Week 3

Learned Truth: There is no good or evil, only self-interest and circumstance.



Last weekend’s trip to Amritsar was weird. I would call it an experience more so than I would call it a trip. Angela, the girl who’s father is from Amritsar and the reason we were going on the trip got very sick a few days before and ended up in the hospital. She didn’t make the trip. This was the beginning of the experience.

The ride was mostly at night though various Indian towns and villages. There really aren’t any highways here, or at least highways as we would think of them. The highways here are simply wider roads that are mostly straight. They are not necessarily paved and are rarely lit. Generally traffic is supposed to stay to the left side but that’s just a guideline. Drivers take up whatever space is free and its not uncommon to see a row of cars from one side of the road to the other heading straight into oncoming traffic. It eventually works out and there’s no head on collisions but its scary as hell at times. We often gasped and braced ourselves as we came within a few feet of what was moments earlier an oncoming truck or bus. This is driving in India. The drive took six hours and after it we all needed a drink

Our hotel was a rock bottom budget hotel. It makes Hotel 6 look like the Ritz Carlton during a presidential visit. Seriously. The rooms came with a mattress, a dirty sheet to cover the mattress and a pillow. Nothing else. Our rooms were the deluxe rooms meaning they had a bathroom. We had to buy toilet paper. The walls probably hadn’t been painted in decades. All this decadence costs $2 (US) per night. College girls are on a budget after all.

Nicole and Jodi got sick the first night and were mostly confined to the hotel for the first day. The rest of us ventured out for breakfast and site seeing. Amritsar is an extremely dirty place its very hot. This makes for walking around a generally unpleasant experience.

In the afternoon, a few hours before sunset, we all drove to the India-Pakistan border to see the border closing ceremony. Nicole and Jodi were feeling better and joined us. This thing is like a football game.There’s stands on both sides of the border though the Indian side is much larger. Military on both sides wear full military dress including some kind of fan on their head. When they walk out the crowd cheers as though a sports team just hit the field. There’s people waving flags on both sides and each side is chanting either “Industan (India) is great” or “Pakistan is great”. The Pakistan side is much more subdued than the Indian side though. The men and woman sit in different sides and the women remain quiet. Only the men are allowed to cheer. On the Indian side everyone is dancing and cheering and its basically a wild party.

Eventually the actual ceremony began where both sides march around in an extremely exaggerated fashion mostly in circles. Eventually the guards make it to the border line and then each side stares at each other with their hardest stares sometimes circling each other. The flags are lowered together with one side not wanting to have their flag lower than the other’s which makes this tedious with lots of false starts and inching down of the flags. Once the flags were gone it was all over and everyone wanted to run to the border line for some reason. It was getting really crazy and us Westerners wanted out so we got out. I don’t really know what happens after that, probably more taunting from both sides.

Our next stop was The Golden Temple. This is a Sikh temple but its open to everyone. The city of Amritsar was built around the temple. The temple is protected by a castle that surrounds a lake of holy water and in the middle sits the temple on an island. The temple is covered both inside and out in gold. Thousands of people go there every day on a pilgrimage to enter the temple for a brief moment and the bathe in the holy water. Andrea, Deb and I went into the temple to leave some money one of the Sikh staff members asked us to take for him. We were the only Westerners in line to enter the temple. Everyone was staring at us. Not in a bad way, all are welcome, but its not very common for Westerners to do that. Actually we get stares everywhere we go but to be surrounded by people looking at us was odd. We skipped the holy water bath...

That night Andrea got sick, she was the last one of us to get sick. It really wasn’t a good time or place to be sick. She was taken to a “hospital” which is really just a doctor in a storefront with a bed and some medical equipment. He didn’t do much and at first refused to give her anything including water. She was told to walk to the store down the street if she wanted water. He had to be practically begged to give her antibiotics. Many Indian doctors believe in karma and feel that if someone gets sick its because they did something wrong and deserve to suffer. I don’t get the point of being a doctor if one feels that way but there’s a lot I don’t get about this place.

The next day we were leaving. Andrea wasn’t ready to travel yet so we waited around for a while. Our driver got pissy because he wanted to leave much earlier. He got even more pissy when we wanted to go to lunch. He was going to drop us off and expected us to walk back to the hotel. Eventually we worked things out where he would return to pick us up. Eventually we got on the road to return to Dharmsala. The driver really wanted to get back and drove like a maniac. Andrea was in the front seat throwing up into a bag but that didn’t concern the driver at all. I guess he’s a believer in karma as well. What took six hours of normal driving (for India) too four and a half (of suicidal driving) to return. Multiple times we actually went off the road to avoid getting hit by an oncoming vehicle or to pass a slower one. There was also lots of slamming on the breaks. None of this helped Andrea.


Tuesday I hiked up a mountain with Deb to a placed called Triund. The clouds were low that day and we made the cloud line very early. Most of the hike was though thick mist. When we reached the top there was a short break in the low clouds and the view looked like that from an airplane window. We were about fifty feet from the snow line and it was quite cold. On the hike down we ended up caught in a herd of mountain goats coming down the mountain. The fog was so think they didn’t see us until they were right on top of us and which point they would freeze and eventually walk around us. It was pretty amazing.

Thursday most of the volunteers were phased out leaving me, Jodi, Chelsea and Pam. There will be a bunch more phasing in on Monday.

There’s more pictures of the kids in my daycare this week. I couldn’t resist. The rest are from Amritsar and my hike.

Click here for this week’s pictures. See ya next Sunday.