Follow Me Around the World

May 28th Overland from Delhi to Agra I was supposed to get up at 645am to get down to breakfast before our long drive to agra.  Instead I was up at 445am because I felt like I was being bitten by bugs constantly.  I went to bed at 1am after chatting with ben for several hours.  It was fun, but waking up that early was not.  I went downstairs and brought my palm but Pooja another student on the program shortly joined me, then Ben and before you knew it others did as well. 7am rolled around and breakfast was ready.  It was outside but in an air conditioned sun room/greenhouse type place with a nice buffet style spread.  I wasn’t that hungry in that my stomach was bothering me from dinner the night before.  I had some fruit and cereal with milk and a lot of juice.  We packed up the tourist bus, which was nice, most of our luggage went ahead of us to Shimla while a daypack, stuffed with 4 days worth of clothing and stuff went with us to Agra and Delhi.  The drive would be long but it was our first bus ride and a chance to meet people in the group.  I sat with several people, including Pooja.  We had a great long conversation which are always great on this types of journey’s. We made one important stop which was at Achbar’s tomb.  This dude achbar’s grandfather built the taj mahal and I forgot what he did, maybe was a ruler at one time of india, but he got a magnificient tomb and some other things on this vast land in honor of himself.  He actually built it before he died, so now im positive he was a past ruler, king perhaps. We shuffled back on the bus, and continued our journey to Agra.  We got to Agra a little late, dropped our stuff off and a bunch of us went to dinner at a local restaurant.  There were 8 of us in total which required 3 auto’s.  This also required some good haggling.  I mean Agra is a huge tourist town which most tourists come to first as this is where the Taj Mahal is.  They fly to Delhi and then take a really nice express train to Agra.  Everyone knows its a tourist town where whites and westerners have money to spend, I’m sure australians and others come also but when I saw westerners I really mean non locals with money. We first walked to this really nice sheraton hotel, but it was too expensive so thats when we negotiated the price for the autos and went to this south indian restaurant.  I ordered a Mango Lassi, mexican pizza, which was basically veggies, with indian spices and flavors.  Both were damn good!  After dinner we got autos back and it was right to bed.  I was asleep by 930pm as we had to get up 545am to see the sunrise of the Taj Mahal. 

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