Rachel's Visit

Whirlwind visits are always hard to summarize. My friend Rachel from DC came for a conference and we spent the last few days crossing things off lists. Her first day, Friday, we did shopped - and that can be really exhausting. We then met up with a bunch of friends for dinner at a rooftop north indian restaurant overlooking ruins. I never go to this place unless visitors are in town - but it's just lovely. Saturday we left wicked early (5am) to go to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. The drive, driven by my driver, was actually quite interesting as we had to detour through some typical markets. What Rachel noted as organized chaos. We left early so as to avoid traffic, so got to the Taj by 8am. Which was great because it was essentially empty (that term is completely relative), no crazy lines and the heat wasn't horrible. The taj is the taj. It's really amazing. It changes in every light, depending on time of year. What I notice most though is the changing of the Yuma river beside it. When I came in 2001 it was almost completely dry after several years of poor monsoon. In 2003 it was much fuller. This time it was in between, clearly dry but not horrible. You'll notice the camels and water buffalo trudging across (if you click on it to see it bigger). They also now give little cloth covers for your shoes so you don't have to walk barefoot on the tomb. One of the pictures is of a guy putting on his booties. As we were leaving it was getting pretty crazy - I think the first train from delhi had arrived. We then went to breakfast (typical backpacker fare of banana pancakes, which make me oddly happy) at a little guest house overlooking the Taj. I had never seen the Taj from the city - it's really interesting to think about living there and what the significance of the building might be for locals. From there we went to Agra Fort, which is actually one of the more interesting places in Agra. There used to be monkeys as you entered and I was feeling pretty relieved that they were gone but we walked around etc etc until we got to the ladies Mosque and found the monkeys. At first they look so cute, mother de-flea-ing her baby, but then you notice the one that is over the entrance way just waiting to pounce on people. It got to the point that no one was willing to leave because he would attack. Finally someone remembered that pretending to have a slingshot scares them and got it to go away. I'm putting a picture of Rachel and I sitting on one of the thrones in front of the Taj because I think it's cute the whoever we asked to take the picture didn't notice that we were completely blocking the Taj!! Oh well.

It was getting pretty hot by then so went to a hotel pool for a little while. They were doing construction work on a nearby roof and the construction workers were staring so hard it's a shock that they either didn't fall or got any work done at all! But it was a nice way to cool off! We then hit a south indian restaurant for lunch - the traditional thali. Rachel, as a vegetarian is in paradise. And with bird flu almost everyone is a defacto vegetarian or veg and fish only. The drive home was long and even though we got home by 8pm we were utterly exhausted. I'll go into more detail on exploring Delhi with her in another post.