The Golden Temple!

Hi everyone!
Greetings from Vellore again on a hot and humid night! Shout out to the Klaska, Bowman, and Jump families :-)

Today, after our exciting first Indian grocery store experience, we decided to join Rasika and her grandparents (they rode in on the train to Vellore from Bangalore to drop her off at the Darling Residency) at the Golden Temple. The Golden Temple is a relatively new temple (about 6 years old) about 7 or 8 km from where we are staying. It's a Hindu temple dedicated to the goddess Lakshmi, and the temple itself is made from plated gold.

We took our first trip on autorickshaws (if you've never seen a picture of an autorickshaw, definitely look it up on Google!) to the temple....Shivani and Yinan were in the same autorickshaw as me, and while they were playing it cool, I was fearing for my life. These city streets are CRAZY. Can't really explain how chaotic the roads here are, but there are buses, cabs, autorickshaws, bicycles, and motorbikes all weaving in and out of lanes competing for space on the correct side of the road (which is opposite side compared to U.S. driving). Definitely gonna take some getting used to!

We arrived at the Golden Temple to the largest crowd that we've seen yet. Most were locals there to visit the temple and worship on a Sunday, especially because the kids are out of school and will be returning after vacation soon. This was the one time we didn't mind paying the entrance fee for a monument, because this ticket allowed us to skip the more than 3 hour line and enter the temple directly.

The gold plated temple was surrounded by gardens, waterfalls, statues of other Hindu gods, as well as covered walkways where we waited in line, which Rasika said were in the shape of an "ohm".

We got to take a quick walk through the temple itself, where they were performing a ceremony. There was music, lots of jasmine flowers (especially in womens' hair), and TONS of people On our way out of the temple, we were presented with prasad, a blessed sweet. Near the exit we saw a painted elephant walking through the gates towards the temple.

Compared to the crowds in Delhi and Agra, we definitely stood out more and attracted lots more attention towards ourselves. We'll see how things go tomorrow at the hospital, though as we have heard (even in our travel books), Vellore is known to attract many international medical students, so we might not be such an unusual sight after all!

Caitlyn and Shivani