“Keep smiling you in Pushkar”

We’re in Pushkar, a small town in the middle of the desert of Rajasthan. Despite the desert-like nature of the place, it manages to have a very holy lake in the middle of it which draws thousands upon thousands of visitors a year. There are many ghats, stairs down into the holy water, where priests will do puja (worship) with you (for a donation, usually). Yesterday we walked through the main bazaar to the Brahma temple, where our teachers took us inside and we did something. (I don’t know what to call it. Puja?) We took off our shoes outside, left our bags with a teacher, the women covered their heads, and then we walked up the many many white marble steps. Apparently you’re not supposed to step on the last step before entering the temple–it’s inauspicious and everything here is about auspiciousness–but unfortunately I didn’t learn this until afterwords. Inside there is a small gazebo-type platform thingie, at the back of which is an icon of Lord Brahma (forgive me if I’m chosing the wrong words here). We offered orange flowers into one square-shaped bowl, and the man standing there gave us purple flowers that we took to the man standing in front of the image of Brahma. We gave him the purple flowers (presumably as an offering to Lord Brahma) and stood there for a minute. We then left the gazebo thingie and walked around it clockwise. I don’t know why we go clockwise. I asked a teacher and she said it’s just part of puja. Unfortunately you can’t take pictures of the temple, so I have no photos to paste, but it’s quite beautiful and it was really interesting to watch the different kinds of people in there. Pushkar is a big tourist town (so big with Israelis, in fact, that many signs are written in Hindi and in Hebrew) so there were a fair number of videshiis (foreigners) in the temple.

Our hotel is a government-run hotel which is okay. The outside is quite charming and beautiful, and the inside is sufficient. (My standards for Indian hotel rooms are still high when compared to my peers, I think.)

This morning I got up quite early and took a hike with some friends to the top of a small mountain where there is a temple to Savitri, one of the wives of Brahma. From down below it looks like quite a walk (which it was):

When we starting climbing up the hill I felt like I was heading off into an Indiana Jones movie:

And the best part: there were monkeys!! Langurs, the long-tailed monkeys. There was a family of them hanging out up there.

Of course we can’t take pictures of the temple itself, but we did get a nice photo of the view of Pushkar. You can see the holy lake in the background.

And, because I’m short on time, here are some random other pictures of Pushkar. Although the town is a bit touristy, it’s main bazaar is small and relatively free of traffic (particularly rickshaws) so it’s a rather pleasant walk through old twisty streets. One of my friends said that Pushkar looks the way a foreigner would expect India to look, and that’s probably true.

Cows: the untold story

Someone told me that the cows here are all owned by people. And that at night, everyone finds their own cows and herds them off. To where exactly, I do not know, as this is a city with not a lot of pastureland. I assumed that was why the cows were eating garbage in the first place, because there was nowhere to put the cows. Where do the cows go at night? Into people’s apartments? It is a mystery to me. So if the cows are not wandering cows, if they truly belong to people, then are these cows used for producing milk? (Why else would one own a cow that one considered holy and un-eat-able?) So these cows that people own, they eat the trash off the street, and so I have to wonder: Are they producing the milk that goes into my morning lassi (yogurt drink)? Or the paneer in my lunch? Is that street trash being recycled into my evening meal? I try not to think about this, but I am definitely curious.

Although it’s becoming more normal to walk by cows on the street (and pigs and goats and dogs and camels and horses), I don’t know if I will ever stop being startled by the sight of such LARGE agricultural animals nosing through the large piles of trash. There are some really fat pigs and cows here. I think it’s a permanently startling sight.

Also, we had a monkey on the roof last night! (And yes, I can say that in Hindi. I can’t say “leave me alone,” but I can tell a story about monkeys!) I didn’t see it on our own roof, but I saw it hopping around the neighbor’s roofs. Except for their funny-looking red bottoms, they are so human-like it’s startling. Every time I see a monkey I’m startled by this, especially by their eyes.

