Never Coming Back

Well, obviously we have been home for a while now, we got home on December 5th. We left in such a hurry, that I didn't have time to finish up the last of our adventures in India. Don't worry I didn't forget! School here at Davis takes a lot more time up than I remembered. In India I didn't have to go to class so I didn't mind writing, now I have to write all the time; my brain is tired! Way back in August, if you can remember that far back, we went to Varanasi. It's a town on the Ganges that is considered holy because it is where the Buddha gave his first sermon at Deer Park and it's where the Holist Rivers in India converge into the biggest Ganges that empties into the Bay of Bengal. Anyways while we were there we went to a very touristy (but fun) place for dinner, where they had a guy playing the sitar accompanied by a man playing tabla. A sitar is a wooden instrument about 4 feet tall, with about 16 strings. One sits while playing it, and strums it, kind...

For the weekend Andrew and I with nine other friends headed out on a Friday to Pushkar, and the largest mammal fair in the world. That's right, the annual Pushkar camel festival. They have a website here. They estimate that 25,000 camels are traded each year. Pushkar is a small town in the state of Rajasthan, a short bus ride from Ajmer. We headed out on the relatively expensive Shatabdi Express Train, which is a fancy seated car train in which they feed you and serve you chai. It's quite comfortable. It also completes the journey a couple hours faster than all of the other trains, which means we left at about 8 am and arrived in Ajmer by one in the afternoon. From the train station we took rickshaws to the bus stand, 2 km away. Then we got into a bus (of course, first we had to switch buses about 3 times because people kept telling us conflicting information), and took the hour drive up over a mountain range to Pushkar. We got into Pushkar and immediately went to our hotel, t...