I often wonder which of the travel lectures I post will get more views than others. I can understand that some are more dry and full of academic jargon than others so I thought I would do a little test. The Khajuraho Group of Monuments are often vaguely called the "sex temples of India" by tourists so I thought this lecture would be a natural one to throw in the word "sex"as much as possible. It's not that this is inaccurate, as I can attest and you can see form the many photos I have included below, these temples are indeed about sex among other things of course. It's kind of funny, but in my travels I have found a number of words to become popularized as selling points to the extent that they lose their meaning. For an example, I was once walking down the streets in this country when someone saw my group of American tourists coming so they switched their pitch language to English. They started to call out, "Hey, American's love our chicken! We know you guys love your fried chicken, come on down and get your sexy fried chicken here!" and I though to myself, "sexy fried chicken? Ew, well now I really don't want any. You can keep your sexy fried chicken to yourself". Of course, sex really had nothing to do with it, but it had become a term people used to mean "good" just like other terms have become popular internationally like "cool" or "hot" don't actually refer to somethings temperature.
One of the most fascinating things to me about religions of the world is how much they have changed through the broad sweeps of time that humanity has been in existence. These Hindu and Jain temples were build about a thousand years ago and by contrast India is culturally much more conservative today when you compare these artistic pieces with arguably the most popular modern art of India today, Bollywood. In these films you will rarely see a couple kiss or even touch, and there was quite a controversy a few years back when American actor Richard Gere kissed one of their most popular actresses on the cheek at an awards ceremony. 
In one of these photos you will see me in my socks, we were to take off our shoes before entering any of the temples themselves. You can also see in one of these pictures a separate temple behind barbed wire. We the tourists are actually the ones behind the fence and that temple you see with some architectural reinforcements is one that is open to the public. It felt strange honestly, to be a westerner who had access to this huge range of incredible art and historic buildings while the locals seemed regulated to that one. 
You will also take note of the below set of sculptures including various people and humans, and yes if you look close in the center you will see a man appearing to have sex with a horse. As you will see if you scroll down, there is a giant range of various erotica on display. My local tour guide pointed to the man and the horse and said to our group "this, this is just what happens when a man is too long at war and away from his wife" and I thought to myself, "you know, I don't think there is some preset amount of time that what we see there would automatically happen if I was away from my wife. I mean, I feel like that dude make a unique and personal choice that I wouldn't make even if I was away from my wife like... ever".
There first pictures were some highlights but below you will basically see what I saw as I walked down the street to the world heritage site. I tried to take some kind of covert photos of people who were gathered near the entrance, you will see them sitting on the ground. I wanted to give you a little bit of a taste of what the streets outside were like, but I didn't want to be rude and shove a camera in anybodies face so I help my camera in my hand and just snapped some shots as I walked. Many cities in India and other rapidly developing nations have a problem with homelessness and building enough places for the surging populations moving from rural areas into the urban. This is one of the basic facts of modernization for many countries, agriculture used to also employ a much larger percentage of the population in more developed nations and when they industrialized they too had many small towns empty out and surging working class populations moving around manufacturing centers where the jobs were. I think the rest of the photos kind of speak for themselves, but if you want to read more about the area or see pictures of some things that I didn't get shots of you can go to it's wiki site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khajuraho_Group_of_Monuments 
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