goodbye varanasi

i'm really happy to finally be leaving this town. i've been here for around 20 days and this town has worn me out. i'm heading to kushinigar (where buddah died) and then nepal. hopefully wherever i end up offers a slightly slower pace than varanasi. all of these are from the morning boatride i took, so some of them are crooked but i don't care.

sarnath (where buddah gave his first sermon)

sarnath was a nice and quiet break from the madness of varanasi. The first picture is the stupa that marks the spot where siddartha gave his first sermon. the other photo's are from another temple near the stupa. the frescoes covering the walls were amazing i've never seen anything like it.

and more

more faces

varanasi

just a few of the people i've been meeting

Trapped in Benares

I'm starting to feel like i've been trapped in this city forever (kinda like the chickens) and it has been wearing on me, but this place has a way of reeling you back in. You can't trust anyone here that has anything to do with the tourist industry directly. Someone will come up to you and be freindly and buy you a chai (often the chai walla is in on it. you might wonder how i know that? everytime someone buys you a chai you have to watch the exchange of money often the bills they hand the chai walla are just peices of newspaper cut to look like money). then they want to take you to their shop where they manufacture sarrees or something else. "i give you good deal, you get wholesale cost trust me!". what they don't tell you is that they are getting commission for bringing you to someone elses shop (alot of commision). Shop owners already double the price of their products for foreigners. when a tout bring you to a shop the price can be 3 to 10 times more than what you should be paying. The worst part about the touts is that they are relentless! alot of them are rickshaw drivers and will intentionally go out of their way to take you to a shop where they get comission often refusing to take you to your original destination until you go inside and have a look. This is only half of the frustrating things that sometimes make you want to flip out.
then you happen to meet some normal and honest people. The little guy on the left was like most kids out playing and asked me to take a picture of him and his friend. I asked him if he had e-mail or some way for me to send it to him. He got very excited and insisted that i come with him. He ended up taking me home to get his older brothers cell number for me to send it to him. His whole family was there chopping onions and tomatoes in their little two room house (inside a much larger building containing at least twenty other families). his older brother explained that they were doing prep work for the cafe he worked at. His mother served me chai and some hard bread( that was a little like biscotti) while i tried to talk with the older brother. the whole experience was an incredible veiw of indian home life and exactly what i needed to dispel some of the frustration that has been building.

Saraswati the Goddess of education and the nightly Ganga aarti celebration

The first photos are from the nightly Ganga aarti (river worship) . it's a pretty amazing sight people light floating candles and send them out in armies, it looks pretty cool once you get over how much it pollutes an already toxic river.
There have been non-stop celabrations in honor of swarsati for the last three days. it's mostly young guys just going nuts to bad indian techno but it's very entertaining. there was a really crazy parade last night. they had a wall of speakers set up on a bike cart. it was so loud it was shaking the hotel. it was like going to a metal show in the states and watching people mosh and get the crap kicked out of them. the guy pulling the wall of speakers got so into it he stopped pulling and started flailing until someone grabbed him and directed him back to the bike.




the guys at the bottom mobbed me as soon as they saw my camera. i took photo's for 5 minutes while these guys went wild. they were suppose to be marching to the ganga but they got carried away celabrating and wanted their photo taken so badly they forgot about it until one of the leaders came and literally hearded them back down the street with a stick. you can see the saraswati murti in the background.

------>Varanasi

these are the ghats where most religious ceramonies take place. many people come to varanasi to die because doing so offers moksha or liberation from the birth and death cycle. there are two ghats specifically for cremating people and the fires burn 24/7

some of the more well behaved kids

the kids are rabid when they see you have a camera. first they ask for a picture and then for a ruppee and when you tell them no they beg you to take their picture. i was mobbed three times today

this place is crazy and disorienting. It's what i expected india to be like and then some. Varanasi is one of the holiest places in india and is supposedly the longest continuosly inhabited city on the planet. 60,000+ people bathe in the ganges everyday.

mumbai and the train

Mcdonalds is everywhere even india.

i thought about eating there in honor of amber and mike but i couldn't bring myself to do it

goa--->

it feels like it's been a long time since i posted anything even though it hasn't been that long. i lost my glasses while swimming in the ocean, left goa and rode the train to mumbai, got glasses for 30 bucks and then spent 30 hours on the train to varanasi where i am now. kind of a mouthfull.

before i left goa Ladu the guy that owns the house i was staying at dragged me into his resteraunt. the first time i ate there it was good the food was hot and tasty. i ate there a second time and it was disgusting. it was cold had bugs and hair in it. the third time i felt like i had to give him another chance. his mother was there helping him and she insisted that i have thali (all you can eat curry and rice) . they tried talking me into having fish thali and inspite of my explicit instructions she put a fish on the plate just to let me try one. as it turns out ladu and his mother are some of the people that buy the maggoty sun dried fish becasue that's what was on my plate. i managed to eat some of the rice the only thing that was sort of hot. his mother wasn't going to let me leave until i had tried the fish. thankfully ladu caught on and distracted her in the kitchen while i made my get away. luckily i didn't get sick from the rice