Amritsar

A truly stellar weekend. It started early on Friday when we got up to see if we could catch up with the Dalai Lama one more time, and we were finally successful. He was speaking at the Tibetan Children's Village, a school that offers free education and I think housing to Tibetan refugee children. It's a really beautiful place right on the side of a mountain and covered with pine trees. It's a little above McLeod, which is a little above Dharamsala, and a lot more remote. We were able to see him drive in and could listen to the English translation of his speech on a radio outside, but only Tibetan children were allowed an actual audience. It was very cool to see how eager all of the Tibetans were to see him, the second he drove in everyone was on their feet.

After work on Friday four of us piled in a car with our trusty driver Rinku and headed for Amritsar. On Saturday we got up a 3:00 to head to the Golden Temple. The temple itself opens at 4:00 and there is a ceremony at 4:30 to "wake up" the Guru Granth Sahib, the original copy of the Sikh holy book. It is then "put to sleep" at 10:30 every night. We caught the tail end of the ceremony and then got in line to go into the temple. The temple itself sits in the middle of a rectangular pool of holy water, which is in the middle of a rectangular compund of buildings (museum, living quarters, kitchen, etc.). There is a bridge leading to the temple about 30 feet wide and a little less than a football field long and the line to get inside literally fills up the whole bridge. Shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of other people, at 4:45 in the morning, we waited an hour to get in the temple and got there five feet at a time. The whole time I was just so struck by the devotion of all of these hundreds, probably thousands in the whole compuond, of people, who were up well before dawn on an ordinary day. What extraordinary faith the Sikhs have. They're beautiful people too. They don't cut their hair, so all of the men have these great turbans and long beards and look exceptionally cool. The little boys don't wear turbans yet, so instead they wear their hair in a bun right on top of their forehead and put what looks like a tiny shower cap over it. The temple guards all wear royal blue turbans, orange salwars (long shirts), white pants, and carry legitimate spears. And the women, just like all Indian women, are just beautiful.

Once we got inside the temple, which is pretty small all things considered, we were ushered out within two minutes so that all of the hundreds behind us could have their turn. The floor was all of marble but literally the rest of the temple is made of pure gold. There were men inside chanting from Guru Granth Sahib and others were playing music. Either all of the men were wearing royal blue or there were royal blue tapestries hanging from the walls, but either way, it was truly stunning. After you exit the temple (to the left) you wind back around clockwise to receive holy water and get off the island. Afterwards we wandered around the compound until about 7:00 and decided to call it a morning and go back to sleep.

Around 4:00 that afternoon we headed out to Attari, a little town about 30 minutes away from Amritsar, right on the Pakistan border. Every single day there is a ceremony, celebration, block party, pep rally, riot, whatever you want to call it, celebrating the symbollic closing of the India-Pakistan border. We got there at 4:30 and realized that the ceremony doesn't start until 6:30 but that was ok, because the party starts early. There was grand stand seating leading up to the gate the separates India and Pakistan and it was PACKED. Fortunately, and oddly enough, there is VIP seating for westerners and we were able to sit right in the front. For the next two hours there was music, dancing in the street, cheering, and sweating. Lots and lots and lots of sweating. Sweatiest I've ever been. That's alright though, because it was exceptionally fun. The ceremony itself is basically just a bunch of pomp and circumstance, namely funny hats, loud yelling, stern looking men and high kicks. Both sides take their sweet time prancing around high kicking and lowering their respective flags and then close the gate for the night. As soon as they close the gate its a mad scene. People rush the gate for whatever reason and just carry on yelling for a really long time. What's wild about the whole things is that the Pakistan side is basically empty and extremely quiet. The men and women sat on opposite sides and the women's side had tops 10 people on it, all wearing burkhas.

That's it as far as weekend excitement goes. It was really great and a true blast but it's nice to be back where the air is cool and the sleeping hours normal.