Varanasi

Here is a city that I was excited about. We stayed in the most touristic area around the Gange. The small streets are full of life and of cows. One of them even attacked me, without reason really, if it was not for the red T-shirt…


We get the cultural shock pretty quick. We started by going for a short stroll along the river to get some air and look at the sunset. We took lots of pictures and at some point, I raised my head because i see smoke from the corner of my eye. Some people are carrying a stretcher which was in fact a bambou ladder. As we got closer, we can easily distinguish a body on that stretcher, an old woman covered by colorful cloths. She will be cremated on the side of the Holy river, the Gange. You can follow her story in the next blog.

It gives a shock even if you knew that you were going to see death so openly. We have seen many of those stretchers in the next few days going through the streets. The men carrying it sing prayers and blessings. The body must be taken care of within 24 hours usually unless you keep it on ice. For the people who can not afford the wood to be burnt, there is also a crematorium which cost about 10 times less.

We also explore the Gange’s ghats at sunrise. It is at sunrise that most citizens of the old city take a bath in the river and they also do their prayers and blessings since it is a Holy river. It is also really polluted. Of course, there are already some fires burning bodies right beside people enjoying a morning chat. I feel a bit worry that i am intruding into the intimacy of those people although, they smile and talk to everybody, not caring who is watching. I think i can see worst tourist around me anyway!

I stay with a feeling of having been robbed in Varanasi. Many events led to that feeling involving vendors, rickshaw drivers, barbers and ‘guides’ who always take you to a shop. It is a continual task to say ‘No thank you’ to these people but they kept insisting. So…

We met few silk vendors, silk being one of Varanasi speciality. Silk is though to evaluate. There are so many different qualities and I don’t know anything about it. The vendors gave very good demonstrations and I did compare many different pieces of bed spread believe me. I was not conviced in the ned and did not buy anyting at that point. I will look for it somewhere else.

It is also in Varanasi that i took some Tablas lessons. First try at drums so far and i will need lots of practice. I decided to buy a pair of drums to do just that when i go back home. The whole story around those drums gave me a bad taste in my mouth. When we took the first lesson, the teacher was very nice and I could not explain why I had a feeling about him. Rob thought he was great and so I took a second lesson as well before deciding to buy the Tablas. The teacher assured us that it was the best quality but we have not taken the time to look around much to compare or even to get good informations elsewhere. Many little details of the conversation we had with the teacher or littles events while we where dealing the Tablas came back to me afterwards. I was convinced that i had paid too much! On top of that the teacher became more and more a pain in the butt once we had giving him the money. I will one day be able to play…

We avoided a huge line up at the post office the day we were leaving. We had to ship the tablas home since they are heavy! One of the employee let us in through the back door before the office even opened, a little money helped. He also took care of the payment and included another extra fee. He said the size of the box was not standard!! When we look at the official receipt a little later, the amount did not include fees for the size of the box. We had been warned and we need to get over that. Let’s forget it all.

It’s bad for the next persons that we ran into because we were already exhausted of the extortions of money that never end. We got less patient with the people that kept asking for money and try to get their little piece of the tourist pie.Even the music teacher wanted us to buy his super DVD to learn to play tablas better. Dawn it, he just got a huge cut on the tablas, he could have given it to us! I take so much time usually to choose and decide what i want…what happened to me in Varanasi?

I still met old women that were smiling at us so i think i will have to go back at some point to get a better impression of that city that has so much culture and is so unique.