Namaste! This past weekend I went with some friends to Rishikesh--the yoga capital of the world. (This is also where The Beatles stayed in an Ashram and wrote The White Album...). It was a quick and cheap ($1) bus ride to the nearby city that is situated on the Ganges. Similar to Varanasi in that it is overrun with white hippies, but very different because the river is CLEAN here, no cremations or floating bodies! This means...SWIMMING!! Yes we did. We went rafting one morning and it was one of my favorite activities in India thus far. While maybe not the safest (safety instructions in a mix of broken English and Hindi), we all had a blast. The water was freezing but so refreshing and the scenery was beautiful! Unfortunately I didn't take my camera (fortunately actually, it would probably be at the bottom of the Ganges if I did), so no pictures of us in the stylish helmets and soaking wet salwaar kameez.
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| View from the balcony of our room at an ashram (more like a guest house for white people as it turns out) |
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| View of the Ganges |
We also went on a sweltering hike to some waterfalls just outside the city. It was beautiful, and after narrowly escaping a monkey stampede, we arrived to find lots of scantily clad Europeans lounging in the cool water. We jumped in dressed in our full salwaar kameez, once again.
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| Waterfall! |
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| Drew, Emmy, Harriet, and me! |
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| The Lakshman Jhula bridge |
One evening we went to the Ganga Aarti, evening prayer on the Ganges.
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| Lots and lots of people |
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| Drew and I sticking our feet in the Ganges at Aarti |
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| Large statue of Shiva |
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| Large (and animated) statue of Hanuman |
Other activities in Rishikesh involved shopping, eating at delicious restaurants, and not thinking about our ISPs... :)
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| Me, Emmy, and a cow |
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| One of many carts selling prayer beads |
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| Just pretend that's me in the raft! |
It was a wonderful, relaxing weekend, and now we're back home and trying to crank out these papers! Just one week left in Dehradun, then a few days in Mussorie for ISP presentations, then Delhi for two days, then HOME. Woah.
In other news, it's pretty crazy thinking how close (compared to the rest of you) I am to where Osama was found. If you Google Map Pakistan and zoom out you can see Abbottabad and Dehradun in the same screen. Trying to be a good American ambassador here, and saying a little prayer for the world.
