Deepavali Tour

On Wednesday I signed up for a tour of Little India here in Singapore, with the tour focusing on Deepavali.  Deepavali is an ancient Hindu festival that is celebrated every autumn and Little India takes it very seriously.  Singaporeans of all ethnicities come together to celebrate the triumph of good over evil and light over darkness.  Apparently over 400,000 people came to Little India to celebrate Deepavli last year.  This year the holiday falls on October 22nd when we are going to be in Bali so I wanted to take a tour of the area and learn more about the holiday and Little India in general.

We started our tour by visiting several of the Hindu temples in the area, each distinct due to the fact that Southern Indian Hindus worship differently than Northern Indian Hindus.  For this tour we were told we had to were clothes that covered our legs and shoulders so that we could enter the temples.  As it is 90+ degrees every day and so very humid, suffice it to say that I was sweating just standing still.  Unfortunately, after arriving at our first temple we learned that due to the lunar eclipse that evening that the temples are closed because priests don't want the rays from the eclipse to reach their idols.   Hence we walked around for the next three hours sweating like crazy!!

Above is one of the Hindu temples from the front and the side - all the decorations are for a specific goddess that this temple worships.  Apparently different temples worship different goddesses specifically and so you decide which one you go to based on which goddess you want to honor at that point in time.  

Front door of the same temple - the bells signify something that I'll have to remember and update on later!

Throughout Little India and most definitely beside most of the temples are florists that are constantly making flower garlands that worshippers buy to place on idols in the temples.  Each flower means a specific thing and each goddess wants specific flowers as well so you have to choose your garlands carefully.  This was a beautiful bracelet garland that I was given that smelled just heavenly (gardenias I think), which helped to offset the sweaty smell I was producing sweating in my long pants and long sleeve shirt!

Since we didn't go into the temples, we instead stopped in an Indian vegetarian restaurant for a snack and were served this long, paper-think hollow tube of bread/cracker called Dosai, I believe. You break off pieces of this and dip it into great sauces and it's amazing how thin it is.  It apparently takes about 8 hours to make one tube because that's how long the thin bread needs to rise in order to taste right.

A key thing to remember is that you are trying to break off this piece of bread while only using your right hand because in Indian culture, it is incredibly rude to use your left hand for eating or touching anyone.  The left hand is left for taking care of, uhhh, personal hygiene and therefore shouldn't be used elsewhere.  Was laughing thinking of our youngest, Henry, who's a lefty and would definitely be grossing people out regularly (especially if they knew how often I had to remind him to wash his hands!!).

After our bread, we had an Indian The Tarik which literally means "pulled tea".  The milky tea is poured back and forth between two vessels from varying heights creating a frothy tea.  It gives the tea  a better flavor since apparently without this it is quite bitter and acidic.  I enjoyed it and was impressed with the man's ability to never spill a drop!

Below are pictures of Little India as I was leaving and the lights were coming on for the evening.  Deepavli is on the 22nd and I'm sorry that we are going to be out of town for the event because it would be amazing to see all the celebrating take place.  Of course, being in Little India with 400,000 other people celebrating might be a little overwhelming so now I can see what it looked like before the masses arrived!  A very cool experience.