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Other entries in Aurangābād

Caves!!

We went to the Ellora caves on a 10 hour long tour, including some other stops to semi interesting places. The caves were not like you'd imagine caves to be. They were really intricate and ornately carved , sort of like buildings inside a mountain. One cave had 3 stories! With rooms with beds and pillows, all carved out of the mountain, all of rock. Buddhists made them and used to go there to pray and stuff. There were also Hindu and Jain caves. The Buddhist ones had all these carved out statues of Buddha and other people-y sorts of statues. There was this temple place in there, with a high ceiling and a HUGE Buddha statue, with amazing echoes. Our guide made us be quiet and did some singy chanty thing and it sounded amazing.

We stopped at some boring Hindu temples with dead guys buried in them. One temple was so crazy- there were people buying a plate of flowers and white things and other stuff, you go into this little room and there's this mound of rock and you place your flowers and stuff, and coconuts and money, as offerings to the god. There are hundreds or thousands of gods, but this temple was to the god of fertility. It was weird, but very interesting to be able to witness. It's part of the tour, so tourist go there all the time, so they didn't mind us being there. The guide told us that to achieve forgiveness of sins, they have to go to all 12 of these temples around the country and pay these offererings. I prefer Jesus cleaning my sins without me having to do anything, or paying money or giving him flowers or coconuts, just cause He loves me. It was funny, our tour bus had all these Christian stickers like God is Love and Psalm 121 or something, and we were visiting these Buddhist and Hindu places!

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