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.

Jaipur

So for the past six weeks I have been living with an Indian family in Jaipur and taking Hindi classes and conducting research. This afternoon we're leaving on an overnight train to Varanasi and I am sad to go, but ready to leave. I'll miss my homestay family even though they were kind of crazy at times. They are an extremely traditional joint family so there are always lots of people around which I really enjoyed, but they are also very nosy and would only speak to us in Hindi most of the time.

Jaipur is a bit ridiculous. Women don't really ever go out in public if they don't have to because they get harassed on the street by Indian men. I have become an expert at walking quickly with my head down and am in the habit of wearing a shawl all the time which can be used sort of like an invisibility cloak.

Last weekend we went to the Pushkar Camel Fair which was one of the best experiences I've had so far. Villagers come from all over Rajasthan with their camels. I rode a camel, it's pretty much like riding a horse except way better. I tried to make it go as fast as it could which is not very fast.

I'll try to write more later but this is a start! Need to go finish packing...

Love, Sarah