takin' it easy in pokhara/massive photo post!

so now were in a much chiller town called pokhara and unfortunately seriously heavy rain has been dumping down on us to remind us we're silly and that were here during the monsoon season. but that's ok cause were still having fun! oh and our guesthouse, called the little tibetan guesthouse is the cutest thing ever! its one of the nicest and cleanest places ive stayed, with a pretty garden, and its like $3 per person. i love nepal! yesterday we rented motorbikes and went around in the mountains but it was monsooning on us like nobody's business. however we did see some cool things especially rice pickers and rice paddies which i thoroughly enjoy for some reason.

oh but i forgot to blog about something major! i cant believe i forgot to write about it cause it was one of the wierdest things ive ever seen. back in amritsar, about an hour away is the pakistan border and every evening they have a closing of the border ceremony. and oh what a ceremony it is! first everyone just waits, women on one side of the road, dudes on the other. then when they let you into the stadium seating area (that's right), its like a fucking stampede! women running like crazy, shoes flying, people being trampled if they stop! well practically anyway. so us girls sat in the women's only seats but all the action was really in the men's. it felt like a concert or a festival with people cheering and going nuts. first they select some lucky people to run down to the border and back with indian flags while the crowd goes nuts. there's also plenty of loud dance-y music with an MC or something trying to get everyone pumped. lots of screams of "HINDUSTAN!" which apparently just means india. and then the guards who are all decked out in crazy uniforms and heavy duty moustaches start their thang which includes speed marching and michael jackson style high kicks. this goes on for a while, and the same thing is going on on the pakistan side. then the gates open a couple of times with the indian and pakistan guards shaking hands and such. crowd goes wild. indian and national flags go up, crowd goes wild...flags cross on their way down, crowd goes wild. it's something you just have to see, go youtube or google that shit! anyway, it was greeeaaaat and wildly fun. i wish this kinda thing went down at the canadian-us border.

anyway im gonna attempt at posting pictures all the way back to agra as i mentioned in my previous post. by the way, does anyone even still read my blog!? id like to hear from you! ok so here we go...

at the beatiful taj. some serious photo taking went down here so im gonna try and pick out the best ones. i like this one cause angelee's looking all pretty in her indian suit.

me and eugene doing super asian poses. and yes that's what eugene looks like nowadays.

the taj at sunset on the 2nd day we were there. its so pretty!!!!

me doing the quintessential pinching the taj photo!
we also did jumps and leaps in front of the taj. it took many many takes for me to get this shot so appreciate!

ok and moving on though im in love with the taj and wanna post more pictures of it. beautiful beautiful fabulous leh! this is the view from the leh palace, and then me and mini.

this is inside thiksey gompa during the monk's morning prayer sesh. baby monks!

more of thiksey gompa.
this is a big ol' tibetan prayer wheel.

and here's the thiksey gompa in its entirety. it's amazing looking!

and here's some photos from me and mini's motorbike adventure around leh. me sitting on a rock on a sand dune!

i dont remember exactly where this is, maybe in shey? but i just thought it was a picture perfect shot.

the view from....i think thiksey gompa. through some wax candles that the monks made.

my in the middle of nowhere shot.

and here we are at a giant gaping hole in the middle of the road/ the bridge that was never built. we took a backroad for a portion of our day and here's where we ended up at one point. oh ladakh!

this is at the cultural dance and music show in leh. the women dancers in one of the coolest costumes. i think these outfits are also used for weddings! and the 2nd pic is of the men (including our adorable driver tashi!) doing a dance in celebration of beer! the jugs on top of their heads traditionally was used to hold beer.

ok so even though i have about a million more pics of ladakh id like to post, i have to stop somewhere. so moving on....here we are at the golden temple in amritsar at the crack of dawn!

ok and even though this was totally not allowed, i snuck a few photos inside the temple. it's so cool looking inside, it just had to be done!
ok and here are some pictures taken at the closing of the pakistan border ceremony i was talking about. it just occurred to me that my blabbering about the scene wouldve made more sense if attached with these pictures but apparently i cant cut and paste so here we are. the indian guards in their full regalia!

and here's us cheering on india in the ladies section. angelee, me, joanna and smeghan. the boys were lame-o and sat in the vip foreigners section but we did it up with the locals and engaged in all the cheering and hoopla. oh the good times!

