Tour Day 4

Last day in Delhi and only three of us at yoga. Everyone else is enjoying the sleep in but I am a glutton for Indian experiences.

We had a fun Hindi lesson to start the day and have worked through the alphabet. Slowly picking up some useful words "mera nahm Dee hai" (my name is Dee) and have also been learning some naughty Arabic words from my fellow students from UAE and Bahrain. 

The morning was filled with visits to a variety of temples. First one was Birla Temple, a Hindu temple which was beautiful and filled with some statues of their 84 hundred thousand (that's how they said it) gods. The Ganesh statue was gorgeous and my favorite, partly due to the story of Hinduism's beginning starting with the creation of Ganesh, son of Shiva the god of destruction.

We stopped to chat to a western women praying in the temple, her name was Anna and she was from Switzerland. Anna travels to India 3 times a year to holiday and study Hinduism. She is an archeologist in Switzerland and said she was not at all religious and through her professional career she felt that she had seen sufficient proof to say god did not exist as Christianity believed. She then fell in love with the philosophy of Hindu. To Anna it is not a religion. I thoroughly enjoyed her perspective on life and the Hindu perspective of god is in all of us.

Next stop was sikh temple. We first had to take our shoes off and wear a scarf to cover our hair, we looked like a bunch of pirates. The beautiful marble path on the way to the temple was partly obstructed as they were mixing concrete on it for some renovations. Who mixes concrete on marble floors? Lol. Before we could go up the staircase we had to wade through a small trough to wash our feet, now you may or may not be aware but I have a slight case of OCD and this clean water trough was very murky and there was no avoiding having to step in it. I managed to stretch my step to reach the far edge of the water to where the clean water was running out, so I figure there was less foot soup at that point (that's what I tell myself). Hattan from UAE caught my OCD moment and he thinks it's hilarious, he looks for my facial reactions when suggestions are made about where we are eating or if we have to use public toilets. 

Anyway, back to the Sikh temple and our pirate group. The temple was beautiful and the ceiling was made of decrotaive solid gold. On exit a Sikh guard hands out a traditional sweet dish to all the worshippers. When I say hands it out, he scoops a handful up and serves it in your hand. 

In the evening we went to see another Hindi movie. This one was called Rockstar. I was lucky to be sat next to our tour guide Abijheet and he decoded the movie slightly for me, although most of it I could work out. It was an awesome movie and the soundtrack was brilliant, I'm going to buy the soundtrack before I leave India.

Have to spend the evening now packing ready for our first domestic flight.

Phir milen-gay. (see you later).