Amritsar- The Golden Temple

After about a 20 hour train ride, we've arrived in Amritsar.  It's a city north of New Delhi that's famous for it's Golden Temple.  It's hotter than Hades here but it's beautiful.  There are tons of people here (about 10,000 pass through a day!) who come as pilgrims to give offerings at the temple in the middle of the complex.  We're staying at the temple where they offer free food and sleeping accommodations/ a spot on the floor in the sleeping hall for the pilgrims and visitors.  Its awesome :) We were surprised to be redirected to the tourists sleeping hall where we were advised to sleep separately (some dodgy things have happened in the past) but were glad because they had lockers to keep our bags safe and more room to sleep on the floor. The food hall is amazing- it serves thousands of people breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday.  It's definitely a great example of a successful social program in India.  And the food was great!  We spent the day visting the other temples and museums inside the complex, walking around the Golden Temple and sweating.


Being our first stop in India it has been very interesting to experience everyone's reaction to us. We are stared and gawked at by everyone- you'd think we were aliens.  I'm curious to see if this keeps up and is  just an Indian thing but its pretty wild.  Also, everyone takes pictures of us. All the time.  Either someone will come up and ask and we'll awkwardly pose in the pictures with them or they follow us around with their camera or cell phones taking pictures of us.  We had one family follow us for 15 minutes, taking pictures of us just walking, drinking water, doing nothing. How strange!


Update: We were recently told that all these pictures we have had taken of us by strangers normally go into their family albums.  They put them alongside their pictures of the trip and talk about their friends from the US they met at the Golden Temple or wherever... So its in the works for Vasae and I to be in about a million new Indian family photo albums... awesome.