and here's where the pakistan and indian flags meet!ok and now just a couple of pictures from here in nepal cause im tired of bloggin now! kathmandu's really been a whole heap of shopping, eating and drinking but we also got ourselves a stoned and sex-obsessed guide for an hour or so for a tour of the old city. i mentioned before that we saw a living goddess well we saw our 2nd living goddess right in that window. the living goddess is called a kumari and she lives in this building in the old city and she never leaves cept for like once a year during a festival where shes carried around. the kumari's life is fascinating, stuff like they're picked at 4 years old and requirements include zero imperfections on their skin, cant be scared of anything (they put the girls in a dark room filled with severed animal heads or something for one nite and theyre not allowed to show any fear), have to be intuitive, their birthday has to somehow compliment the current king's birthday....and the list goes on. and then as soon as they get their periods or even get a cut or something, theyre back to being mortal! not much fun i think. anyway its fascinating, so go google kumaris! anyway our guide called the kumari to the window so we caught a quick glimpse of her but no photos allowed.

and finally one of the many temple carvings in the old city. our guide was hilarious and loved talking about marijuana and sex. sex and marijuana. and so on. so of course he had to point out all the erotic carvings and i believe this was one of his many favourites.

and so on that note, im off for now! we're leaving pokhara tomorrow am and i'll be spending my birthday at chitwan national park! you can hope for us that we'll get to see some rhinos and tigers!

the taj/ladakh/amritsar/now in nepal!

