Today was a lazier day with a later start. First stop is always Hima’s for lunch. Today we had roti, rice, and a potato vegetable mix all served with curry. I never thought I liked curry but this kind wasn’t bad.
We then headed to Hima’s other grandparents to spend the afternoon hanging out with them. Her grandparents were very nice serving us an array of biscuits (cookies) to try. Their house was beautiful with two huge swings — one thing I’ve not talked about yet is the swings in every house. It was explained to me that here in India everyone loves to swing and so they have swings all over. Almost every house I’ve been in (I’ve been in a lot… see yesterday’s post) has had a swing in their living room. They are the coolest things and I wish I had a place I could put one in our living room , because I would order one and have it shipped.
Her grandmother was very interested in speaking to us, but we have quite a language barrier as Gujrati is very, very different from English. Hima translated a bit, but her grandmother wanted us to learn Gujrati so she started teaching us (I’m sure I butchered the spelling)…
Kem cho=Hello, how are you
Pani=water
Beso=sit
Challo=let’s go
That’s about all we can grasp at this point. But it was so nice of her to want to communicate enough to begin teaching us.
Her grandfather showed us the housing that he owns behind his place which turned out to be 32 one room apartments. Not one bedroom apartments… one room apartments. They are very low cost (around $10-15 a month) and were quite small. However for laborers that are only making maybe $4 a day, these apartments are all they will be able to afford.
Next stop was the local Hindu temple. This is the first one here in India that we’ve been to… This is a really old village temple that isn’t necessarily kept up, but the atmosphere is still there. And because her grandparents come here so often, we were able to meet the guru and his family. The guru runs the temple… I’m not exactly sure what to think of this (Kevin compares the guru to a pastor, which may be true. However I’m not sure I got that feeling from him).
Anyways, we walked all around the temple and learned who each of the gods are…if you are unfamiliar with the religion you may think that Hinduism is a poly-god religion, when in fact, there is really one god that takes all different forms based on a point in time. For example, there is a god of health and a god of love. So you would pray to a specific god for a specific reason. Another way to think about this is if you picture your hand underneath a thin sheet — each one of your fingers looks like a different object, but really underneath it is just one hand. This is a very simplistic explanation and I’m sure a more western perspective, but I think it gives a good broad perspective. And I can’t take credit for the ‘sheet’ example as my World Religions professor in college explained Hinduism similarly and it really helped me understand better.
The rest of the day we hung out around Hima’s house, ate dinner and killed a lot of mosquitos. For real… the mosquito game is real. We have some bug zappers and walk around the house just zapping.
See for yourself…
