Tourists Again

BCT spoiled us. There we were treated as guests, visitors, and by the end we felt like a part of their community. No one ever asked us for a single thing (well, except for the calls of "photo, photo, sister, photo please!" by the students). In fact, everyone kept giving to us.

So it was quite a shock arriving in Bhubaneswar, then in Varanasi, and now in Delhi and being seen as just another tourist again, hounded by rickshaw drivers, 'guides', and shop owners. It made us realize once again that even though it's nice to be tourists for a bit, we're so happy that our trip has been about more than just that.

We only had a few hours transit time in Bhubaneswar so we stored our luggage and hopped on a cycle rickshaw to see a few of the temples we'd read about. At Raja Rani Mandir we took off our shoes to enter the temple, but one of the older men who was part of the exercise circle just outside told us there was no reason to remove our shoes since the temple contained no deity. I took a peek inside but decided not to go any further because of the rather unpleasant smell. Michael forged ahead and discovered the source of the smell along with another reason why it was good to keep his shoes on--the floor of the temple was covered in droppings from the hundreds of bats who made their home in the temple (definitely not a place for you David!). We decided to stick to the outside which was decorated with beautiful carvings of lions, elephants and dancers. We enjoyed a tasty Dosa for lunch before boarding our next overnight train to Varanasi.

In Varanasi we were fortunate to be under the care of Professor Krishna Murty, a relative of Sreenivasa. He picked us up at the train station and arranged for an auto rickshaw to take us to Sarnath, 10 km away, where the Buddha preached his first sermon of the middle way to Nirvana. We also got to see an offspring of the tree under which Buddha achieved enlightenment, as well as a beautiful new Buddhist temple. In the evening Krishna took us down to the Ghats where we experienced the daily ceremony honoring the Ganges. Krishna then even took us to his home for dinner, where we met his wife and sister.

After a good night's sleep we went out for a boat ride on the Ganges the next morning. From the boat we had a good view of all the activity on the Ghats--men, women and children washing away their sins in the Ganges, cows and bulls grazing in the trash, fishermen at work, smoldering funeral pyres, and scraggly hippie westeners searching for their own Nirvana. A few Dosas, a couple of rickshaw rides, and a frustrating attempt at communication at an internet cafe- later and we were off on our fourth and final overnight train ride in India. We've become experts at sleeping comfortably on top of all of our stuff and last night we felt lucky to have our sleeping bags (though we got plenty of stares) since it turned unexpectedly cold.

We're now still at the Delhi train station, we figured we'd wait until it was light out to find our hotel. Michael's busy uploading photos right now and we plan to get all caught up during our days here in Delhi.

We also just noticed that the new BCT website is now live. It still needs quite a few corrections and adjustments and is far from complete (we still have about 8 more interviews to put up), but we're pretty proud of ourselves for the amount we did in such a short amount of time! Michael spent most of his time creating the village across the top from photos of actual BCT and village buidings and people. We'd love to hear any feedback and suggestions you have as we continue to work on it.