As for the other wildlife in the street, the Jaipuri men have been leaving me along a little bit more. I’ve cultivated my scowl, and I’ve been draping myself in excessive layers of clothing (so much that I’m starting to think a burqa would simply have to be more comfortable). I’ve also been trying to go with people when I walk somewhere, but I’ve had less success with that. The harassment is a big downer. There’s nothing like constantly getting the message that you’re a second-class citizen who’s not entitled to decide what happens to her own body to make a girl feel blue. It’s really made me dislike this city, which is a shame, because I hear lots of other people rave about how wonderful it is. Why, just today, we had a (male) professor from the US talk about how easy it is to talk to shopkeepers in Jaipur. Yep, easy. Until they start following you down the street, and send their brother to look for you after you’ve finally ditched them, and generally keep harassing you (happened to me and Clare). I’m betting that this has never happened to that particular professor. I’m still pretty cynical about this, clearly.

Today is Friday. On Sunday we leave for a short “Hindi camp” trip to Ajmer and Pushkar. After Hindi camp we have a five-day break. Some friends and I will be leaving on a massively-unplanned trip straight from Hindi camp to go north to Amritsar and Dharamshala, so I won’t be back in school until July 21. I’ll try to update from the road, but as the trip itself is unplanned, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to find the internet. But: HIMALAYAS! How awesome is that?

Overall, I’m feeling better but still pretty down. This trip has been really really hard, and some snarky comments from classmates (“If you feel like you can’t wait to get back to America something is WRONG”) have left me feeling sort of…lame. I know it really is hard, and I shouldn’t feel bad, but I do. The exciting news is that when I get back from my trip to the Himalayas, two good things will happen: this whole adventure will be halfway DONE, and the following week I’ll get to meet Kathleen O’Reilly, a prof. who studies water and society and gender in Rajasthan. How perfect is that?

picture post: hawa mahel, snake charmer, city palace, jantar mantar

I’m trying to cobble together a picture post here; let me know if you can’t see them. It’s been a bit of a tricky process.

Yesterday we went to the Hawa Mahel (literally, “Place of winds.”) It’s a one-room deep giant wall that was built so the “ladies of the royal household” (read: harem) could watch street events without being seen (I believe they were under purdah). It’s tall but only one room deep, so it looks rather a bit funny, but the architecture is really detailed and beautiful:

I was a bit surprised at how small the rooms and hallways were, though:

This is the view of the back of the Hawa Mahel. We were on top of a little turret-thinger (I don’t know what it was used for) when I took this one.

This is a picture of some of the scaffolding used in construction on the Hawa Mahel. All the scaffolding here is like this. It looks like trees tied together.

Here’s a picture of the front of the Hawa Mahel. Beautiful, no? You can see all the little rooms with their screens and windows that the ladies would hide behind.

From there we went to the City Palace. On the way into the city palace we passed through several bazaars, one of which was a bazaar of lots of different types of grain. We stopped to talk to one of the grain sellers (he was impressed that we all were learning Hindi, of course) and there were hundreds and hundreds of pigeons on the ground behind him. I got out my camera to take a picture of them, and before I knew it, he clapped really loudly and they all took off at once:

Outside the City Palace we met a snake charmer. Yes, that’s a real snake. And yes, it would try to bite him when he wasn’t playing. But the snake had (in theory) all of its poison removed, so it was not too much of a danger. He asked if I wanted to get closer to it, I could touch it if I wanted, he said, but I politely declined.

The entrance to the City Palace is a road with a series of gates with beautiful detailed architecture and paint. This is just one example of the side of one gate:

Inside the palace, there are many beautifully decorated doors and gates. There are beautiful rooms, too, but they were closed to the public when we were there. This is a photo of the top of a pretty famous door there, the peacock door (yes, the peacocks really are 3-D!):

Also, we found some lovely elephant statues next to another gateway.

And finally, after lunch (we had tasty Indian food and giant bowls of ice cream), we saw a band of monkeys hanging out on someone’s roof!

Also, since I haven’t posted a cow picture yet, here you go. We saw these cows just outside City Palace. They really do wander all over, and cars really do have to veer around them.

And finally, here is a picture of our school. Yes, our school is in an apartment building, but it works really well that way. There are a lot of bathrooms, a lot of rooms, and we have our own kitchen which means we can have the staff make lunch right on the premises.

After City Palace, Clare and I did some shopping in the bazaars. That was an adventure, and after I make sure these photos post successfully I’ll write about that too.