It MUST be curry...

Well, a day spent in Varanasi has fulfilled my quota of 'Try something new every day!', for the next two years or so...!
This place is totally overwhelming, on every level. The highlight of the day, and an experience I will never forget, is watching the open crematoria alongside the Ganges river. In the Hindu relgion (which 82% of Indians follow), the banks of the Ganges river are considered holy ground. So holy, in fact, that if a person dies on site, they get a Get Out of Reincarnation Free card, and get catapulted to a state of eternal Nirvana. So, people bring their loved ones here to die, and when they do, they get wrapped in special cloth, bathed in the river, then burned while family members look on. 300 bodies are burned per day - there are 6 fires on the go 24/7. We stood and watched a wrapped body burn until the cloth and skin were burned off, and you could see the skull bones protruding - with family looking on in celebratory joy. Dead pregnant women, holy men, babies, and people who die of snake bites don't get burned, but are either sunk to the bottom of the river with a stone, or set afloat down the river on a banana leaf.
As this is going on, there are wild cows alongside dipping in to the river for a bath, and many people following suit, submerging themselves in this holy water, as 30 sewage treatment pipes belch out their fluids alongside (spawning my safety-based philosophy of 'Anything wet is urine until proven otherwise!!). The rest of the day is difficult to describe... wandering around in a hypervigilant state, people and animal watching.... An elderly woman paying homage to a cow on the street, walking around it in a trance, touching it systematically, and saying prayers; a herd of monkeys romping around the streets, getting into fights with each other, ultimately beaten away with a bat by a local man; us beating off the hundredth tout asking if we would like a boat ride, a tour, or perhaps some hash?; watching a beautiful group of young, colorfully clad girls sprinting along the river banks in a Punjabi-Baywatch fashion, realizing too late that they were running towards the two pale skinned walking ATMs, to hound us incessantly to buy their wares; feeling so deeply for the umpteenth crippled man sitting on the steps, wishing better for his life.
A picture really does speak a thousand words... stay tuned. Off to grab our laundry, which was motivated by an unidentified yellow substance on Deb's pants ('it must be curry!'... this is up for debate.) !! :)