Much catching up to do

So I haven't written in the longest time, mostly because I've been absurdly busy and tired. Right now I'm sitting in a rather cute little coffee shop in Bangalore. The people here are quite racist though...

On to the past couple days, I'll just start with yesterday. We went to this giant bazaar area and walked around for a good 4-5 hours. At one point I stepped into a questionable puddle of something...second time my left foot became engulfed in Indian street muck, but hey these things happen.

We left the bazaar and began looking for an auto rickshaw to drive us back to NGV (our subpar apartments...). We ended up befriending this social rickshaw driver, who in return absolutely loved us. He drove us around Bangalore, told us he'd only charge 10 ruppees, about 15 cents, to drive us back but we had to stop at certain stores. Apparently, the shop owners will pay rickshaw drivers extra to drive naive tourist to their stores. He said we didn't have to buy anything, we just had to look.

We went to these stores and were immediately swamped with attention and "How much you want pay?". It was difficult to decline, but I did. Mostly because I'm already short of money here.

By the end of the trip we found out just about everything about our cab driver. His name is Mohammad, he has 2 children - boy and girl - he's 38, and his wife is 28, he got married to here when she was only 18. We also found out that woman should get married when they are young 18-20. 25-years-old, way to old. No longer marriageable at that age. "By 20 you should have 3 kids"

Today

Today was nothing short of exhausting. It began at 6:30 in the morning when we started our trek to campus. We left around 7:15 and began our fast tour of Bangalore. It is a beautiful city. Up until it began to be ungodly hot, it was great to see the city and experience the various religious temples.

We went to The Krishna temple and it was nothing short of beautiful. After praying to the first two gods we went to the main temple - it house the 3 "main" gods Krishna being one of them. The alters were all made of pure gold, some of the statues had diamond tiaras and jewels. The smells permeating the air from the incense burners was enchanting, it put you in a completely heightened mental state.