Day Two.

The second day of our trip we awoke early, after a night of loud noises outside our door the night before (The Mela brought in a lot of tourists from other parts of the country, and I don't think they slept!). We ate an early breakfast and then headed out to do some exploring of the town. At first someone told us that the town was 50km around, which sounded like a lot, but we later found out it was only 5km, which makes a lot more sense because it only took us about 20mins to walk from one side of town to the other. The town is split by a river, and the main residential area and market is on one side, where the bus stand, and open air type market is on the other side. There is a main bridge that joins the two parts of town, decorated with colored flags, and a great view from it. As you cross the bridge you come to the main market in town. The underground market as it is called, contains, as I was told over 200 shops, including food, bookstores, clothes, electronics, pretty much anything you need. The market is in a square shape with a building type thing in the middle,(see picture top) I'm not too sure what it is, but there were also idols in the garden surrounding the building. After visiting the market, which was closed because it was Sunday, we ventured to see what a crowd nearby was looking at. There was some sort of ceremony/Puja that they were doing for one of the 200 Idols that had come from the surrounding town. There were men banging on drums and blowing horns, while another man, dressed in white danced around with swords, and insence, after a couple minutes of this ritual, they stopped and the crowd dispersed.
We then decided we would go exploring through some of the streets. We started up this one hill, just out of curiosity, not really knowing where it would take us. We kept on walking further and further up the hill, while we were walking we saw multitudes of mandirs/temples, and a lot of shrines on the top of people's houses too. Apparently there was a a temple at the top of the hill, but after about 20minutes of walking UP the hill, we decided we would turn around and come back down. There wasn't too much to see, although the view was nice. On the way down we passed some donkeys, the town is full of them. It seems the come in pretty handy when carrying groceries etc. I later found out you can buy one of these cute little guys for a mere $200 or so. You may hear more in the future about me trying to acquire one of these guys for my own grocery shopping!!
After a morning filled with walking, and crowds, we ventured back to the hotel for some food and lunch, the rest of the day was spent meeting people, and hanging out. Day three to come later...