fuck i havent blogged in ages! ive been totally meaning to but weve been so busy and now there's just so much to catch up on. well last i left it at, we were in agra...doing the TAJ MAHAL. now the taj is a big deal cause when i first plopped down in india, i had read zero material on the country and whenever people asked what i wanted to see, i just said, "ummm....the taj mahal?" and so it was a very big deal.agra as a city is a total pit. but oh the taj! we went to see it twice, the first time was a little anti-climatic cause we went in the afternoon and it was so hot that i dont think ive ever sweated so much in my life. i say that all the time but definitely that was one of the top sweat days. as in sweatin into my poor eyes that were already being scorched out by the sun/sun reflecting off the oh so white marbly taaaaj. but the taj didnt disappoint and the next time we went, we went at 6 am and took the most brilliant pictures and we also had a guide who gave us the low down on the taj. and when i say brilliant pictures, they range from the ones with the taj and its reflection in the fountain pools, to ones of us doing retard jumping leaps into the air in front of the taj. oh it was so good! i love love love the taj mahal. oh and whats also kinda cool is that on the 2nd day that we went, the date was 7/7/07 which was the day the new 7 wonders of the world was announced...and well whaddya know, the taj is now a wonder!so other than the taj, we didnt do too much in agra. we also went to the agra fort which is where shah jahan (as if i know how to spell his name. but the dude who built the taj as, so they say, a "monument to love" for his deceased wife) lived. it was still cool but really now, it cant compete with the taaaaaaj! im gonna go ahead and say the 2nd best thing about agra is this super sweet MALL! i bought badly needed clothes and there was an arcade! seriously, that's cool. i got to play air hockey, chuck e. cheese/scandia-type games and virtual boxing! oh the good times.and so we moved on from agra to delhi where we got to spend the nite sleeping on benches in the airport and then first thing in the am, we were off to leh, ladakh! ok now there's some serious unresolved confusion here. i thought we were going to kashmir which is right under tibet i suppose. but then some people say no, ladakh is ladakh and then some people say ladakh is a region in kashmir.....so as far as im concerned, we were in fucking kashmir cause that sounds cool!leh was so nice, such a change from the rest of india. its at an elevation of 3500 m above sea level so we had to get all altitude acclimatized or whatever. so bed rest the first day and then taking it easy the next. its really wierd you cant breathe well, need to pee lots and some people get pukey. luckily i didnt barf however my lungs never got down with the altitude so even walking totally horizontal, id run out of breath after like 5 minutes. stupid gimpy lungs! oh but i love leh!!!it's definitely not as hot as the rest of india since were up in the mountains (ok here again, im not sure. we were either in the himalayas range, or the ladakh range. i wanna say himalayas....) and also its a total small town and the air is so crisp and clean! and we only had electricity about a third of the time but i have never seen so many stars in my entire life. the nite sky was amazing and the stars seemed so close and whereas back home you just see the big ones, here you could see them all. i even saw the milky way! (i was a total tool and tried to take pictures of the stars to share with you all. it sooo didnt work). oh and damn the people in ladakh are so good looking! a cross between indian and asians yet even hotter. i dont know if everyone feels this way but angelee and her friend joanna totally agree!oh and leh made for good shopping. they say its the closest to tibet that you can get without actually being in tibet so i made sure to buy some dalai lama scrolls and craploads of tibetan prayer/peace flags. and rolling with the whole tibetan thing, lots of gompas / buddhist monasteries.oh wait, before i forget! we found one awesome garden restaurant that we went to like 3 times a day and i got to eat good food for the first time in so long! they even had AVACADOES. that's major man! anyway...one day we hired a driver and off we went in a van to thiksey, hemis and shey. on the map it would appear that these places are like towns but there more like just...places...with a gompa or something in each. in thiksey they had the coolest gompa built up on a mountainside and we were there super early so we got to sit in with the monks as they were doing their morning prayer/breakfast session. that was really cool. they were just chanting and drinking tea and then there'd be drums and horns going off. at one point baby monks (not really babies but oh they were soooo cute!!!!) would go around giving scoopfuls of what looked just like flour to each monk and they'd mix it with the tea to make like a dough and then eat it. then later they also got bowls of some seriously yummy smelling soup and they ate in silence which is when we decided to leave. i wouldnt want ppl sitting there staring at me while eating! anyway that was really cool.the hemis gompa was also good but just couldnt compare with thiksey and then in shey there was an old palace that we went to. the next day was even better cause me and mini went off on a motorbike to see pretty much the same places cause he was sick the day before. but on a bike we could stop all over the place and spend more time in some places so that was good. so id stop at like a riverside where people were washing their clothes next to sheep and goats. we also stopped right next to what looked like giant sand dunes. another nice stop was we took pictures of ourselves in this giant empty dusty plain with just the mountains in the far background. it looked like we were literally in the middle of nowhere. oh and the mountains in ladakh! ladakh looks kinda like the okanagan cept more deserted. the mountains are beautiful and brown and dusty and further off in the distance you can see snow-capped mountains. its soooo pretty, everyone must go to ladakh! that day we also had a mini-picnic under a tree, next to a stream, in the middle of nowhere. the flowing water in ladakh is so nice cause there's practically no rain so i guess its all just glacial run-off so the water is so cold that its almost grey. (not that you can drink it or anything, for future reference!) our only company after a good long while were some cows. oh and the cows in ladakh are so cute!!!everywhere in india, cows are roaming. but they're all narsty looking. all scrawny and...pooey. oh but ladakh cows! theyre so small and theyre all furry! actually all the animals looked just smaller and furrier....like the cute lil donkeys! awwww....anyway, we spent like a week in leh and it was great. oh the last nite we went to a cultural dance show and our driver, tashi, was in it and it was great! they had different traditional costumes for each dance and it was really good. the dancers also sang and if they had a cd, i would totally have bought it! i miss leh already!and so next stop, amritsar! this is gonna sound dodgy in some racial way but tough lovin cause this is my blog. anyway, as everyone in vancouver knows, most indians in vancity are sikh. oh but not in india! and i never noticed that until i arrived in amritsar which is in punjab aka sikh central. (ok its not known as sikh central...but whatever.) anyway, there's no actual point to be made here, i just found it interesting. anyway, in amritsar is the famous golden temple which i guess is like the temple/religious site for sikhs. it's really quite beautiful. everyone has to have their head covered here and you walk inside and it's like a giant pool i guess (which interestingly, has koi fish in it) and at some points in the pool there are ghats, kinda varanasi but on a much smaller scale. all over the place there are holy dudes sitting behind glass reading their...holy book (i dont know what its called. i just asked mini and angelee. no one knows.) anyway in the middle of the pool is the golden temple which looks like....(let the anticipation build....)....a temple made of gooooooold! all over the joint people are walking around, lounging, praying, reading their little holy book.oh and then the temple itself. there is a massive fucking line up to get into the temple (between 1 and 2 hrs) and inside the temple there are a bunch of holy men with the main holy book (oh god this sounds so uninformed) and some of the men are playing these wierd looking instruments and singing. you can actually hear the music from all over inside the complex and actually it sounds very beautiful. again, id totally buy the cd. good sountrack to sleep to. people are just sitting around inside the temple, reading their books or whatever. the temple itself is quite small i think but with 3 floors and its very beautiful inside. i give it an A+!then as you leave they give you a handful of this wierdy sugary greasy shit that i guess youre supposed to eat? theyve got all sorts of rules and one is that you cant even drop a morsel of this stuff on the ground. by the way, i shouldnt call it shit but i dont know what it is so there you go. oh and i dont wanna bitch but damn, sikhs dont seem to know how to have fun the way hindus do! in varanasi it was such a fun and laidback vibe at the gahts but here i got sternly talked to a bunch of times. for stuff like, my headscarf fell off my head, my back was turned to the temple, i was talking, i sat with my legs stretched out, i sat with my knees propped up..... but overall, good times yet again! oh and one nite me and eug stayed up because there was sposed to be some ceremony at like 3:30am at the temple so we went but failed to see it. however we did find that people are at the temple literally 24/7. people are just wandering around, doing the usual, sleeping on the ground. craziness!and as of yesterday, we are now in kathmandu, nepal!!!! yet another country to add to the list. were staying i guess on the backpackers strip and it's crazy here! super cheap accomodation, awesome food (ive already had mexican food and a massive cheeseburger! yay to the return of beef once again! it was like half a damn cow between the buns. damn.), lots of shopping and an actual nite life. im so pumped to be here in nepal!!!oh and what's really cool (except we didnt know it at the time, booo!) is that we were in the presence of, as well as on the plane with, a LIVING GODDESS. there she was, mere meters away from us in delhi airport. just a little girl all decked out in fancy shmancy clothes and with cool looking makeup on. we thought maybe she was in a beauty pageant or something (so embarassing) and then when we arrived in nepal, at the terminal there were hordes of journalists or something with their flash cameras and we were like "oh thats interesting."and THEN! we were just walking by a newstand and there she was on the cover of the newspaper: the little girl was a living goddess! apparently the story goes she went to the US because a documentary was made about her but now they're stripping her of her goddess status because of it! that just aint right! i still say the kiddo's a goddess.and so that's that! i hope i havent bored you all to pieces but so much has happened since i last blogged! i hope to post pics real soon.

