Last month I had the opportunity to go to India for work to visit a development office in Pune. I immediately started to make arrangements to go to India. I would be traveling with a coworker who has family in India, so that eased some of the nervous feelings I may have had about going to india for the first time. I knew I had some preconceived notions as to about what India was like, but I wouldn’t fully know it until I experience it for myself.
I have practiced Yoga on and off for over 10 years, and I have 3 friends who are yoga instructors, so there were definitely aspects of Indian culture that I was fascinated with. I understand the concepts of OM (in fact I got an OM tattoo in 2002). However I am not familiar with the complex religion known as Hinduism, I knew that I would be exposed to Hindu parts of Indian culture. A coworker of mine gave me the book of Self-Enfoldment by Swami Chinmayananda to read while I was in India. It was a very good book, and it explained a lot of Spiritual concepts that are rooted in Hinduism and some concepts from the great thinkers from the beginning of documentation and before. I really enjoyed a the way it explained reality and gave clear instruction on pursuing Self Realization. I recommend this reading if you are at all interested in expanding your Spirituality. One of the things I definitely wanted to do to expand my field of experience while in India was attend to a yoga class, or a meditation class.
My journey to India was to start with 2 days of travel, 2 weeks in India, and then 2 days of travel back. My coworker and I left from Miami and we had a 9 hour layover in Frankfurt. We made it a point to leave the airport, and take the train to downtown Frankfurt to see what the city had to offer. Neither one of us spoke German fluently, but there were several people who spoke enough English to help us on our way. I did a little research before I left the states to see if there was anything in Frankfurt that held interest to me, and the one thing on my list of things to do was to visit the Johann Wolfgang Goethe house. Goethe is most famous for his story
Faust, which is considered one of Germany’s most important pieces of literature. Fortunately when we arrived downtown, we were about 2 blocks away from the Goethe house, and for 5 Euros we were able to get in. For more information about the Goethe Haus
click here. Before the Goethe house we stopped for some authentic German food and a beer, then we were back on our way to the airport for our flight to India.