Well, I Never Saw Myself Doing This! A Whole New World Indeed!

One of the castes here is the Jollaries (totally spelled that wrong I’m sure).  Our professor has been working with the Jollaries for years and years, and we were invited to a celebration they were having.  Of course all of us wanted to go and were very excited! ………. Honestly I’ve put off writing about this experience because I still don’t even know how to explain it.  I’m still just in shock from it, so maybe if you want to hear all the details about it ask me when I get back home!  Basically what happened was, you guys, I went to my first animal sacrifice in the moonlight on a beach in India!!!  What the heck??  I mean really, who does that?  The whole time I felt like I was in some Indiana Jones movie or something, thinking no way could it all be real, but it was!  It really felt like something you would only see in a made up movie!  So anyways we went to this village late at night excited to see a celebration for one of their Goddesses and ended up watching a baby goat get its head chopped off and disemboweled and craziness. Fabulous! But we did learn a lot!  This celebration was for a Goddess of theirs who is crazy powerful.  She is the Goddess of broken promises and she demands a blood sacrifice.  Apparently it’s quite a lengthy ritual “celebration” with a lot of different steps to it.  We didn’t get to see the whole beginning because it was too dangerous for us, so we waited inside this little home with a cute friendly family till it was safer to go out.  We learned that part of the ritual involves people getting (or maybe acting) possessed.  If people become possessed that means that the Goddess is present, but if no one were to be possessed that would mean the Goddess wasn’t there or wasn’t pleased enough?  So I’m glad we were in side for that part.  We went to the beach to watch the rest of the ritual with the whole sacrifice part.  There were some crazy drunks all around us and these people were crazy about their fireworks, so we had to be careful and watch out for their fireworks to not get burned or something.  This was because they would set them off all around us and within a couple of feet from each of us.  After we got to leave and go back to our home all of us were in shock from what we had experienced.  It was funny though because our professor said that since we could handle animal sacrifices we should try going to some sort of human impalement thing that they do here in a couple of months!  This place is cool, but its got a lot of, let’s say interesting, things.

Since I wasn't able to get any pictures of all of this, the following pictures are a good way to sum up my expressions from this adventure!