Amritsar - Golden Temple, Mata Temple, Silver Temple

Had a glorious sleep-in morning, our first night on a good bed in 4 nights. We are so going to get ourselves a foam bed when we get home. OMG, loving them so much! Then had a leisurely breakfast at our hotel. This is something we need to do more of, both at home and traveling: long leisurely breakfasts. It never seems like there is time, but it makes the day so much better. It reminds me of something at the end of "The Seven Habits" about somebody (Martin Luther?) being quoted saying, "I have so much to accomplish today, I must spend another 2 hours on my knees."

After breakfast, we wandered down to the Golden Temple. We started with visiting the Sikh Museum, which unfortunately left us fully as uninformed about Sikhism as we'd been before. (However, we have since learned on Wikipedia that Sikhism is the 5th largest religion in the world, so we should probably learn about it.) It basically just had a lot of photos, paintings, and information about a lot of Sikh martyrs. Next we took a leisurely walk around the pond surrounding the temple, watching people go for their holy dips in the water, listening to the sacred Sikh texts being quietly sung, along with instrumentals, over the PA system, and as always posing for endless photographs with Indians. We decided to skip, for the time being, going out to the temple itself, as there was a very long line to do that. Silly us, not paying attention to the day of the week and showing up at such a big site on a Saturday afternoon! What were we thinking?

From Drop Box

We went through the Sikh Parliament building, which was incredibly beautiful. Amazing carved wooden doors, chandeliers, and ceilings. The inlays were probably the best we've seen in India (along with those inside the Golden Temple). Here's an example in an area where we were actually allowed to take photos. Note especially the array of materials--most places only use around 3-4 inlay materials (either the more valuable set or the less valuable set), and we've not seen the mother of pearl anywhere else. This is on the floor!

From Drop Box

Also stepped into another little shrine, which was very busy, and spent some time resting in the shade of a 500+-year-old holy tree.

From Drop Box

Then we made our way to the community kitchen for a late lunch.

From Drop Box

This has got to be the most efficient feeding operation on the face of the Earth. This free meal is fed to between 60,000 and 100,000 people per day, depending on your source. They moved us in and out pretty fast, so we didn't get a lot of photos. We saw some of the food being prepared in giant vats, probably 4 feet across. The cook had a ladle the size of half a basketball. Sikh volunteers brought the food out in buckets and large baskets. There were two kinds of dal (bean curry), which were pretty good, and roti. Unlimited seconds seemed to be available. We had intended to help clean up, but after looking at the fast paced hand washing operation, we decided we'd probably just slow them down and decided to stick with giving money. Note the plate in mid air.

From Drop Box

After the Golden Temple we walked back to our hotel. On the way, we ran across a shop that did passport photos and dropped in and paid 100 rupees ($2) for 32 passport photos of each of us. We'll need a bunch of them in Southeast Asia supposedly. We relaxed at our hotel for a bit, then walked in the other direction up to the Mata Temple, which was described as a "cave temple" in Lonely Planet. We thought a temple in a cave sounded pretty cool. The cave part was totally fake and not even underground. However, it was still a good stop. It's a modern temple (dedicated to a 20th century saint), with some incredible mosaics made of some very modern mirrored materials. For those of you who have been to Epic's campus or seen my pictures, it really looked like it belonged there. Someone needs to tell Judy that Epic needs an India themed building. And then they need to send someone to this temple to see what that looks like. There were also some young (maybe middle-school) girls who decided that Mary was their new best friend.

From Drop Box

Next we tried to go to dinner at a restaurant with some highly recommended tandoori, but got there much too early for Indian food and decided to move on to the Sri Durgiana Temple, which is also known as the Silver Temple for its silver doors and similar design (temple out on an artificial lake of holy water) to the Golden Temple. There was a Hindu ceremony going on when we got there, and not another tourist to be seen. The ceremony seemed to have some similarities to the one in Varanasi, in the sense that there was a priest doing something with candles or lamps. However, there was also beautiful singing coming from the entire congregation. It felt like a real religious ceremony, and a beautiful one, even though we didn't really understand what was going on. We got pushed forward from where we were standing at the back, just in time to be splashed with holy water. It was great. We think the decorations here are for Holi, which is tomorrow.

From Drop Box

Had we made it out to the Golden Temple itself, today would have been a perfect day. We'll try to do that early tomorrow for less crowds.