Kitten Titties 2012

The Taj Mahal is in Agra. Here are my pictures about it, lookie here:

I found it f***ing impressive, one of the most beautiful buildings I've seen in my life.

It all happened on a Delhi night, when we were wandering around in the city, just managed to get completely lost about 30 minutes away from our hotel when we suddenly bumped into a coldbeer-shop. The coldbeer-shop could be spotted from a distance as there were hardly any people by any other shops, but in front of this one was something like the stock exchange stereotype, all people holding money above their heads stretching out as far as they can towards the cashier so something to happen. By the way the shop was selling all types of liquers, not only cold beers, but I bought a cold beer there so I call it a coldbeer-shop. Problem?

The next project was to find a place where we could have our beer in peace. It's not easy in Delhi, there are people everywhere. So we picked a random direction and started walking. Soon we got into a residental area, quite dark, park-like with two-three-story buildings and all. So we sat down close to the entrance of the area in a shadow of some bush, having the beer and a chitchat.

Then after a while a car drove by us slowly from among the houses (I hid the beer), then stopped, switched to reverse, came back to us, window pulled down... and suddenly there was the Gledwin family staring at us from the car :) They asked us if everything was alright, whether we needed help or anything. I told them well, actually we live in Pahar Ganj (a district of Delhi) and if they could tell us the way, that would help, but otherwise, thank you, we're good. They became a bit puzzled how to explain us the way, they said they would offer us a lift but they are heading to the church and all. Then they added we shouldn't stay where we were because it's a dangerous place in the night (!? It seemed quite a calm place...). Probably they were a bit too worried for us but they seemed nice people so we agreed to go to church with them and then they'd throw us home. They were really cool and helpful people you see :)

The Gledwins live as a small Christian community among the Hindus, so we went to a Catholic church. TO show you what a splendid time we had there I made a short video for you:

So, quite random things happen in an Indian Catholic temple, if you're accustomed to Europe :)

After the mess they invited us for dinner (see pic above), then took us home and we settled to meet the next day when they'd take us here and there as it was a weekend and on weekends they are mostly free.

On the next days we went to some places with them, but the coolest place by far was Akshardham, the world's biggest Hindu temple, just outside Delhi. I was impressed at the entrance for the huge garden around the complex being so clean, and the temple itself. I asked when it was built. I expected something like 500 years, these huge stuffs are always at least a thousand years old. They answered, "Oh, this one has just been finished, they opened it like 6 years ago." ... So there is history still being built in the world.

Apart from Akshardham, we also went to the Gledwins' home for dinner one night, and to a mess held in the garden of a neighboring house by a Jamaican priest. The priest blessed us and despite the Jamaican stereotype he was not high at all. No dreadlocks either.

We also went for a walk in a park close to their place, we had some dosas in a real South-Indian restaurant, we went to the bazaar to have some new dress sewed for their daughter, while I took care of their younger child, the 2-year-old Simon, who was very tiny but very heavy being asleep in my hands for half an hour. People very staring with big eyes, what is this white guy doing with that obviously Indian sleeping boy in his hand :)

Before we would jump on a train to Agra and the Taj Mahal, you get a video with some typical Indian pictures in it, which was not made by me this time, but a musician called "Indian Rope Man". I live the music in the clip and although it was probably filmed in Mumbai, I still put it, 'cuz I love this music :)

On a beautiful Thursday we packed our stuff and took tearful farewell of our cool little room, our balcony and the Ganga, and took a bus which transported us to Delhi.

Although I had found some seemingly good hotel in Lonely Planet on the bus, in the end when we arrived and started wandering around in the mess of Pahar Ganj (this is the district where 90% of the travellers stay: shopping street, cheap food and hotels, etc.) and a bum-looking guy found us and said he had a cheap place to stay. We asked how cheap. He said 300. (That's about $6 per day for both of us) We said that's allright, let's take a look. We took a look. Well... Raunchy building, dark, windowless room, basically dirty at every inch, half of the other rooms are such a bad conditions that they cannot even be let out, they are used only for keeping the garbage. One of these out-of-order rooms had a working bathroom (a hole in the ground as a toilet and a cold water tap at waist-height as a shower), it could be used because even though the room we were offered had a bathroom but there was no water in it, just dirt. We didn't think much, it was cheap and we're poor, se we took it. Along with the keys came a joint left there by the previous resident of the room, and also after we told the guy we'd take the room he said "Allright, let it be 250...". So at least it was really cheap :)

We don't have a pic about out room because we didn't dare to take a photo, but in the hallway I took a picture about how greatly the Indian engineers planned the way the rain water should accumulate in the drainpipes just to flow into a vertical pipe and pour down in the hallway just in front of our room, forming a 5-6 cm deep puddle. Awesome.

By the way the neighboring room was not let out because the rain was pouring in there the same way through another pipe.

