Kancheepuram and elefant

Last week I spent travelling around Coimbatore and other places around, but that will be topic for the next post. BUT important things first, I was supposed to put an elephant pic for Märss, so here it is:

This an elephant next to a temple in Kancheepuram where me and Ivette went few weeks ago. Its a small town near Chennai and has many many temples. This elephant blessed me, I gave it 5 rupees and for that it hit me on the head with its trunk, unfortunately there is no picture of exactly that moment. At first I was so shocked I thought that the elephant ate the money and I was already ready to protest out loud (thinking about cows, dogs, cats and monkeys eating garbage), but then I saw hot it secretly sokutas (put) the money from its trunk into the hands of its tamer.

Inside the temple area there was this strange place where stones where put ontop of each other and of course I thought that this is supposed to be for some wish to be granted or whatever and picked some stones and made my own pile and some lady came even to help, I guess she was expecting to get payed for taking rocks from some other people's pile and putting them to a new one... :D what a business idea

And even straner thing on the tree, don't know what it could represent..

Hello mandala!

This is a typical river going through a city in India, this one was is Kancheepuram, similar ones in Chennai as well, just bigger and deeper.

Then we went to a next temple and it was just time to open it up and these were the people waiting desperately for the doors to open.

  

And when the doors did open then they literally ran into it, well first it was a struggle like whereever in India, no one is willing to let anyone else go first, just elbows into the other person and thats the way to go.

 Inside of the temple were all kind of figures and things and monks allover. The feeling inside was somehow sacret, since it was dark and there were some fires next to the statues and insense and monks and drums and uff.. I felt chills inside, even though it was not cold..

And then this monk blessed me again and...

... gave me my first bindhi in India. There is a rumor that many young Indian men want to be monks in a Hindu temple because they are allowed to smoke cannabis freely :D (to help them in their spiritual journeys of course) dunno how true it is, but some of the monks were very young indeed.

Then when exiting the temple there were women there who put milk on peoples palm to drink it from there. I also took it and drank it, was sweet and lil taste of nutmeg. Yes I know, to take that milk in 30 degrees heat, but we did many high bakteria risk things that day, ate in so strange places etc, but everything was good, I guess the temples have antibakteria aura.

Then after visiting smth like four temples the auto riksha driver took us to a typical silk factory, since Kancheepuram is famos for its silk sarees

And this one had also gold stand in it. It takes 3 weeks to make silk for one saree.

 Just a streetview of Kancheepuram, poor sacred cow...

I just remembered one thing that happened about 1,5 months ago when I spent 12 hours in Dubai airport. So there I was, just waking up from a small 3 hour nap on a laydown chair after being awake around 30 hours. Next to me was this Indian guy also just waking up. I was eating an apple and reading Gunnar Aarma's book "India". So the guy started asking where and why I was going etc. It turned out that he was just returning from Chennai and on his way to South Africa where he worked. We had a very fruitful conversation about everything, but mostly about religion. He was a very religious Christian whose father is a Hindu priest (haha) and he was very surprised to hear I wasn´t religious at all. I told him immideatly not to try to convert me and basically he agreed with my idea that there is divinity inside every person. But what was the strangest thing was that after we had had this interesting discussion for about an hour and just as he set himself to leave he asked if he could pray for me. So he did. He said things that really got to me. He told me that I had been very sad for some time, because I had lost someone important from my life. Also he wished safety and good health for me in India and that I would find myself a religion (without labelling it he added quicky as I turned my eyes on him) and a life partner. Wow the last was so cool, so cool was that he said it in a gender neutral way :)