"ganga is the life line of indian culture": just some of my varanasi pictures!

ok so this computer kinda blows but i cant find anything better and i desperately wanna post some of the kajillion pics i took in varanasi. i think i'll only be able to post a fraction of what i actually wanna post (evidently meghan's spent the past 2.5 hrs posting 60 pics or something absurd like that so please go check that out to tide you over if you care to do so...) so im gonna just post some of my absolute fave pics.

here's one of my first pics of the ganga river. i noticed just now that you can actually see the burning ghats in the background which youre absolutely not allowed to take pictures of...so feel privileged to be able to see that! (by the way its taken like well over half an hour for me to even put the photos onto the computer, so by this point im really not feeling the whole posting pics thing but im doing some anyway...)

sunrise on the ganga which is very beautiful. i think i took like 50 pictures of the sun rising which was highly excessive and im sure all the locals were thinking, "stupid foreigners, how many pictures can you take of the fucking sun?" ok maybe not but something along those lines.

a bunch of women doing their thang down in the ganga bright and early in the mornin'.

ah by the way, i decided varanasi and the ganga calls for black and white photos so a good fat chunk of my pics are b/w. and the above pic is the view from bablu's...platformy thing.

me and our dear bablu having a muscle demo. im so macho.

i forgot to mention in my last post (at least i think i forgot...), i went into the ganga river! ok so only halfway up my calf but seriously. its fucking sewage water filled with corpses! it took days for bablu to convince me to do it. i told him, im gonna get diseased! but he gave me this whole, "but the river is our mother and our mother would never make you sick" talk and what with his whole holiness thing going on, how could i argue? so in i went! here's me, eug and bablu.
and here's our little princess, bablu's niece kajel. cutest kiddie ever!!! at the ganga, as usual, and the kid's all super dolled up! matching earrings and necklace that're colour coordinated with her polyester suit and with a smidgen of lipstick to top it all off! ok and contrast with me, sweaty and in stinky dirty clothes. god i look like total ass.

