A morning to relax in the hotel, then our guide and driver took us into the city of Amritsar to walk the streets and visit the oldest bazaar in the city (400 years old). Since we are on foot for the next couple of hours, we are able to meet the ‘local dentist’. He is a non-trained sidewalk dentist for the very poor. I did ask him a bit about what dentistry he did and how he did it. He showed me his one well worn and rusty forcep, and on a ledge on the wall behind him, he showed me a tooth he had pulled! He told us to ‘replace’ a tooth, it would cost someone 200 rupees. That’s about $3.00 US. Not sure what replacing a tooth means, but it sounds like a pretty good deal for the patient. Before leaving, surprisingly, he wanted copies of our photos, we arranged with our guide to email them back to him.
He was quite proud of his flippers and dentures
He, also, wanted me to see his nice denture teeth
Next door was the tattoo artist
A few pictures below of our walk through the bazaar.
We paid for our guide to get his shoes shined and repaired by this guy. Looks like he has been there for a hundred years. I paid him 35 cents for a nice shine and a bit of glue and sew-up of one shoe.
These buildings were built before our Revolutionary War
Manjeet didn’t have a big buffet breakfast like we did, so we watched him eat his Chicken Biryani street side. We could have joined him, but probably not a good idea to eat street food just before a 30 hour marathon to get home.
So ends our adventure in India. Great food, great people. Really, a world up side down from ours. We had little exposure to their middle and upper class, but we did see how, probably, a billion Indians live. Poor and in need of many things, but they probably don’t need or desire what we have. One must honor their resourcefulness. The country and culture has a deep history. One must honor that as well. I would recommend a holiday in India to those willing to watch, listen and learn.
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