Amritsar

Getting from Varanasi to Amritsar turned out to be a lot more difficult than we anticipated. We bought tickets a week or two in advance, but were put on the wait list. There was plenty of time for cancellations, but the morning we were supposed to leave we were still numbers two and three on the waiting list. We went out to the track to talk to the conductor and he told us there were no seats, we had to go and get a refund and buy tickets for another day. This was really not what we wanted to hear since we didn't want to wait two or three more weeks for a confirmed train ticket and we also didn't want to take a 24 hour bus all the way to Amritsar. We had almost given up hope but the last time we went back to him, he said "OK, get on. I'll find you a seat." And he did. I don't know why it was so difficult before and so easy the last time we asked him, but we were just happy to be on the train.

All was well until it was time for us to arrive. We weren't arriving. We looked out the window to see the names of the stations we passed and deduced that we were quite a bit behind schedule. We finally pulled into Amritsar almost four hours late. It's no fun spending an extra four hours on a train, but it's REALLY no fun starting to look for a hotel at 8:30 PM in a new city. We were very lucky though, there is no better place we could have been with these problems.

After leaving the train station we found a free shuttle waiting to take us directly to our destination. Within five minutes after we got there someone was showing us to our room which was no charge (except for our donation). One minute away was a dining hall where we could be served 24 hours a day, also at no charge. "Why?", you might reasonably ask?

Our destination was the Golden Temple which is the holiest site of the Sikh religion. One key thing you should know about the Sikh religion is that they don't believe in the caste system like Hindus do. They believe in treating everyone equally and that is exactly what they do. Their goal is to make the holiest site in their religion accessible to everyone, regardless of caste, religion, nationality, or wealth. This is why they provide a free shuttle and a free place to stay. Instead of just giving free meals to the poor, which they believe perpetuates the class system, they offer free meals to everyone - equally. Very equally. Everyone sits together, in lines on the floor and for at least the duration of that meal no person is better than any other.

It's sounds pretty cool, but really the scale of it all is nothing short of magnificent. They serve 60 - 80 thousand meals every day! And that's when there isn't a festival or a holiday or something going on. I really felt special just to be a part of it. Even more impressive than that is that everyone who works at the temple is a volunteer. The people who serve your food, the people who wash the dishes, peel the garlic - all volunteers. Many of the volunteers are Sikhs, but many or not. Really, anyone can volunteer. All you have to do is just start doing the job you want to help with. It's really wild!

The temple itself is really amazing too. The reason it's called the Golden Temple is because the entire temple is plated in gold. It sits in the middle of a lake and, during the day, houses the most holy book of the Sikh religion. At night they carry the book to its bed in a different building where it stays for the night. True to their belief in equality, anyone can go inside the temple (we haven't been allowed to go in most Hindu temples) and anyone can participate in the ritual of carrying the book to its resting place. We just witnessed this even last night and there was a crowd of people surrounding and helping to carry the palanquin used to transport the book. I would have jumped in to help myself, but I could see that participating in this ritual meant a lot more to some of the other people there than it did to me.

The Golden Temple is really the main attraction in Amritsar and we couldn't expect anything more, really. But there are some other interesting things in the area as well. Yesterday we took a shared taxi to the Indian-Pakistani border at Atari where they have a ceremony every day to close the border. While this might sound a little dull, it's anything but. The border guards are dressed in a uniform that I can honestly say is nothing short of ridiculous. Imagine someone in a military uniform wearing some kind of hat with a one and a half foot fan on top of it. Yeah. Then imagine these guards stomping around (sometimes almost at a jog), waving their arms back and forth at insanely fast speeds, and performing high kicks that reach within an inch of their forehead. At the end of it all they shake hands, lower the flags, and the gates slam shut. The Indians love it! They have stands built, almost like a stadium for the people (mostly Indians, but some foreigners) to come witness this ceremony. It's kind of unbelievable really.

We arranged for our taxi to take us from the Golden Temple to the ceremony and then back again after the ceremony was finished. We didn't expect our driver would want to take us to a couple more temples on the way home, but we were excited to see them since it isn't always so easy for us to get to these places and hiring taxis isn't normally in our budget. We weren't prepared for what he had to show us.

The first temple I can only describe as some kind of bizarre Hindu fun house. I don't mean to be rude by calling it this, but there is simply no better way I can describe it. This place had many of the things you'd expect from a Hindu temple like statues of Gods, places for offerings, and things like this. But it had other things as well. First of all, you had to travel along a very circuitous route. Up stairs, down stairs, through little alleys, etc. Many of the rooms had broken mirror mosaics as well as a variety of other things we didn't understand. At one point we had to crawl through some sort of artificial cave. We looked up to see a cow's udder on the ceiling that was dripping like a stalagtite. Another time we had to roll up our pants and walk through ankle deep water for some purpose that was beyond our understanding. At the end of it all there was a man sitting who told us to kneel as he put a necklace of marigolds on each of us, gave us a mark on our forehead (the third eye), tied some kind of shiny, glitter cloth around our heads, and gave us a sweet coconut treat, then said thank you and goodbye. At the end of it all we just looked at each other trying to comprehend all that we had just experienced and completely failing to do so. But the night wasn't over yet, there was still time for one more stop!

At the next stop we got out of the taxi and just did a double take. The temple we were looking at looked exactly like the golden temple. Completely plated in gold, sitting in the middle of a large lake, and everything. But it wasn't the golden temple. It was the Hindu version of the golden temple. I guess they liked the Sikh's idea so much, they built their own! Even though this temple looks golden just like the actual Golden temple it is instead called the Silver Temple because of its silver doors. The whole time we were walking around it we were trying to figure out why the Hindus would build what was almost a replica of the Sikh's holiest site just a few miles away. It's something for us to think about.

It's been a really eventful last several days, I'm really happy to get all this up on the blog. We're planning now to do just a few more things here and then tomorrow we will head to Mcleod Ganj, the residence of the Dalai Lama and many refugees of Tibetan Buddhism.