Amritsar: Home of the Sikhs

We arrived into Bangkok yesterday and we are now in northern Thailand in a city called Chiang Mai. We are already loving the amazing Thai street food: mango sticky rice, pad thai, fresh fruits, thai iced tea, and crepes!

We still have a lot to share about India. Here are some photos from a city called Amritsar that we visited in August.

Note the "Horn Please." It does not seem that anyone here needs a reminder. This photo was taken on our way to Amritsar - another overnight bus ride in a bus with one of the world's worst horn systems.

The Golden Temple. This is the holiest place in the world for the Sikh religion, and after visiting numerous holy sites in various countries, Alisa and I will be so bold to say that this is our favorite. It seems to us that it is hard to find the fine line between serenity and earthliness. Some places are so serene they feel sterile - the police men and soldiers make the serenity seem so forced that it is no longer human. Then other places are so "human" they can be suffocating - when people can sell merchandise, pee, or take photos on temple grounds in can be harder to find the serenity. For us, the Golden Temple, which receives tens of thousands of visitors a day, still maintained a satisfying balance of the sacred and the profane.

The community kitchen, or langar, is a good example of this balance. Every Sikh temple has a kitchen which serves all who enter, regardless of caste, class, or creed, 24 hours a day.

There were lots of volunteers hard at work to keep everything running very smoothly.

Everyone sits on the floor to eat, partly as a symbol of all people's equality. Even the prime minister of India has eaten on this floor.

Anyone is allowed to sleep inside the temple.

They have rooms with beds for a small fee, but also free accommodation on the floor. The temple also has free accommodation for foreign visitors, like us, in a special dorm room. In this room, we met people from all over, including Mexico, Spain, Malaysia, Korea, China, Ireland, and Argentina. We even randomly ran into Sean Andrew, who goes to Santa Clara University, but we had never met before!

A shoe salesman getting his beard curled.


Hindu gods, Sikh gurus, Indian movie stars, and white babies. This man has it all.

We had the following conversation with this man:

Man: To which country do you belong?
Us: Amerrrica.
Man: Ah, I'm going to Germany next week.
Us: Uh . . . wow, sounds great!

A similar type conversation with a young Indian woman we met 3 weeks ago:

Girl: To which country do you belong?
Us: Amerrrica.
Girl: Ah, my uncle lives in Australia.
Us: Uh . . . wow. We hear Australia's really nice . . .

Usually, though, the conversations are pretty much always like this:

Indian person: To which country do you belong?
Us: Amerrrica.
Indian person: Ah! Amerrrica! Good country! Very rich. My uncle (or aunt or cousin brother or friend) lives in Texas (or Washington DC or California or New Jersey or Chicago).

Until last week, when the conversations suddenly took a sharp turn:

Indian person: To which country do you belong?
Us: Amerrrica.
Indian person: Ah! Amerrrica.! Very bad economy. Very big problems.
Us: Oh . . . uh, yeah.

A man giving tattoos on the street corner next to a man making dentures.

Who wouldn't trust this face with their permanent tattoo?

We went with our new Malaysian friend to watch the nightly showdown at the Indian-Pakistani border. The Indian soldiers were looking pretty sharp.
Hundreds of Indians gather every evening at sundown to watch their soldiers have a dance-off with the Pakistani soldiers. The soldiers shout, high-step, and stomp and the crowd goes wild.

One last shot of the beautiful golden temple at night.