically, I didn’t quite lose any weight. It was nice to be able to explore one part of the US at a time.

And perhaps it’s a good thing there weren’t too many things to do or else I wouldn’t have gotten any work done, haha.

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Food in Indiana & Illinois – 2015

I’m a major foodie, but I don’t go out to eat a lot, mainly due to my dietary restrictions: vegetarian and I don’t eat onion, garlic, leeks, chives, or hing (asafoetida). Basically, everything in the genus Allium, which also includes leeks, shallots, scallions, etc. What makes it a lot easier is that my entire family follows the same diet so in order to satisfy my craving for foods of all kinds, I end up cooking. A lot.

Why? Purely because though America is getting on that vegetarian bandwagon with things like Meatless Mondays and an increasing amount of vegetarian-friendly restaurants in addition to the all-vegetarian/vegan eateries, those aforementioned spices that I don’t eat are often featured in the food. It also saves me the waiter/waitress the trouble of having such a “difficult” customer and me the trouble of trying to figure out what in the world I could eat. As a note, my brand of vegetarianism is more Asian-based; if you go to Taiwan, all vegetarian restaurants there actually make their food without those spices (I was in Gastronomic Heaven there). Traditionally, Buddhist vegetarianism doesn’t include those items. Of course, this differs by the country, but if you trace it back to the very beginning, that’s how it was. There are several folklore-like stories of why this is which leads back to how eating those items was akin to eating meat itself. Then more scientifically, some of them, like garlic, is touted for their antibacterial character… which is great when you have tons of germs that need to be killed when eating meat. What is it going to kill when you’re only consuming plant-based foods? In a sense, you’re just harming yourself… plus, people that eat it mainly do it for the flavor it imparts and not its ‘benefits’. That’s just a nice side effect.

Plus, I frankly avoid them now because they’re so pungent. Comparably speaking, it’s all right if other people eat it because it’s easy enough to avoid them, but it’s hard to get away from yourself when the smell is, well, coming from yourself. Interestingly enough, I have met some people who have an actual allergy towards onion and garlic, so if you’re wondering, that is an actual allergy. Personally, I’m not allergic though if it’s strong enough, my eyes actually water and my nose stuffs up to the point that I feel as if I somehow got severely congested (and blinded by the influx of tears) in the matter of 5 seconds, so I guess I am somewhat allergic in a sense. That only happened once to me and I never want it to happen again. Trust me, if you avoid them for just a week or two, you’ll start feeling the affects due to your increased sensitivity towards them.

So, on this trip up to the Midwest, I found myself battling the constant frustration of trying to find food other than sweets, salads, or sandwiches that I could have, since I no longer had access to my beloved kitchen. Plus, I hate buying food that I can make. It seriously bothers me. To make it more simple, I would either tell my waiter/waitress that I was allergic and if I found myself in an Indian restaurant, I would tell them I ate Jain vegetarian, which also avoids those spices, among other things.

[RECIPE] Ham ‘n Cheese Pockets

I love potlucks… but when you have two potlucks in one day, no matter how many recipes you have on your To Do List, sometimes, there just isn’t time… or the ideas are never enough. This past weekend, I was brainstorming trying to figure out what to make. The people? Totaled around 20 and split down the middle when it came to the number of adults and the number of kids. They were mostly Asian, but of the more open-minded sort. The kids tended to like American foods. Then – I remembered these pockets and I thought they looked amazing. The cool thing: I recently bought a big pack of vegetarian bacon ham (I kid you not – they’re called bacon ham).

It all fell into place…

Plus, I really wanted some nice salty (humane) protein with some nice, melty cheese. How does that not win anyone over?? The fact that the dough is homemade cinched it. I ended up doubling the recipe and cutting out a total of 32 pieces (there were 8 “breadsticks” per recipe that I halved).

Day 1: Downtown Bloomington & Thereabouts

It was only 2 weeks ago that plans were finalized and now, I find myself in Bloomington, Indiana. I’ve never been up here before, which was what ultimately brought me here. The real reason why I found myself here was because Hubby needed to go for a program at IU.

On the way here, I sat between two men – one of whom was originally from a small town (or “village” as he called it) right outside of Indianapolis, the state capital.

Me: Do you have any recommendations?
Him: [slight pause] No.

Well, that was promising for my prospects for the rest of the week, especially since Bloomington is actually an hour’s drive outside of Indianapolis. I made a list of possible places to get food, as per usual (food is very important to me, you see). However, I didn’t find much online either other than for the Indy 500 in Indianapolis.

