Hindu Temple

After a three hour drive to Aurora, Illinois, we made it to the Hindu Temple. The first thing the tour guide talked about was about how India is different how the United States, not only by religion, but how they are set up. Each of India’s states has its own language and has different ways of how their women dress. You can tell which state a women is from by the clothes she wears. Also, our guide went on to discuss that we were in a South temple, there is a different in a North temple and a South temple, but he really didn’t get much into details about it.

After the tour guide talked for a little bit, he took us to get some food. The choice was spicy or yogurt and both had rice. I tried the spicy, but could only get a little bit down. The spicy and I did not agree as much as I thought we would. I did not try the yogurt food because the texture did not look that great. Oh well, at least I tried something new!

When we finished with the food, we then went upstairs into the actually temple part. Before we could go upstairs we had to remove our shoes. They do not wear shoes in the temple because they need to keep it very clean up there and they also do not have chairs to sit down in. So, they sit on the carpet. I thought that was a pretty neat way to pray and have a temple!

Once we got up to the temple our tour showed as around a bit. He talked about the different gods and how even though they worshiped and prayed to different gods, they still believe in only one god. I never knew that and I thought that was pretty cool information. After he talked about the different gods, our tour guide let us wander about the temple.

This is where it starts to get neat. One of the priests allowed us to get blessed by the god Vishnu. This involved the priest brings around a flame and we cuffed our hands and brought our hands to our heads. Then we put out our hands and received holy water, which we then had to drink and not let touch the ground. By the way it did not taste the greatest, I believe it was made of water and incent. Then the priest touch our head with a golden hat thing and this was Vishnu blessing us, since the god could not leave where he/she was. Then we received a gift from the god, which were two almonds.

I know a lot of this probably does not make sense if you were not there, but I would suggest to anyone to go to a Hindu Temple sometime in their life. It was completely worth the three hour drive!

Catherine :)