Hi everyone!
I’ve just finished quite a bit of traveling through northern India, and am now settled in the city of Chennai on the southern coast. Now that I have a free moment, and decent internet access, I thought I’d send this update on how my adventures in India have been going.
Me and the other folks on the overseas program spent about three weeks in Delhi, which is a fun and very intense city. There are a lot of parks in Delhi where you can have a peaceful rest, but most of the city is a complex mixture of wealth, poverty, crazy traffic, people trying to sell you things, and so on. I really came to love Old Delhi, which is a maze of tiny streets lined with all kinds of shops. It is astonishing how many bicycles, motorcycles, people, cows, and occasional monkeys can squish through such small spaces, and generally never hit each other. I was also really amazed at all the holy places that are spread around Delhi. It seems like every couple of blocks there is an Islamic mosque, or a Hindu temple, or some other holy space, with people fervently praying at all hours. One of my favorites was a Jain temple that is covered with hundreds of thousands of electric lights, which glow and spin in the night sky. Very impressive!
We also took a trip for a couple of days to the city of Agra, where the Taj Mahal is located. The Taj is really massive and beautiful–it is definitely something to see at least once in your life! Agra is also known for all of its monkeys, which are cute (especially the little babies) but also quite the trouble makers (they try to steal stuff). We went into a temple that humans have essentially abandoned, and which has been taken over by monkeys, and it felt like going into a den full of rather smelly, chattering pirates. Luckily we all got out alive, and with all our stuff, so we triumphed over the monkey pirates.
For the last week or so I’ve been traveling with my colleague Nicole and a smaller group of students across northern India. We started out by taking a crazy over-night bus ride from Delhi to Dharamsala, which is where the Dalai Lama has resided and taught since escaping from Chinese-controlled Tibet in 1959. The neighborhoods around the Dalai Lama’s temple are full of coffee shops, great restaurants, and cool stores, and the atmosphere is more relaxed than Delhi or Agra. Everything is built on ridges that rise from the plains into the Himalayan mountains, so there are cool vistas and pathways everywhere you turn. One day we hiked for about 4 hours straight up to the snow line of the first line of Himalayan peaks, and I got to see goat herders and clear mountain streams and all kinds of other beautiful sites. I also got to meditate quite a bit in the Dalai Lama’s temple during the days I was there, which was really powerful.
Then Nicole and I took another bus to the city of Amristar, which is on the border of Pakistan. India and Pakistan have had border tensions for decades, and in Amristar this takes on a somewhat weird and theatrical form. Every evening, soldiers in all their regalia line up on either side of the border, and then do these intense marching sequences in front of each other. For instance, an Indian soldier will march really fast up to the border gate, while a Pakistani soldier rushes up from the other side. They stop just a few feet away from each other, and do all kinds gyrations. Meanwhile, patriotic chants and drum rolls are blasted through loudspeakers, and crowds of people yell at each other across the border. It all seems like a strange sporting event with soldier-cheerleaders, but each of the teams has guns and missiles and nuclear weapons instead of soccer balls… Amristar is also where the Golden Temple of the Sikhs is located. This temple is massive and very ornate, and the people are very devout when they are in that space, so it has a really powerful feeling. We slept in a pilgrim’s area inside the temple one night, which was really interesting. All Sikh men are required to wear a dagger or sword slung across their shoulder, along with a turban, so I felt like I was in a religious but very piratey kind of place. But everyone was extremely friendly and welcoming there.
After Amristar, we got on an airplane and flew to the coastal city of Chennai. All the students had been on their own independent adventures in different parts of India, and so it was a relief when everyone made it safely to Chennai (where we will be studying for the next few weeks). Almost everyone has gotten a bit of stomach flue here and there (except me, I am still waiting for that to happen), and some students have had slightly strange things happen to them once in awhile, but overall everyone has been remarkably healthy and safe (thank ganesha!). Everyone is in quite good spirits, too.
: ) Bruce