Hare Om from the Land of Yoga

I wrote this while I was in Rishikesh. so it's a little old.
Well my journey in India has taken an inward twist. I've been spending the last 5 days doing yoga and meditating along the banks of the Ganges. There is no other place in the world where there are as many yoga ashrams per capita. it seems like everyone here is offering a yoga course. on every internet cafe, restaurant and hotel there are fliers for their affiliated courses. I'm staying at an ashram called Sri Ved Niketan, he was some guru who made an ashram. That's about all I know. It's the off season here and because of that I'm paying 100 rupees ($2.25) a night to stay in the cell like rooms, but two daily yoga classes are included! There are monkeys here that will ambush you for your food, that's probably the biggest risk in this city: monkeys. Another guy who's staying in the ashram was ambushed one morning and had to throw his loaf of bread at the monkey to keep it from advancing at him. I'm not sure if he really had to give it the whole loaf though... I've seen a monkey ambling along the side of a house, peer into the open window, and then deftly slip into it. About ten minutes later I heard yells and monkey screeches... The bridges are the worst. There are two footbridges that connect one side of the Ganges to another, they're like box canyons and the monkeys wait, watching all the clumsy human hands. When one of those hands has food in it, they will leap onto the person and do their best to separate the food from the person. I've done my best and so far have avoided any dangerous monkey encounters. Besides yoga, I've finally started Hindi classes, which have gone really well, slowly but surely I'm picking up a little Hindi.