ISP has begun!

You know that saying that to see if you truly love someone, you have to leave them? If that's true, my love with Banaras is true. I got in this afternoon, and felt like I was back in somewhere I belonged.
I left Jaipur Monday morning with Ally and Sarah. We took a bus to Delhi, checked into a guesthouse in the hippie tourist (ahem... Israeli) part of town, and wandered for a bit. The walk up and down the bazaar was enough to let us know that we didn't' want to go back there. We ended up spending most of the night in the guesthouse room, watching wrestling on TV (watching Kevin Federline on WWE... how much better can you get?) Early this morning, we started the trek that was flying through India. After very few bumps in the road, we arrived in Banaras at around 2:00 this afternoon. In the line for a taxi, we made friends with a guy who wanted to share a taxi. He's a nice guy, just graduated from college- a Indian Canadian who's in India to work on a volunteer project with his family and is traveling on his own for a little while now. Sarah and I checked into our guest house as soon as we got here. Because of a slight miscommunication, we ended up with one double room. That should be fixed by tomorrow, and now we just have to share for the last week that Sarah is in Banaras, but for the rest of the time, I get a massive room to myself.
When we got to the guesthouse, the manager wasn't there, but one of the residents showed us all around. He was showing us the roof, and there happened to be a man doing (really good) yoga, who turns out to be a yoga teacher, and supposedly we can join in when he does yoga whenever we want. The other residents are mostly philosophy/religious studies people from China, Japan, Spain, Canada, South Africa, now the US... There's also a Tibetan monk living there... The house is run by the same foundation that heads one of the biggest clean-up efforts for the Ganges.
Because it's run by a Brahmin family, the house has the rules of 1. no drugs 2. no alcohol 3. no meat 4. no eggs 5. no live music (nothing to do with the brahmins), and 6. no Indian men can sleep over. Besides that, we're free to come and go, it's all locked and really safe, we can use the kitchen whenever we want, and everyone seems really amazing. I'm really excited about this place and my project too! Hopefully, tomorrow, I can make some contacts to talk to about the project itself and get going.