Durgā and Mahisha, part 1: a war story

Midterms are on Thursday, and when it comes to Hindu Goddesses, I’m probably going to end up writing a lot about Durgā. Because she’s just that awesome.

The word “Durgā” is the feminine form of “durga”, meaning a citadel/fortress. So she has connotations of being unassailable, inconquerable, like a fortress on a hill. There are a couple of vague hints of a spouse in her mythology, but she is generally seen as attached to no god (except in her more benign manifestation as Pārvāti, in which she is the spouse of Śiva). (The opposite extreme is her manifestation as Kālī, whom you’ve probably heard of.)

Oh, and she’s a warrior goddess, whose foes tend to end up wounded with so many arrows that they look like porcupines.

Normally, when the world is out of balance, Vishnu manifests as an avatar who saves the day. When Mahisha, the buffalo demon, took over the universe, it was Durgā who did the honors.

Of course, she had to be created first.

More random notes from NZ

1) The corner dairy (i.e., convenience store) has random Japanese snack foods. (Not just pocky, either.)

2) The cashier there will give you $1 coins if you ask, but not many, because everyone else asks for them too. (The washing machine is $2 a load, but only takes $1 coins.)

3) Right next to the dairy is an Indian place that does takeout. There’s a little fridge right in the entryway with ready-to-go mango lassis. And this is literally right around the corner from my flat. I may be in trouble.

4) I met this cute girl there, too~ She’s from New Mexico, she also lives in Ilam Villages, she’s studying anthropology, she writes in her spare time…and the odds are good I’ll never run into her again. Sigh.

5) I also met a cat. Walking home one day, spotted it sitting on a fence, said hello.

6) Did I mention that skateboards are all the rage here? There are tons of people who just board around campus, natural as walking.

7) The Canterbury library is huge. I missed the tours at the beginning of the term, but one of the librarians gave me some quick pointers. Religion textbooks are on the fourth floor; political science is up on the ninth. (The elevators go – say it with me now – all the way up to eleven.)

Hindu Goddesses 101

So far, the bulk of my time in the Hindu Goddesses class has consisted of a combination of “listening to stories” and “taking furious notes.” Hinduism is overflowing with stories. You couldn’t cover them all in a lifetime, let alone a semester.

I’m going to do writeups of the ones I’ve heard, using the full depth and breadth of understanding that I have cultivated over…three weeks of class. (I’ll be summarizing rather than analyzing, is what I’m trying to say.) But I need to give you some foundation stuff first, because otherwise I’ll be stopping every couple of lines to say “You see, how Hinduism works is…”

So here are the basics.

Miscellaneous observations

In no particular order:

1) One of the phrases used during orientation was “Four seasons in one day.” It fits. Yesterday I walked to class in the morning in a sweater; went back to the room during a break in the afternoon (I needed a new pencil) in a T-shirt, and was sweltering; and went home after class in the sweater again, because it had gotten dark and chilly and the wind was nearly making it hard to walk.

2) We were also told that New Zealanders don’t do umbrellas, so I haven’t bought one. All the rain until today has been very light: so far, so good. This afternoon, though, it started pouring. Glad I didn’t have to go out.

3) The world is flat. NZ does not do hills. My mental map of the half-hour walk to the mall puts it on a slope, probably because similar walks in MD are up-and-down all the way, but this is nonsense. It’s board-flat all the way.

4) On a probably related note, I’ve noticed more people in wheelchairs, wearing leg braces, and using canes or other similar methods of support here than anywhere else I’ve ever been.

5) …darnit, the US changed the clocks, didn’t it? Just when I was getting the hang of counting by sixes to calculate the time difference, too.

I have a dreamsicle

Early on in any long trip, I always have a very vivid dream about going home. So when one hit last night, it was right on schedule.

It covered everything: Mom driving me home from the airport, getting ready to take a bath in an actual bathtub, even the amazing first episode of The Daily Show I got to see at home. In fact, the episode was so awesome that I wondered if I were dreaming, so I went to check it online. Sure enough, the clip was still there, all details intact.

Then I started thinking. Sure, I knew the semester in Canterbury was going to be a short one. But I only remembered classes meeting once.

And then I woke up.

But I promised you a post about food, didn’t I?

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There are a couple of supermarkets and quite a few dairies (convenience stores) right off campus, but a brisk half-hour walk away is the mall (currently one floor, though the next level is under construction) with the Pak’n Save.

Pak’n Save’s motto, and entire selling point is “New Zealand’s Lowest Food Prices”, which they achieve in part by not spending any money on frills. Like expensive advertising. Or shelves. Most of the products are stacked in yellow metal industrial frames, or just piled in the cardboard boxes they came in.

But the food itself doesn’t seem to suffer, just cost less. A whole loaf of bread for under NZ$2! A 1.5-liter bottle of fruit drink for $NZ0.95! I haven’t managed to spend more than NZ$30 on any trip yet.

Along with the staples (lots and lots of bread and fresh fruit), I’m trying to sample New Zealand-y things. When we got lunch at the Christchurch airport and everyone else was reaching for the water, I sprang for a bottle of ginger beer, in part because the label touted it as “a great New Zealand tradition”. (“Is that real beer?” asked one of my companions nervously. No, it’s the same idea as ginger ale. Only more ginger-y.)

So when something weird/new catches my eye at the store, I spring for it. Sometimes it backfires. Like with the Korean pear:

Same texture as a standard pear, but the taste turned out to be more bitter, or maybe more sour. And, as you can see, it’s huge. I only got halfway through.

It did come in a pretty cool wrapper, though:

The Russian fudge, on the other hand, went great:

Tasted like a hybrid of fudge and caramel. You know how some combinations of things that should taste perfectly decent turn out to be horrible mistakes? (Ham and bananas, anyone?) This was not one of those combinations. This was a chocolate-and-peanut-butter level of right.

There have, admittedly, been a lot of frozen dinners and canned soup (from Campbell’s, even) in the picture. (I have yet to put in the time and effort to actually cook something.) But on the easy-to-prepare front there’s also cereal and fruit bars, Made In New Zealand With Local Ingredients for good measure.

It should go without saying that I’ve bought fresh kiwis.

And on that note, I need to take the walk now. I’m down to two oranges, a kiwi, half a cereal box, and a little tin of mints, none of which sounds like dinner.