Dharamshala, October 11th 2016

I'm sick. One of the worst things to be when you're traveling is sick. I mean I wanted to do so much here, I wanted to learn yoga and see Dharamshala and its area. But all I do is lie in bed and wait to get better.

View from our guesthouse in Dharmkot

We are here for already 6 days, we arrived by night bus from Bhuntar, which is at the end of Parvati Valley, just where it meets Kullu valley. It took us something like 7 hours including breaks and one police search. (Police didn't find anything, just made some mess). The way was curvaceous and the driver didn't mind that, so we didn't really sleep.

I'm not sure about other tourists, but Israeli tourists are staying mostly in two villages around Dharamshala, one is Bhagsu and the second is Dharamkot. We didn't really know a lot about the area or where we can find an open guesthouse, so we went with the flow and arrived to Dharamkot with everyone from our bus. Nothing was open and we realized that everyone is basically like us, they have no idea where to find a place to stay. Luckily for us, someone (who was leaving) ordered a taxi, and the taxi driver had a guesthouse to give us a room in. It wasn't the best guesthouse but it was mostly quiet and clean and we decided to stay there for the weekend, until we had rested and started to understand what goes around in this place.

On the first day, Renana didn't feel so good, so she rested and I stayed with her to work on the blog. I opened it on Google's blogspot platform, and started uploading the posts I wrote from Parvati, and sent the link to a few people.

When I started writing, I thought I'd name the blog "The traveling programmer", but the domain is caught, and I went with "The digital nomad", I like the taste of this name, but I'm not completely sure.

What do you think? I thought also of "The programming traveler" or "Programmer on the road". Can you think about something else?

I also started working on FCC's weather app project. It should be very easy for me, but when I upload it to CodePen everything starts to mess up. First of all, I need to get the user's location, and on the localhost everything works well, but when you work in CodePen (or any other remote domain), chrome blocks location requests from non-secured connections. Meaning I need to use CodePen's https domain. But then I can't make non-secure requests to other domains, meaning I need to use OpenWeatherMap secure domain, but it works only for paying members, so I can't use that unless I pay.

So I started using DarkSky API, which gives SSL requests for free, but It doesn't give the city from where you are requesting, so I need to use some geolocation service, but then why do I need to use the html5 geolocation service? And if I'm not using it, why do I need to use CodePen's https domain? And then all this trouble I went with changing to DarkSky was redundant.

I left the weather app with that, and finished working on my blog.

Renana started to feel good in the evening, and my throat started aching in the morning. At first it wasn’t so bad and we went to Yoga that day. It's an Indian teacher called Sanjay who works with another Israeli teacher (Noam), they both give lessons at a place called "Nature Valley". If you ever come to Dharamkot, After Om Café, you take a left and start going up the stairs, there's a little temple after a few stairs and Nature Valley's entrance is like one meter before the temple on the right. It's a big tent on the roof of a building.

The Yoga was Hatha yoga, I don't know if that's the meaning but it felt a bit too hippy for us. A lot of prayers, and on the meditation in the end he rubbed some oil on our forehead, which wasn't very comfortable for me. But at least we tried. It was very nice to do yoga at last, and I'm looking forward to the next time.

The throat ache got worse day by day, and I found myself in bed all day, trying to sleep. I don't have a fever so I figured it's mostly my need to sleep good (which I didn't). Yesterday I started eating fresh garlic, and I hope it will help. I'll let it for a few more days, and if I feel the same I will go to a doctor. Today I finally woke up not so tired, but we'll see what happens later :) 

So as you understand I don't have much to write about. Because of the sickness I wasn't in a mood to write or do anything interesting around here. Hopefully I'll have something to write about in the weekend.

What I can tell you about is the weird weather (well weird for me). When the sun is out, it's very hot, but that can change in a matter of seconds. The second the sun is behind a cloud - it gets very cold. Yesterday I woke to the sound of rain on the roof. Heavy rain. Renana just went to buy us something to eat (Sabikh, it's probably not originally from Israel, but it's a dish we eat there, basically egg and eggplant in pita – She bought it from a place called dudu falafel in Bhagsu, very good). So it was raining heavy rain, but the sun was shining and it was very hot. Renana came back after a few minutes and while I was eating my sabikh, it started hailing. It was very weird this rain and hail with the sun, and we really enjoyed it.

Tonight starts Yom Kipur, it's a day when Jews believe that God forgives them for their sins and it's also time to forgive each other for the wrongs we did. I believe that every day can be this day, but I'll use the opportunity to say sorry to everyone I wronged and hurt.

Gmar Chatima Tova.