India: Honeymoon Edition

Good news! After a 3 year hiatus, JohnGoesToIndia is back! This time, it's the Honeymoon edition. As I'm sure most people reading this know, Becca and I got married last year and now we're on a belated Honeymoon for 2 weeks in India.

We left Wednesday morning and after long flights to New York, Paris, and New Delhi, we arrived Thursday night just before midnight. Luckily our flight was not diverted to the Northern Indian city of Amritsar, like some of our tour group, so we got to the hotel at about 3 in the morning and did our best to sleep. Unlike my last trip to India, we're staying in some very comfortable hotels, so it was great to have a nice shower and sleep in a good bed.

We woke up early and did our best to shake off the jet lag before having some breakfast (among other options: noodles, curry, dim sum, oatmeal, waffles, and lots of fresh juices like orange, pineapple and watermelon). The weather has actually been pretty cool, about 60 degrees. It's a bit odd to be cold in India, but we're dealing with it reasonably well. It certainly makes walking around a lot more pleasant!

On our first morning we toured Delhi. We went to Jama Mosque, which was beautiful and somewhat empty due to the rain. Becca had to wear a cover gown as they recently instituted a rule that all Western women have to wear that, even if they are properly dressed. It was fun walking around barefoot in the rain, and seeing the biggest Mosque in India (supposedly it fits 20,000 people). From there we went to Raj Ghat to Gandhi's memorial in a large park. It's a simple black marble stone, with some of his sayings engraved around the walls of the memorial. After that was our favorite of the day, Lakshmi temple. It was actually established by Gandhi as a temple for people of all castes and even various religions. There are depictions of Hindu Gods as well as Buddha, Sikhs, and Sufis. We learned that Hinduism adopted Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu, which seems like a pretty smooth move.

The temple was entirely marble, and the biggest challenge of the day was not falling as we went up and down marble steps in the rain. It was incredibly slippery, and we had 2 people in our tour group take pretty hard falls. The cocky local teenager jogged down the steps in the rain, only to fall really hard as he tried to laugh it off. Kids these days, am I right?

After our morning of sightseeing in Delhi we got lunch (Becca had her favorite: Okra, or as it's known here, Ladyfingers). We all hopped on the bus and headed out to Agra. They just finished a new highway so we had a pretty nice and smooth trip, although we were so jet lagged we slept most of the way.

This morning we awoke to head to the Taj Mahal. After a mistake by yours truly (I forgot I had a small tripod in my bag, which is prohibited. They then made me take it to a locker a ways away and I was separated from the group for a little bit), we saw the gorgeous Taj. It was my second time seeing it, but it was just as spectacular. Becca was also a fan, especially up close, as you can see some very impressive details in the marble and semi-precious stone inlays.

In the afternoon we took a break from the rest of the group to go out on our own for a little adventure. We tried a local restaurant (delicious veggie curry, chapati and daal), then walked (amazingly not getting lost AT ALL) over to Agra Fort, with a brief stop for some amazing chai (I forgot how much better the chai is here than most places at home). The fort was fun, although the Taj really stole the show today. We took our first tuk tuk ride of the trip home (a LOT scarier than being on a giant tour bus), as the driver offered to take us other places and we declined he repeated again and again "you happy, I happy!". This evening we got another tuk tuk to get some South Indian food (remarkably similar to our favorite South Indian restaurant in our neighborhood, Udupi Palace) and now, of course, we sit at the internet cafe (our driver, when asked to take us to an Internet cafe said "You want Internet coffee?". Um, no, we don't was Internet coffee.)

Tomorrow takes us to Jaipur, and hopefully to an internet cafe with a computer than I can upload pictures to!