Karma tells about our day in Trichy

We are in Trichy. Today, we went to breakfast at the breakfast buffet downstairs in the hotel. It wasn't that good, but we ate cereal, toast and croissants. After breakfast, our Dad wanted us to see a music video that his dental staff made. It's supposed to be the kind of thing where you vote on which idea for children's dental care you like best. Maggie, Tenzin and I went upstairs to get ready to go to a few temples after we saw the music videos and then we left and went to the first temple.

The first temple was a little temple carved out of rock, but it was on top of a huge staircase with 417 steps, which we had to climb. When you first get out of your car to enter a temple, you take off your shoes (we put them in the car because our last pair of shoes got stolen when we left them outside the last time we went to a temple) and you can leave them at the temple door. It was really muddy when we got out of the car with our bare feet and we tiptoed to the temple door. When we got inside the door, we were blessed by a very large elephant. The elephant's trunk was shaved so it looked like leopard print, and it also had chalk designs on its' trunk. To get blessed by the elephant, we had to put our heads down and the elephant's owner (called a mahout) said a word which I didn't understand and the elephant touched our heads with the tip of his trunk. Then we started walking up the steps.

When we got to the top of the stairs, we went into the temple. The temple is a small room with a hallway surrounding it. Inside the room, we watched a priest and a statue Ganesh. After he prayed, the priest took ashes on his thumb from a bowl that someone was holding and put a little ashes on each person's forehead. Then he gave the men strings of grass to put around their neck, and he gave the women flowers. Me and my sister pressed our flowers and our Dad got a packet of ashes from the priest[sort in a kechtup packet shape.] Then we enjoyed the view (and it's a really amazing thing to see a bird from a bird's eye view.)

Ganesh is the elephant god. He has a man's body and an elephant head because his father didn't recognize him after a long trip (like 10 or 20 years) and Ganesh wouldn't let him in because he was a faithful guard, so his father cut off his head, but then his mother came out and told his father that it was his son, and one of the very few things that Ganesh's father was afraid of was his wife's anger. So he asked if there was anything he could do, and she said yes, he could go and get a head from the first living thing that he found and put it on his son's shoulders. I'm not sure what people pray to Ganesh for. Each god in India is prayed to for different things, like getting a good grade or having more money or being healed. There are thousands of gods in India.

The second temple was called the Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple. The town was built around the temple. There are seven circles, with a wall and a gate, and the golden shrine is in the middle. This is a temple for Vishnu, who is the preserver in Hinduism. The other two main gods are Brahma, the creator, and then Shiva, the destroyer. Vishnu came to life as a cowherder named Krishna, who played the flute to call his cows. It is believed that there will be 10 incarnations of Vishnu, and we are in the era of the 9th incarnation right now. The 9th incarnation is Krishna. The 10th incarnation is supposedly a little like the apocalypse in Christianity --- it means that the world is being destroyed. They don't know when the 10th incarnation will come. It might be in a year, in a month, or in a century, or in a millennium.

At the temple, we spent a few hours listening to a guide talking. He showed us different areas, like the barn where they keep the animals that are donated by people who come to worship. Tenzin, my brother, got his own tour guide, that a lot of people seemed to know. One of the temples was all white because of mourning for the priests who jumped off the top in protest because for a hundred years they didn't have to pay taxes but then all of a sudden the new ruler made them pay the taxes for the past 100 years all in one day because he worshiped Shiva and didn't like the temple to Vishnu.

One part was the "temple of 1000 pillars" but there are really only 960 because they believe it would be wrong to do something "perfect" as that is only for the gods to do. So once a year on the festival, they put up 40 palm tree trunks in the courtyard to finish the temple and make it 1000 pillars. Vishnu sleeps on a bed made by a giant cobra, which shades him while he sleeps. The cobra has 5 heads for the five elements, fire air water sky earth.

We were not allowed to go into the temple because we are not Hindu.

After we left that temple we drove back to the hotel and ordered room service and had fried rice and spaghetti and four orders of French fries. All this time on the way back home, my little brother Kobi had been asleep.

Our feet got so dirty we had to wash them for millennium years.