Feb 12th Continued.
On our many walks in Delhi we have seen very few garbage cans. People eat and drop the container where they are standing. There is urine and feces everywhere and the men of Delhi are not modest. They will whip it out anywhere. I have never been anywhere so dirty and loud and pungent. We got lost so much in Delhi. The city is a maze of streets and alleys that weren't on any of our maps. There are no street signs of any kind. All cars have at least a door ding even if they are brand new. Driving seems scary enough that the whole time we were in Delhi Don and I didn't take any taxis or rickshaws but that's also because they were always trying to scam us. - Lindsay
Feb 13
Agra is beautiful! The little I've seen anyways. I've spent most of my time here either sleeping or on the toilet. After some deliberation over whether or not we should try to figure out the insurance and go to the hospital we decided to walk across the s from our hotel and buy some over the counter antibiotics. Normally I'd feel very unsure about this but the lonely planet mentions a few that are used in the treatment of travelers diarrhea and the guy had all of them. We ate supper on the roof of our hotel and watched the sun set on the taj. It was beautiful and peaceful. There was chanting coming from mosques all around us and monkeys everywhere. Too bad the service here is abysmal. - Lindsay
I think I like Agra. Maybe it is just the rooftop restaurants with views of the taj. Maybe it is that there are less people, or just that the touts are less aggressive. We are staying in a noisy and active part of the city. In agra I have been able to meet all sorts of other tourists. We sat with two Japanese guys on the train, Noori and ___ can't remember. They also happened to be staying at our hotel. At lupper today I met a flower grower from Montreal. Also at lupper today I was feeling so good that i ordered a lassi. My first non-bottled drink other than coffee and tea. It was a great banana chocolate lassie. Now I just hope it doesn't make me sick again! - Don
Feb 14
Happy Valentines day to us!.. NOT. We haven't exactly had the best day. The peaceful feeling we had about India after seeing the Taj yesterday have subsided. And through all of the days trials we have managed to stay positive.. until now. We didn't get the wake-up call this morning that we asked for. Fortunately, being sick, I wasn't sleeping well enough to not wake up at five. I woke don and we hurriedly packed and managed to check out on schedule ( the hotel staff claimed to not have any change) . Outside the gate of our hotel we sadly saw that there was only one autorickshaw, as apposed to the usual 50 during the day. He promptly demanded 100 rupees for the 5 minute ride to the train station which was outrageous. Don got him down to 80 but on the ride we realized it would be nice to have some smaller (precious) rupee bills for getting food on the train etc. So we gave him 100 which was fine because he got us there fast and to be honest it's only 2.50 CND. At the train station we found out that our train was to be three and a half hours late. "So what" we thought... It is just a few hours... But those few hours turned into seven (one hour at a time). Still we had the ability to stay positive. We were bored and hungry but my dad had told us a few times that it is a 3rd world country; you can't expect anything to run smoothly or be on time. The frustration comes now after having to cram ourselves onto the overcrowded train only to find an entire family sitting in our seats. They finally moved but then we experienced the first truly rude (or possibly racist) behaviour from Indians. The remaining men wouldn't let us put our packs on "their bunks" even though they were sitting on "my bunk". I'm not really sure it was any of their bunks. They refused to produce tickets for the ticket men who seem to have no authority and there were more of them than there are seats. This train has far more people that it has seats. And now these men insist on staring incessantly at me. We are ready for the south!
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