here's me getting my blessing from bablu

mini, me and pooge right after getting blessed.

just one of the many pictures taken while wandering along the ganga river.

me at one of the ghats where saris are being dried in the sun. oh the scorching, scorching sun.

here's bablu and some of the other priests performing the evening prayer-type-thing ceremony. evidently called puja. so there you have it! i only took about a million pics of bablu doing the puja deal since i was there like every single night but here's just a few of them

.

ok so that took eons and now the internet joint is closing up so im getting tossed out! there's still lots of pics i wanna post plus videos but i guess that'll have to wait. and now im in agra where i got to see the monumental TAAAAAAJ MAHAAAAAAAL today. cept it was ridiculously hot (that is until it started dumping rain) and i sweat more than i ever sweat before in my entire life. anyway it was still great and we'll be back to see it for sunrise. anyway getting tossed out!

holy varanasi & mother ganga!

ok so i realize i havent posted anything in a good long while and that's cause weve been hella busy ever since we left the south. in kolkata we fully embraced the fact that we were at last back in a big city so we lived it up. as in i engaged in absolutely nothing cultural and instead spent my days in malls, watched movies (ocean's 13 was fantastic, fantastic four aka eug's choice, not so much.) and went clubbing. ok so i had to go shopping cause in pondicherry one of the hotel staff threw out a bag of my very limited wardrobe that i had dropped in for laundry....it really sucked. and what sucks more is that shopping in india is not so easy at all. since most chicks wear saris, practically all stores cater more to men. im wearing a lot of stinky dirty clothes lately, im so attractive.

so not much to say about kolkata, i dont particularly enjoy the big cities over here. we just kinda indulged in being able to live western-style once again and binged on the worst (or best, depends on how you look at it) food the entire time. as in it was a mcdonalds-kfc-pizza hut-mcdonalds marathon. oh and damn, its expensive to go clubbing in india! we met a new friend, gill, who took us out a few times and it was a total blast but it'd be like minimum $10 for a drink. i guess that goes hand in hand with our whole, living it up like at home.

and in kolkata, krista has sadly departed from our lil' crew for about a month to travel with her aussie friend but we shall meet her again and in her place, mini has arrived from thailand. im sure eug enjoys having some testosterone around once again. and on a very sad note, one of the girls with angelee, andrea, was thrown off a camel in rajasthan and had her hip broken! it's very horrible and she now has to cancel the rest of her trip and go back to ontario. so for those who know her, send her happy healing vibes and best wishes.

anyway in stark contrast to kolkata, we have now been in varanasi for about a week, the holiest of all holy cities. we were only planning on spending a couple of days here, and in fact we were supposed to leave about 3 times already but i wont get into that, but this is definitely by far my most favourite place in all of india and it's been a total blast. as most know, im not big on anything religious but i absolutely love this city.

we've been getting up bright and early every day (as in a very painful 4 am-ish) to go down to the ganga/ganges river. the river is quite a sight: though the water is polluted as hell and reportedly more like sewage than anything else, hindus go down every morning to bathe, wash their clothes, wash their hair, swim, etc. in the river. they call the river 'mother ganga' and it's all super spiritual. all along one side of the river are ghats which i guess are just stairs leading down the riverbank and there are a few burning ghats which is where dead bodies are burned in big ceremonies. a lot of death going on here, people apparently come to varanasi just to die cause of its.....holiness or something. (you'd think after a week here id be super informed about all things ganga but im not. i read/hear something, and then i forget. im so useless.) so along the river banks there are burning bodies all day long but then something like children and lepers who die dont get burned but instead get attached to a rock or something and get dropped into the river. so we've seen a few floaters.

in fact, one man we met who lives on one of the many boats on the river said to us one morning, "do you know what i saw first thing when i woke up next to my boat? a dead body!" and points out just a few meters from us. and whaddya know, a rotting dead body just floatin around!

