Family Visits and Hindu Experiences

These are some of my favorite pictures from Rachel and Yvonne's visit, and most of them are from this last weekend's trip to Rishikesh. Rishikesh is about two hours away, and is one of the top spiritual locations for the Hindu religion...as well as the yoga capital of the world. I've been particularly interested about the role that the Ganges River plays in the Hindu religion, so have been reading a book specifically on the "Ganga". It was really interesting to experience such a major place in the religion.

The city itself is basically a "hippie" town, filled with "soul-searching foreigners" and Hindus that have devoted their lives to worship.

It is said to be more worthwhile to spend a day near the Ganges river than to live an entire life devoted to worshipping the gods of the religion...so I would imagine that a lot of people would want to live by the river! Here's some of the story...

In short (and I'm SEVERELY abbreviating the story because it's really long!), the Ganges River is the earthly form of the goddess Ganga (so it's considered to actually be holy). One of the most interesting tales I read about the goddess-form of the river is depicted in the picture below.

One day, Ganga laughed at the expense of another god, and as a result was cursed to live forever on earth. However, her earthly form (the river) was SO extreme and powerful that if she had descended to earth directly, she would have "plowed" right through the earth and flooded everything. :) SO, the god in the picture above offered to use his dreadlocks to slow the flow of Ganga, and just moved one of his dreadlocks aside to allow the river to flow as it does today. The spot of origin is a glacier called Gangotri (a trek that we'll eventually make). From Gangotri the river splits into eight forks, which all converge at Hardwar (only about 2 hours away...another weekend trip!). And, Rishikesh is down the river from Hardwar and an important location in the Hindu religion.
We were only in Rishikesh for one full day, but I really feel like we got a good introduction to the city. We took a yoga class in the morning, and got to observe a Hindu festival that happens twice daily. Every morning at sunrise and every evening at sunset a "festival of lights" is put on to worship the river. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it all means, but here are some pictures. It was really interesting...but I'm still wading through my spiritual/emotional reactions to the whole experience.


Rachel, Yvonne and I decided to wear our saris into town....and WHAT an experience! Apparently, people in Rishikesh are VERY used to foreigners, and are NOT used to foreigners wearing saris. So, what we were expecting to be a "fitting in" experience was actually a "STANDING WAY OUT" experience. We got SO many looks, LOTS of stares and pointing and comments, and even got asked for quite a few pictures! Here's gaggle of women...

Us in our saris. :)

Another really neat experience we had was visiting a local Hindu temple...with a Hindu guide! A guy from our hotel offered to take us to the temple, and was kind enough to entertain my many ignorant questions. Apparently, there are over 33,000,000 gods...did you know that?! Each god represents different aspects of life, and Hindus present their requests to the god that best represents their problem. Then, they ring a bell which sends the spiritual energy out into the universe. Here are some of the physical representations that they pray to...



And lastly, we all got henna tattoos (a.k.a. mindi) done! Unfortunately, we got TOTALLY ripped off (which I found out once I got back to school and compared prices) but it was a fun experience...and Rachel's #1 to do, so I guess it was worth it. It took forever, but now we've got some sweet tattoos for a week or so. Fun fun!

Rachel and Yvonne's visit was SO wonderful, and I feel so thankful to have gotten to be with family. It made me realize how much I miss everyone at home. It's interesting to see how we kind of "partition" ourselves to keep emotionally intact. It's almost like I stop thinking about home, so that I can really be here and not be too sad...and then when I talk to people from home I enter that "self". Having them here was pretty emotional because I couldn't partition anymore, and it made me really face the consequences of our choice to be here. There are good and bad consequences to all our choices, but as this is a fairly HUGE choice that affects everyone close to us, it's good to really think it thorugh a bit. More to come about that later, I'm still trying to process!

One of the favorite activities, WITHOUT A DOUBT, was shopping in Mussoorie. These girls went CRAZY, and brought home so much stuff! Luckily, they had each packed a suitcase full of things for us from home (it was like Christmas when they came!), so they had lots of room to fill up...and they did! My personal favorite was taking them to the fabric store. I always love the experience, but to hear Rachel and Yvonne's exclamations at the fabric colors and designs was priceless! I'll end the blog with some pictures of their "salwar suit" purchases. Can't wait to have an Indian clothing party back home!

We love and miss our family, and said good-bye to Rach and Yvonne with sadness...but we feel SO blessed to have such great relationships in life! Our Living God is so good to us... :)