Thursday, February 19, 2009

India Highlights

-On Jet airways to Chennai, the stewardess spilled on me not once but TWICE, the second time was a whole cup of some indian yoghurt drink. And everything I was wearing I laboriously hand-washed in the sink the day before. I was expecting at least another 3 days in those clothes. Sigh. But I was just not in the mood to make a big deal of it, so I just did damage control in the airplane lavatory and couldn't get rid of the tart yoghurt smell until we landed. 

-Cozy Inn in the Paharganj backpackers area. (it kinda reminded me of Christiana area in Copenhagen). 7 dollars a night. The window had a wood board nailed to it, and Phil and I shared a full size bed. No mosquitoes though so we were happy. The street food on our alley was 2 feet from the public toilet "stall" which was just a cut out in the wall and a hole in the ground.  A+ for space utilization.

-Phil called me a pussy for not eating the street food (a different stall then the one by us). Phil now has double the delhi-belly count than I do. I'm okay with this.  However, the food in general was all around great and cheap!  All the butter chicken we could ever want.

-Saw all the sights in Delhi, Jaipur and Agra. By far the highlight was the Taj Mahal at 7am so you could see the sunrise. Very cool. I ended up taking like 300 pictures.  Everything else that day kinda paled in comparison.

-Observatory in Jaipur. Some sultan built the biggest sundial in the world in order for it to be accurate to 2 seconds. He also built a range if fairly ridiculous instruments. We were both very impressed.  Nice to see a guy have a hobby.

-Our Tuk-tuk driver we hired for the day in Agra was the evil Fonz of tuk-tuk drivers, not only did he wear a leather jacket, he drove up to random stalls and demanded m
oney where the shopowner ends up handing over a few hundred rupees. He then slapped a guy in the face later in the day. Ridiculous. His lame
 was Saleem and I have his card if anyone is i
nterested (you don't want him). We wanted to like him but he
 ended up taking us to places we didn't want to go to. I'm also disappointed that he didn't let us drive his tuk-tuk like he promised. And then he slapped a guy on the face.

-Indian trains are awesome. In general class people were jumping
 in through the windows and climbing on the roof cause the cabin was so packed. Did
n't get to experience that though since we splurged on reserved seats.

-India was everything we were missing in Sri Lanka, crazy cities, crazy buildings, crazy people.

More Photos can be accessed here and here (you don't need an account):


1 comment:

Gayle said...

I wouldn't call Chris the p-word; I call him SMART. I was relieved that I did not see the back of that red plaid shirt in the street soup kitchen photo.