Taking a shower was especially funny: there was no light in the bathroom, and by the toilet there was a tap with water pouring out of it 24/7. In order to make enough pressure in the "shower" (that other tap at waist-height) there were some plastic bags and pieces of rope applied on the little tap by the toilet, which more or less decreased the amount of water flowing out of it, so this way it was possible to take a "shower" using the other tap. This isolation was sometimes there, sometimes it was taken off, and at times there was no water at all.

When there was water through, it was dirty enough not to see my fingers when I put some water in my palms, and also after taking a shower I was glittering everywhere because there was some glitter (pieces of metal maybe?) in the water :)

By the end of our stay we even got some louse so I got rid of my beard which had been growing for 3 months, and some of my hair. Click on the picture for shaving me.

Finally we got rid of these lovely little animals quite easily: we bought some special shampoo which washed them away and that was about it. But still it was an exciting time. For sure this was the shittiest place we stayed on our trip :)

I'll tell you more about our further adventures in Delhi tomorrow.

Today I finally drew. I kind of suck :) But I enjoyed myself a lot: I downloaded the 30-day trial version of Corel Painter 12, I took out my digitizing tablet and I started off. I made this progress in two hours:

I think there was at least some improvement :) I also drew some 50 circles and 50 ellipses just for practice. Those suck even more :)

If you're interested in stange instruments and/or Indian music, then you're interested in this video :)

We filmed quite a lot at the concert, so I tried my best to select only the best parts, to keep the atmosphere but not to make it too long. In the end it became 11 minutes, being our longest vid so far. Enjoy :)

Once I had a rather bad birthday, the twenty-fourth in the row, which was rather bad because it was rather lonely. I was walking alone in Spain in that period and, well, being alone there was noone to celebrate with. So I was a bit afraid how the twenty-seventh will be in India.

Basically, I had little expectations, considering that birthdays are for spicing up your boring everyday life, and since every day in the past couple months was different and special for us, there was nothing to spice up. But how it actually turned out was much above my expectations :)

But let the pictures speak instead of me:

Originally we didn't want to go to Rishikesh because we were really waiting for Delhi and all, but then my friend Ryan explained to me in the end of the vipassana training that Delhi sucks but Rishikesh is The Paradise. So what could I do, I believed him and we all went to Rishikesh with Ryan (Melbourne, Australia) and Alex (Montréal, Canada). Ryan showed us the coolest place in the area, where the hotels are cheap and the scenery is great, so we quickly took out a wonderful double room with Judit.

Our place was so cool that we even had a kitchen we could use, so one morning Judit surprised me with a wonderful omelet! :) I think I didn't eat an omelet since Bulgaria, and Judit made it so delicious, with tomatoes and onions and everything. Yummy. That cooking school was definitely worth it. :)

So what is this Rishikesh? Rishikesh is a small town in the Himalayas, famous of its yoga centers, the Ganga (Ganges) which flows through it, and because the Beatles spent a few months here in the sixties when they wrote the White Album.

The city itself lies in the valley of the Ganga, on both sides of the river, with several beautiful hanging bridges above the river, and lots of nice Hindu temples. In the area there are also some naturally beautiful places: waterfalls, crystal-clear rivers (which then all join into the dirty Ganga), forests and well, these mountains, being in the Himalayas...

We spent 7 days here, in great calmness: we sat a lot on our big balcony with our Israeli neighbor and with the bugs with blinking asses. In Rishikesh everybody is either Israeli or has a blinking butt. Okay, the Indians are exceptions but otherwise really there are basically only Jews. And these bugs. They are really strange; we noticed them in a night when we saw a blinking light on a tree. Then soon we spotted the others, closer and closer, and finally we found one on our balcony, too, so we examined it and determined that its ass is really blinking. What kind of insects do you readers think these are? I knew there existed some bugs with a light but I thought those were constantly lit up. We saw one which was constantly lit up, in a forest on a night, after climbing over a big fence of some ashram, but I think that was rather a one-eyed leopard or something. Whatever.

Also I spent 1-2 days in an Internet cafe, to finally write some articles for the blog. During this I had a surprising experience: I was told to sit down to a table, which was also the reception desk for a massage saloon. For 8 hours there was not a single soul coming for massage, but on the other side of the desk there was the receptionist lady sitting, and believe or not, for 8 hours she was just staring in the nothingness in front of her. But literally, just sitting and staring the whole day. I already got used to the Indians not striving for efficiency, but spending one's life doing nothing (okay, for sure once in a while someone would come for massage, but still), this shocked me pretty much.

