Sewagram, and the farms

So then comes my favorite part of the trip thus far. We got to Sewagram in the evening of the 4th. We actually stayed across the street from the actual ashram in a guest house. For those who don't know, Sewagram is Gandhi's main ashram where he stayed and did his thing. I don't think I'm going to go into a lot of detail about Gandhi and what he did, but he was a pretty cool dude. We went to evening prayer each night we were there at the ashram and toured around at our leisure. we were only there for two days, which was disappointing, and one of those days we were on field visits. We got to chose between three places and I chose to go to the center for rural technology, a bitchin NGO that gathers appropriate technologies from diverse rural communities around India and disperses them for free (anti-copyright! or "copyleft," if you will). The center was kind of a willy wonka type playground for messing around with different cool technologies. There was a junkyard filled with prototypes for bicycle-powered machines (including a bandsaw and a winnower), a paper making operation, sustainable honey-harvesting experiements, welding and blacksmithing, pottery, and a really really kickass irrigation system.