"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

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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!