Anyway, I'd like you to feel the atmosphere of the city so I made a gallery for you. It's 56 pictures so it'd take about 5-6 minutes to see it. It also contains some wild pigs enjoying a trance party:

I didn't like Dehra Dun. Don't go to Dehra Dun if you don't have anything in particular to do there, because it's no good place. The streets are dirty, rickshaw drivers try to fool you, hotels are more expensive than usual, the city has a bad smell in general and there are lots of beggars. Especially children.

I went there because of the Vipassana camp and I left real quick to a beautiful place 15 kms from there, which I told you about in my Vipassana article. (only available in Hungarian, still, sorry).

After two weeks in the Himalayas we decided to move off the mountains and look for something different. Originally we planned to go directly to Dehra Dun where my vipassana meditation course took place but we very advised not to miss Chandigarh, the capital of "Punjab" (a state of India). So we left Manali two days earlier to make time for seeing this city.

But our journey was everything but without problems. Out bus left in the afternoon and it got to Chandigarh in the early morning. (In India even the distances that seem short can mean a long journey, because of the average speed of ~40 km/h. Especially in the mountains.) The rain was pouring the whole day and the whole night so we couldn't see the scenery. Then we slept but around 1AM we woke up because the bus had stopped. We didn't really understand what was going on, then after an hour people started worrying, when in the end someone figured that a big landslide had buried the road in front of us, and now no car can move either way. So we waited for about 3 hours in the dark, in the rain when finally something happened and we could continue. After a few days we heard this thing was even in the news in Delhi so it must have been some unusually big landslide.

But this would have been alright. The real problem rose when we arrived to Chandigarh: our bags, which were put to the trunk of the bus were soaked. But literally, the water was flowing from my bag. Alas I was too tired at 5-6AM to fo anything about it, and also it was a private bus so it just dropped us off on the street, there was no bus station or any office to complain. Se we left the place without any fight, we took a rickshaw to find a hotel where we could hang our stuff to dry. (By "stuff" I don1t mean just clothes, but sleeping bags, books etc.)

A quick tip for budget backpackers visiting Chandigarh: don't believe Lonely Planet, the price for hotels is not six times more than in other cities. It's just two times more (double room 600 RS at the time of writing), you can find a cheap place if you're willing to walk(/ask) around an hour.

Interruption: a strange thing I saw on the main square of Chandigarh:

And people were queuing for this thing... Whatever.

I'll show you the city in pictures rather than text, but still, a few words: Similarly to Islamabad, this is a planned city. The square blocks it's made of are called "sectors", there are a total of 40 of them and (more or less) each of them serves a different purpose. It's a nice green city (compared to other cities of India for sure), it's inhabited by Punjabi people, who mostly believe in the Sikh religion and they wear turbans. Oh yes, and the city was planned by Le Corbusier, and if I was an architect I could tell you hours about it but I'm not so I really hope our friend Zoli writes something useful about this in a comment :)

And finally the pictures, 34 in total, so it's not a big gallery, just the essence.

Originally we planned to go to the very north of india from Dharamsala, to visit the places Srinagar and Leh, both of them said to be beautiful. But then we started counting the days we had until the vipassana course and we decided to take a shortcut instead and go directly to Manali. Or more precisely to the neighboring village called Vashist, because Manali itself is nothing extra, while Vashist is one of the best places in India.

Vashist in a nutshell: cheap accommodation, cheap and very tasty dishes, lots of tourist in a small place but not too many, homely atmosphere, good company, lots of jews (every second person is Israeli). Fast internet but many power cuts (I was happy to have a laptop). Drug turism: many come for the hashish made of the liquids of the locally grown cannabis, which is - being respectful to the customs of peoples living here since ancient times - legal to consume "for religious and meditational purposes". Our friend Zoli told us that when they were here 1-2 years ago they met two Americans in Vashist who were stoned all the time. Then Zoli and his friends went to the mountains for two weeks, and when they got back the two Americans were still sitting there, still completely stoned :) Of course we didn't come here for that, but if I had tried some local speciality I'm sure I'd have started cooking Chinese soup after it ;)

The people we met in Vashist were mainly a PE teacher from the Basque country and a young artist from Britain. We had nice chats and a nice trek with the former, while we had our first beers since Turkey with the latter. Even though it's easy to get by without drinking any beer for months, it was still a wonderful feeling the have a few bottles :)

Another funny thing that happened: we always heard amazingly good (mainly electric) music from the small restaurant/café next to our house. We went over to ask some of the music of the DJ guy, who said OK, gave us his pendrive and asked us to give him some good music if we felt like. So we gave him some good music, among them an unknown track written and song by a friend of mine, a Hungarian medical student girl. I was quite surprised when I heard it the next day. I was like "Hmmmm I know this song...", went closer and then I realized this is the music of my friend Claudia :) So I uploaded it for you in mp3, I think it goes well with our pictures, too:

Balla Bettina Claudia - Butterfly

Also we have written you a little bedtime story too (in Hungarian and English):