[PLACE] Common Bond

I first heard of this place on the news. I mentally added it onto my list of Places to Go in Houston, but I never got around to it until sometime around two months ago. My sister and I decided to drop by at around 1 PM on a weekday only to find out that their display case of pastries (what we were going for) was completely empty. Completely sold out. We left empty handed.

What is this place? Common Bond.

My birthday was this past week and one of my friends insisted on meeting up. I suggested this place and – awesomely enough – it was on his list of places to visit as well! So we went. I did a little bit of research and found out that the place was particularly busy for brunch, which is served from 9 through 3 on the weekends. We decided to meet right when they opened to get good parking spots (they supposedly have a small lot) and to finally get to see these pastries of theirs, hoping that first time was a fluke.

Back to Yoga

I took a 1 month and 1 week break from the States to head over to Taiwan in December 2014 plus a quick stop in South Korea for a couple of days for old time’s sake. To prepare for this rather big event (it’s for the wedding reception for hubby’s side of the family), I took a three-month break from hot yoga.

In truth, I have a love-hate relationship with it, and yet I still kept going back – even with the relatively high cost to both my wallet and time of keeping up with it. So, after having had a pretty long break from it and coming back for about a month now, I had come to my conclusion in regards to this form of exercise.

The following is my take on hot yoga thus far. Take it as a weak attempt of a half-organized case study of some random female who took hot yoga for almost a year.

Traveling Through Post – 11

Here’s another long-due mass post of postcards that I’ve received since November 2014. Obviously, there was a slight lull since I was out of the country for a little over a month, but it was quite a treat whenever I open my mailbox and find another mystery card from someone!

🙂

The French Macaron – 1

I finally did it. I finally sucked it up and attempted making those picky little sandwich cookies called the macaron. Oh, how I love the little guys but with the hefty price tag ranging from $1.75 to $3 per cookie, I had been wanting to try making them myself for quite a while. My wallet simply can’t support my love for macarons! The only thing that stopped me was how notorious the macaron is for failing (multiple times) for even the most seasoned bakers. However, I guess all it took was a new resolution:

On my past trip to Asia, we stopped by South Korea and, subsequently, my old home of Daejeon. One of our stops was at an Italian restaurant called Flying Pan, which was one of a chain of restaurants owned by Sungsimdang, the oldest (and most famous) bakery in the city. When I came back, I told myself I would make whatever the month’s drawing was… and February was the macaron.

So, I was a couple of days late, but I still made it! Here are the few faces of my macaron babies (notice the cracked shell in the background, haha):

This is not quite listed under recipe because I’m still trying it out. I would say this would be my online foray into what would be my cooking (in this case, baking) journal. I want to try out as many macaron recipes as I can until I can find one I am comfortable enough with to call my go-to macaron recipe (is there such thing??). It may take me years, but I will get there one day! 

[RECIPE] Creamy Vegan Potato & Cauliflower Soup

Something came up last minute and my dentist appointment this past weekend had to be rescheduled for a weekday afternoon. As such, I got out of the office early to make it to this appointment (still ended up being about 12 minutes late because there was an unnatural amount of traffic and lets not talk about the traffic after the appointment). This got me excited because I found this awesome soup recipe and I wouldn’t need to prep the ingredients the night before for the next day’s dinner and I wouldn’t need to run around when I got home to cook it.

In theory. You know – because I forgot to factor in after-work traffic and how yesterday was the first official day of the Rodeo.

Most of my plans ended up not going through. I didn’t get home on time. I didn’t end up making an absolutely delicious-sounding soup for dinner. It wasn’t a relaxing evening at all. In fact, we were stuck in so much traffic that we (husband was with me… our dentist is a bit far so we try to carpool to save on the gas and book out appointments at the same time) decided to go to Chinatown and get our dinner there, because I have a deadline for dinners (I can’t eat that late and the prep work would definitely push me past my dinner time). I also got a little special treat from Bambu to try to calm my growling stomach for the 1 hour ride back into the city for dinner, so I guess it wasn’t too bad. The only thing that went according to plan was that I did end up cooking the soup – but a much more simple version based off of the original for the next day’s lunch with mushrooms thrown into the mix because I found some that weren’t looking so good in my fridge. Sadness.

Excuse the not-so-pretty-to-look-at photos. I literally only made it for lunch at 9 PM the night before, so it’s not quite photogenic. How do you make off-white-golden soup look beautiful, anyway? Although it lacks somewhat in the visual department, I have to say that I loved how it tasted. 🙂 It even tastes better the next day (as seems to be the case with most soups)!