Banaras

We took the overnight train from Jaipur to Varanasi/Banaras/Kashi on Monday, arriving here on tuesday after 20 hours. saying goodbye to my host family was sad- I miss them now. The director of our program in Banaras is a hilarious older man named Ranaji who is taking us to tons of religious sites because that's basically all there is to see here. he is obsessed with numerology, geography/geology, and cultural astronomy. he therefore knows exactly how far away and in what direction things are from each other and how many of everything there is and what that means. if the number of something isn't obviously significant, you add all the digits or divide them by 3 or 9 until you reach an auspicious number. For instance, there are three realms (heaven, earth, the underworld); five gross elements; seven days of the week, levels of the atmosphere, chakras, etc.

A few days ago we went on a morning boat ride down the Ganga, stopping at various ghats to check different things out- one of them being the main cremation ghat. It was interesting in some ways, but I also just felt like we shouldn't have been there. It has become somewhat of a tourist destination. This made me very uncomfortable. Also, people were bathing and washing clothes not more than 20 feet downstream.

Banaras is very dirty.

Ranaji also loves pilgrimages. Today we went on the Panchakroshi pilgrimage for eight hours, which was fortunate because it's supposed to take five days walking, but we had jeeps. We saw a lot of temples. Relatively uneventful.

Cynthia, our assistant director, got back today. For the past few days she has been in Nepal for the installation of a new reincarnate of a lama in the village she used to live in.