Delhi & Agra

This is a bench that Princess Diana sat on, at least that's what our guide said.
My friend Batya and I in front of the Taj Mahal!
This was the restaurant we ate dinner at with the view of the Taj (I talk about it later on)

Traveled to North India recently! I’ll try to keep everything to a minimum, but it was quite an adventure!

This past weekend 6 friends and I took a plane to Delhi (the capitol of India). We arrived in Delhi at 1am and we realized what everyone meant when they said, “it’s really hot in North India.” It was so humid and hot, I thought I would never adjust. The hotel picked us up in a little Sedan, which would only hold 4 out of the 7 of us… even though we emailed them a few days prior saying there was 7 of us. The driver ended up paying for another cab for the rest of us. As we were on our way to the hotel I noticed that we were in an extremely sketchy area… my friend, La and I looked at each other with hopes that we were just passing through this area and our hotel was far far away. The next thing we knew, there were several dogs chasing our car and barking at us (we still don’t know what that was all about). Sure enough our hotel was just around the corner in the bad area. The inside of our hotel was actually really nice, thank goodness. However, hot water was not available in the showers (no big surprise for us at this point). They had free breakfasts too, which was good… except for the fact that 6 of the employees just stood there watching us eat. (In India the population is so large that there are usually far too many people working at any given place and time.. which usually results in nothing getting done efficiently). The only man that could speak English would continuously come back to our table and say, “Excuse me ma’am, good food? Good food?” “…Yes… thank you.”

We traveled all around Delhi and realized that there were many nice areas in the city! We saw some great temples, museums, and memorials suchas; the Lotus Temple, India Gate, the big Government Capitol Building, a Hindu Temple (can’t go anywhere without taking our shoes off to go inside one of those!), and a Gandhi Museum. We ate dinner at the top of a 24 story building in a rotating restaurant so we were able to see the whole city. It was really great, especially after a day of sweating continuously in the North Indian heat.

On Friday we made our way to Agra to see the Taj Mahal! It was supposed to be a 5 hour drive, but it took 7 hours (of course, we weren’t surprised). We got to our hotel, where they had lost our reservations (again, no surprise) and finally checked in and got our keys. We went to dinner that night at another hotel, which was extremely close to the Taj Mahal so we sat on the roof terrace and viewed the Taj as we ate a very good cheap meal! In addition to being able to see the Taj Mahal we could also see the rooftops of all the homes, which were very run down. It was interesting to see the poor lifestyles the citizens live with a majestic tomb (Taj Mahal) directly behind them (see picture above). That night when we got back to the hotel we wanted to take showers, we had to tell the front desk of the hotel to turn on the hot water, but they said it would take an hour to heat up. The next thing we knew there was an older man at our door asking us something about the water… we couldn’t communicate very well with him because of our language barrier. This is how the conversation went:

Me: “Hi, Yes, we want the hot water turned on.”

Employee: “Hot water. 5:30am-10am.”

Sandy: “Well can we get it right now because we have to get up at 4 am for the sunrise viewing of the Taj Mahal and we wanted to shower before we went to bed.”

Employee: “Hot water. 5:30am-10am.”

Us: “Can you just turn it on now? The front desk told us they would.”

Employee: “Hot water, I can bring up in bucket?”

A bucket?! What in the world... only in India.

To make an even longer story short, we never got the hot water we needed. This hotel was a chaotic, there were phone calls at random times because they had questions for us and the water would just turn off while someone was showering. Boy, we were frustrated! Looking back at it, it was a great adventure though!

We left the hotel at 5am for the sunrise viewing of the Taj Mahal. It was amazing! It was so beautiful and big! There are no words to describe it. 20,000 people worked to build it, and it took 22 years to complete (finished in 1648). We spent about three hours there and got to go inside of it to see a replica of the tombs that were actually in the basement. The tombs are of Shah Jahan and his wife (who he built the Taj Mahal for after her death) Mumtaz Mahal. The Taj Mahal is right on a river and on the other side of the river you can see the beginning construction of what was going to be a Black Taj Mahal for Shah Jahan, however black marble was 4 times more expensive than white marble during that time, so Shah Jahan was laid to rest with his favorite wife. (He had 3 wives, but was the most in love with this one) It was crazy to think that this amazing thing was build for one reason- LOVE.

Agra Fort was where we went next, and it was awesome! So interesting and huge. We saw only saw 25% of it in the 3 hours we were there.

There is a lot of history behind these places and I would love to type it all out, but I don’t want to bore anyone… if I haven’t already. I learned so much and loved every second of this trip! It was worth every frustration we came across. Such as people wanting billions of pictures with us and being swarmed by Indian men trying to sell us things thinking they can over charge us because we were tourists… and many many more frustrating funny things!