4 Aug

Golden Temple & Amritsar
My host-mother woke me up today, asking me if I wanted to go to Amritsar. Well, you can try to guess what my answer was. In any case, I got to see the famous Golden Temple. The temple itself is rather small I must say (I mean the main part which is surrounded by amrit (the holy water) and didn’t look very impressive, but the whole complex is very beautiful. We spent there about 2 hours, I think. At first I thought, I would take a bath in the holy water, but afterwards re-decided because I really don’t believe in these things and thought it would be a bit impropriate. Anyway, we waited in a queue for quite a while to get in to the main part and afterwards visited different parts of the complex. This included the place where people go and sit on the ground and eat the food, given by the temple. These meals are actually good to the society because eating there doesn’t cost anything, so the poor people can have their meal over there. You can actually get as much food as you want to. Because of the free food, there are a people from very different layers of society and it is interesting to all of them sitting on the ground and eating side-by-side. After visiting the temple, I saw the Sikh museum (which is actually a part of the temple). There were a lot of bloody paintings of ancient battles (between the Sikh and the Moghuls) and the Sikh martyrs and, to my surprise, the paintings of the so called “freedom fighters” who were responsible for the terrorist acts in the 1984. It only then occurred to me, exactly how violent the Sikh history is. After seeing that, we went to a beautiful garden near the temple, where a massacre had taken place (sorry, but I don’t know the datum). Nowadays there are monuments and truly very-very beautiful gardens.

In addition, I couldn’t miss a chance to see how Siim is living, so we went to the spa in which he lives. Siim gave me a tour around the property. That’s one hell of a building, I must say. Anyway, it was nice to speak Estonian again (although we had to concentrate in order to do so, because we are already so used to English).