anyway the best thing to happen during my entire time in india is that we met bablu, one of the priests who lives at the main ghat right on the ganga river. (he keeps saying he doesnt wanna be famous but he's had his photos published in newspapers, books, lonely planet and everyone knows him so too bad for him.) every morning we go down and hang out with bablu on his...platformy thing. yup that's right, i know its like zero descriptive but i dont know what the thing is called. basically a platform on the ghat where he sits and gives blessings. and then pretty much every nite, we go down and watch him take part in this big ceremony which i guess is like an evening prayer. there's a bunch of priests dressed up and there's music, fire, peacock feathers; there's a lot going on basically. i'll just have to post pictures. and then we just hang out and do whatever. and we hang out with some of the local street kids and bablu's nephew and little niece who is just the cutest little thing ever. she's got massive eyes, is super pretty and looks like a little cartoon character.

we also met a very helpful autorickshaw driver/guide, mr. khan, and he's helped us out loads and has shown us lots of things in varanasi. we've seen a buddhist temple, japanese temple, tibetan temple a ghandi temple.... we were also in sarnath which i guess is an extension or something of varanasi and its touted as 'the birthplace of buddhism' so that was pretty cool. we got to see a bodhi tree which is like the offspring or whatever of the bodhi tree that buddha sat under. or something like that. fuck, im just not reliable for that kinda info. anyway that was very interesting.

mr. khan also took us to a muslim community where they produce silk so we got to see the entire silk making process which was really interesting. and the kids there were so cute, we've been followed around and stared at a lot but nothing compares to the scene that was going on there. adults grouped around us for a while but it seemed like every single kid in the entire joint was just following us around the entire time. and they all like mauled us and wanted pictures taken and their hands shaken; it was borderline overwhelming cept i think we're like pros at crowd control by now. oh and then of course, we were taken to a silk store where, of course, i bought a bunch of silk scarves for no reason whatsover. but they're so pretty!

anyway really, just everyday, not enough sleep and morning and nite at the ghats with bablu. oh but a real standout day was yesterday when bablu took us, kajel (his niece), suresh (nephew) and ravi, one of the local kids, to a hindi movie! ok first of all, id been dying to have just a taste of western food for the longest time cause the entire time in varanasi its been nothing but indian food and really, i cant handle that. and then bam, he takes us to an a/c mall complete with real stores, a real movie theater and food like mcdonalds, baskin robbins and pizza!!!! what the fuck!? when he said movie i imagined a real dive theater cause here in varanasi, there's not an awful lot that's modern going on. well apparently this mall just opened in recent years, we were all shocked that such a thing existed in varanasi and it was the happiest day in my life. ok not really but i was damn happy.

side bar, bablu likes to make fun of me cause the only thing i wish for here is a/c. its almost 40 C here and fuck it, ive decided i just cant live without a/c. the amount of sweating that goes on here is practically nauseating. so he says he gave me my wish, an afternoon of fantastic a/c. how can one not love bablu!?

anyway the movie (which at the moment i cant remember the name..i think 'apne'?) was all in hindi minus a few sentences in english with zero subtitles so that proved kinda interesting. but it was easy to follow and it was like the first time ive seen a non-super cheesy bollywood style indian movie. it was kinda like a family drama and about boxing but they still managed to fit in song and dance numbers!! ok so it was a little cheesy and ultra dramatic but i loved it! and then we took bablu and the kids to good ol' mcdonalds. and it was the best mcchicken id ever tasted. (minus the mcchicken in mumbai. and kolkata. minor details.) i didnt think priests could eat meat but bablu seemed to enjoy his mchicken as much as me! and while me and eug think its super awesome and mini thinks its despicable, bablu gave kajel some mchicken which turned out to be the first time she's ever eaten meat! her first meat experience, and it was at mcdonalds, with us. so magical.

oh and one of the coolest things we did here is that all four of us got blessed by bablu one morning. we got our foreheads done up with the symbols for vishnu and shiva (again, or something like that...), got sprinkled with water from the ganga, had a wreath of flowers put on us, had to repeat i guess a prayer in hindi (ok i basically mumbled my way through the entire thing. it was fucking hard!), and then tossed some flowers into the river to make a wish. it was cooooooool.

anyway im off. i really really wanted to post pictures cause ive taken like a million of them and words just cant describe how amazing this city is. unfortunately none of the computers' usb ports are working here so i'll have to do it later. i was just gonna save this post but im posting it up now anyway since its been so long but check back later cause i'll add pics to it when i have the time!