The bathing ghats

1/11 Lots more computer job stuff in the morning. I took an afternoon walk along the ghats. Walking all the way to the railway bridge in the far north of the city. It was neat to walk amongst all the pilgrims coming to bathe at the ghats. I also walked by loads of Cricket games and lots of kids flying and fighting kites (though they don't fight the kites as intensely as in the Kite Runner). In the evening I attended a performance in the ghats that was pretty cool. They used lots of unusual instruments and fire.

1/12 I took a foggy dawn walk along the ghats and then another boat ride along the ghats just because the activity going on along them was just so interesting and fascinating. I then had a wild cyclorickshaw ride to the train station where I boarded a train heading to the small town of Umaria. I was in the 4th class train and the windows didn't close very well so when night came it was absolutely freezing. I was bundled up in all my clothes, but still shaking. It was probably about freezing temp outside and then add the wind to it. I was so tempted to pull out my sleeping bag and be nice and toasty; however, I was also afraid of falling into a deep sleep and missing my stop. Unlike the chinese and russian trains which are on time so that you can just set your watch alarm to a few minutes before you are to arrive and then you know the next station is yours, the Indian trains are almost always quite late. And unlike the Russian trains with the providnistas that will wake you up anyways when it is your stop, there is no one on the Indian trains to do this. The place, Bandhavgarh national park, that I was going was a bit out of the way and I had to depart at this tiny stop called Umaria. The train would only stop for 2 minutes at this stop, so I had to be ready to bolt as soon as I arrived. The train was supposed to arrive at 10:22pm, but I arrived a bit after 3am. I somehow managed to see the name of the station in the dark and make it off on time. I had originally thought about just sleeping at the station, but all the benches were taken up and the very cold and dirty concrete floor did not look inviting (though I would have been joining many Indians huddled up together under blankets on the floor) so I walked the 30 minutes to the town, woke up a hotel manager and took a room.