Some of my French friends and I went to Amritsar in Punjab. It's one of the super holy places of the Sikhs (I believe Punjab is the state were Sikhism originated). Sikhs are known for wearing Turbans and having beards. They also traditionally wear a certain type of bracelet, a sword (nowadays mostly a small decorative one), a special type of underwear, and a special comb. We were planning on seeing the famous Golden Temple there and go to the Pakistani border to see some sort of a ceremonial dance between the Indian border guards and the Pakistani guards. The plan was then to also sleep in the Golden Temple, which is apparently allowed.
The train ride there was a night train. It was fun because people were very friendly. Most people are charmed by the idea that I might be trying to learn Hindi. I generally try to spell their names when I meet them and they generally get a kick out of it. My vocabulary is not increasing at a particularly fast rate though. The one thing I am getting skilled at is talking about food. I got the traditional swearing course from two of my first Indian friends fairy early, but my useful vocabulary is still pretty low.
One young guy saw me struggling to speak Hindi with this old guy before my train arrived and then decided to sit down next to me. He told me a bit of his philosophy. He also mentioned that he thought that learning Hindi wasn't particularly useful for me. I gave him various arguments on how it improves my mind at the time, but I'm left with the nagging doubt that maybe he's right. It is a very esoteric thing to learn, particularly when I'm faced with a culture in which probably the majority of people speak English anyway. The vernacular seems to be Hindi, but almost everyone I generally talk to is quite good at English.
Anyway we met a variety of people on the train, I was surprised to meet a group of tech service representatives for Del. They were very friendly, and their leader Sukhmit explained to me his theory of how everyone was essentially the same. The next day he showed us the Golden Temple and was kind enough to negotiate a bus to the border for us. I was a little weirded out because my French friends who had been with him previously said he behaved markedly different when I showed up (apparently he was very curious to see how an American would react to his theory or something). So I was a bit on edge after learning this. In any case, he was a great host for Amritsar (although he lives in Delhi) and he cued us in on a lot of interesting stuff about the golden temple etc..
The golden temple was beautiful. Essentially it consists of an outer wall, which surrounds a lake and at the center of the lake is a gold-plated temple. We had to remove our shoes before entering, which everyone warns you not to do in India because of parasites and the like. Oh well, so we walked around and then Sukhmit took us across the one walkway to the golden temple. (There were two lines of people waiting to get in. We were somehow in a VIP line and bypassed almost everyone.) Double standards don't seem to be too uncommon here, though. We bought something that I think was called a Prashad before entering and it was parted in two by a priest with a large knife. Apparently one half is for god, and the other half is for the bringer. After seeing the inside of the golden temple, which was very pretty, we (by we I mean all the Indians and mostly just me) drank a sip of water out of the lake. The holy water apparently is good for a lot of things, and if you bath in it you retain eternal life or youth or something. Everyone who comes to the temple bathes there. (Except us, apparently.) So there must either be a lot of immortal or eternally young people in India.
After leaving the temple we went to the border which was disappointing. Some Indian dudes in funny looking hats and some Pakistani guards in similar outfits did a weird high stepping sort of ceremony to raise and lower a flag. Out of solidarity to Sukhmit and co we waited in the Indian bleachers. It was pretty unpleasant seeing as how somehow the crowd couldn't be coaxed into sitting down. So we ended up standing for two hours in the heat and being jostled by tons of equally sweaty Indians. It was hot and unpleasant, and Sukhmit and co ended up leaving because they were bored without telling us, so solidarity was no longer a valid excuse for being there. It was cool how the crowd responded to the chanting various slogans called out by the guards. The group energy or whatever is impressive. I did not understand where the actual guard even thingumugummy was going on, so I was looking in the wrong direction for quite a while. I don't regret having gone, but I wouldn't recommend it.
We stopped by this bizarre temple to this Vaishna Devi goddess. It was a reproduction of another temple in Kashmir. It had many large statues and obstacle (for instance a giant head only slightly smaller than myself) like things to tell the story of how she was followed by this evil guy who was out to kill her. At one point we walked through this big mouth into an artificial stream. It was like a haunted house of sorts. In the story she wins by killing the evil dude. I only learned this afterwards, the story was not at all clear to me from the assortment of stuff in the temple. Holy water was also offered here to drink, but I decided one chance at getting a holy nematode in my system was enough so I declined.
We ended up sleeping in the Golden temple in Amritsar. By in the golden temple I mean on the marble floor. I slept well, after I got over the paranoia of what might happen to me or my stuff. There are three types of Indians who talk to tourists it seems. One is a friendly type who wants to learn about this or that or help me or improve their english, another is out to make fun of the tourists, and the third is out to get money somehow. I met some of the first two types in the temple. So manu pf them were pretty nice.
At around 3 we were woken up so that they could pour water on the floor, and around 5 we were woken up because holy rites were being performed and it was sacrilegious to sleep. They then showed us to this guest room for foreigners. Apparently we shouldn't have slept on the floor. The last day we just went to the Ranjid Singh museum, who was a distinguished Sikh king of Punjab. It was very interesting, although we also had to remove our shoes for it as well. Using the bathroom barefoot is pretty gross. Apparently the way to be remembered in history is to fight wars (and probably win them).
Last week a bunch of cultural events were going on. In particular a music night and a duo dance thing. All the hostels are in competition for the trophy for the year. Apparently the contest gets pretty towards the end of the year, but this was only the beginning. Yet for the music thing, there was an attempt by the other hostels to disqualify our hostel using a technicality. (This is understandable as our hostel is the best at cultural events, and hopefully everything else I might add.) We won both the music thing and the dance competition. The chanting was pretty sweet. Our entire hostel screamed stuff like Jaya Kumaon at the top of our lungs. (Hail Kumaon, which is our hostel name.) I joined in for the stuff I could pronounce. All the other hostels did the same for their hostels. It was worth going to only for the screaming, I think. The dance thing was better than the music thing. In the dance competition 2 people from each hostel danced with props and other things. They were by and large pretty good, with some tricks with shadows being very popular. They also had a gimmick with a little midget made out of the two dancers and a screen. Besides that, some cool things were a sort of reflection thing done where our dancers pretended to be the reflection of one another. Another hostel had one dancer put on white pants and the other a white jacket, hat and tie. They then turned off all the lights except for a black light. The effect was pretty good.
I am supposed to represent our hostel in the scrabble event. I am too slow at the moment, so I've been training with some of the scrabblewalas here. (Adding the wala to a word signifies a person who is associated with that thing. Scrabblewala is not actually used, but I like it.) I'm too slow, so they insist that I train continually before the event. I have been enlisted by the water polo team too, but if I can manage to avoid playing I prolly will.
I was at the banks of the Ganges last weekend. I saw a lot monkeys there and was attacked by a cow. Most of them are pretty peaceful, but this one must have sensed my many crimes against the Bovine species, so it headbutted raised me off the ground with it's horns. Fortunately someone thought ahead far enough to saw the tips of the its horns. Other wise I'd probably be returning to the US in an extremely castrated and otherwise disemboweled state. I hope everyone who reads this eats a hamburger out of solidarity.
In any case, that's pretty much the gist of what has been going on here. Writing these emails takes a long time, but I figure it's good to document weird stuff in the end. Looking over the length of this one, I think I can see how blog writers develop their megalomaniacal tendency to assume everything that happens to them interests other people.
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