18 of us spent last weekend in Pushkar, since it was on the way to Jaipur from Jodhpur. What an interesting city. It's a mecca for western hippie tourists, and at points I definitely felt like I was in Venice Beach rather than India. On Saturday afternoon a few of us walked around the lake, looking at the various ghats. We took our time, and it was nice and isolated away from the crowds of tourists - pilgrims or otherwise - that flock to Pushkar. We visited two temples afterwards. The first was for Vishnu if I remember correctly, and we definitely walked in on the priests smoking weed. When they realized we were there they came out of their little side room and told us it was "just incense." Sure. The next was a Brahma temple and was much bigger. We were told we had to leave our things outside, so we went in in shifts - two stayed and held shoes, bags, etc. while the other two went in.
There's a pretty significant Israeli influence in Pushkar, and that combined with all the hippies meant delicious, western food for us. For dinner that night my table of 6 devoured about 5 plates of hummus between us, and I had pesto pasta for dinner. Yum.
The next morning we all woke up for a 5:30 hike to the top of a temple to watch the sunrise. When we set out it was pretty dark, and we didn't exactly know where the trail started. Luckily, everyone we asked pointed us in the right direction. Along the way, this little puppy started walking next to us. And stayed. The whole way up the mountain. Eventually someone picked him up and carried him the last bit, but he was a trooper. After throwing around a few names we came up with Otis Redding. He was really shakey and wouldn't take any of the food or water we tried to feed him, so we think he was still being fed by his mother. There was chai on top of the mountain though, and he drank a little bit of that before sneezing it everywhere. Anyway, watching the sunrise was so beautiful. It was so nice to finally be moving and get some physical exercise. The path was pretty vertical, and was made of stone steps for parts of it too. There were tons of other tourists at the top, but it was still definitely one of my favorite things I've done so far. Afterwards we had a delicious breakfast (muesli with yogurt, honey, mixed fruit and real coffee), and spent the rest of the morning wandering around the stores before our bus to Ajmeer, where we got a train back to Jaipur. It left right on time and was much shorter than I expected it to be.
It was really nice to be back in Jaipur after about 10 days of travel. I unpacked my room more permanently too, so now it looks like I actually live there.
So that concludes last week's travel adventures. On Sunday some of us are going to a village called Laporiya to see their water harvesting system, then next week we're going to the Ranthambore tiger reserve, where we're going to be meeting with some NGO's and going on a tiger safari! I'm pumped. Then Udaipur for the weekend.
Now in this week's news...
I just took my Hindi midterm, which was stressful to say the least. Language for me is like math - it needs to be laid out very clearly with no tricks or ambiguity. Which there's a lot of in Hindi (or at least there is in the way we're being taught).
We had a really good lecturer on globalization and climate change for two days this week - Pradeep Saha ("just Pradeep" as he said on the first day he came). He's an editor at Down to Earth, an environmental magazine. He was definitely the best lecturer we've had so far...it felt like I was back in an American college class. He spoke both very theoretically and very concretely about globalization and climate change, and took a very holistlc approach rather than limiting his talk to specifically India like most lecturers have. Also he was the definition of an Indian hipster. So cool!
And I'm meeting with someone for my ISP tomorrow.
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