You can visit the pakistan-india border where each night they have a celebration of sorts. it is a demonstration of border bravado really and it like a show. it happens around when they take down the flags each night and is quite an event.
they all march around yelling and high step marching (i swear the almost kick their own heads) in fancy uniforms with fans on their heads (or what looked like one). they're all huge too. they must grab you from the indian army if you're like 6 and a half feet tall and put you in it (and with a billion people they'd have a few choices).
you get popcorn to eat and sit in a grandstand to watch; quite weird. we sat (me and the german guy) on the road side though as it seemed a better view and when it all started they began with dancing. i was sitting nect to an idian girl who had been beofe and she said they never dance usually so there must have been something on. there were tv cameras and so on too. so all these indians get selected to come dance on the street with the camera on them and then one of the girls comes and grabs me to make me join in. i jump up (pulling germany with me) and dance around for all of 5 seconds before feeling like a prat and jumping down again. germany follows me 2 seconds later.
only regret in india so far. should have just gone for it (o: would have been on tv! but i felt like i was blushing worse than a tomato in a red light district (and probably was) as every person was staring at the white guy (who stood out just a bit) trying to dance to crazy indian music! mmm. next time, haha.
on the way back from the border we also stopped in at a Hindi temple. Now this was tops. You enter and are immediately surrounded by wire fencing so it is like you are in a cage. you walk around this path and then hit a cave you have to crawl through to go on. you enter an area with bells you bang and clash as loud as possible (to let god know you exist) and then you head further up, through another cave, past some crazy statues that look like drunken kindergarten students made them (but i am assured they're the official images of these gods), wade through a man made river (yes, this is a temple remember)through a room of mirrors (this whole place was like a fun park and had us searching for the house of horrors through out) and you reach a holy man who draws an orange dot on your forehead and gives you some candy coated popcorn to eat.
then you get to head down again (it's all a one way path) and do a tour of the more conservative temple area. here you get more orange on your head if you smile nicely, some food from another guy if u ask a question and then if u talk to another holy guy for 5 minutes, smiling throughout, repeating what he says but not really understanding a word of it, you get rewarded with a big lump of yellow sticky dessert stuff (i should really stop asking questions!).
top place really.
then after a quick chai (made specially, and only for us and it does get annoying being treated special when we are the ones who need it least! our chai was also accompanied by biscuits which i never otherwise saw) we headed to bed at around 1am.
Now if you're wondering why so late...
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