On the ship we have a wall of which you can leave a sticky note with someone’s name on it and a compliment on the back and as I was walking by I noticed someone left me one! It was so sweet of someone to think of me and they said I was always so friendly and a sunny face in the hallways. It made my day.
I just got out of a seminar on poverty which was amazing, we had a lot of discussion on what causes it, how to make a difference in it and our feelings on it. Now I am studying and blogging on breaks because I have a midterm tomorrow -.-
March 7th
In Delhi we had a bus that was to take us to Agra (Taj), but the bus was at 6:30. So we took a taxi to nearby the bus station (which wasn’t clearly marked) it was also a really sketchy area with a lot of homeless people and people sleeping in hammocks and on the street or in their tuktuks. We decided we should take shelter in a hotel across the street to stay safe for the 1.5 hours. We each paid 2 dollars and our room was sketchy but we were so tired we didn’t care. We used the Wi-Fi and napped for like 30 minutes until our bus. At 6 we checked out and went to where it said to meet our bus.
Our bus never came.
We freaked out for a while and asked others if we were in the right place and they said were. But at 7:15 we gave up and went to a government tourist building which was a rundown building, people sleeping on the floor in their office and questionable fluids dripping from the ceiling (I really think it was from the bathroom because it was really gross). They told us the only way to Agra was by car and hiring a driver because everything leaves before 7am. We were in denial and went to another office who told us the same thing and so we all thought it through. We already had an overnight train booked from Agra to Varanasi the next night, a hotel in Varanasi and flight from Varanasi to Delhi. So if we didn’t go to Agra that day and stayed in Delhi we would have lost about 200 dollars on our transportations and have had to pay for accommodations in Delhi. So we sucked it up and paid the overpriced driver who would take us around. She nice thing was that the driver was ours for the whole day, he spoke English and we had complementary tour guides for each of our destinations (other than a tip we gave them). We got into our car and we talked with the driver for a bit and fell asleep on our way to Agra for a good 3 hours. The car was really nice and had AC (A big deal).
It was nice that he would literally take us anywhere and we had already paid for him. We stopped for food on the way to Agra but that was it. When we got to Agra we all woke up and it was impossible to tell we were a minute away from one of the 7 world wonders. We were in the middle of a very run down and dirty city. We picked up our tour guide and he helped us buy our tickets into the Taj Mahal! When you walk up to the gate of the Taj, you see nothing. The Taj is beautifully hidden inside the city, but once your inside it’s like BOOM a beautiful garden, fountains and the beautiful Taj Mahal. Our tour guide helped us all take pictures and showed us good places to take pictures. It was simply beautiful and we were all in awe. He also gave us some history of the Taj Mahal and some information of about the buildings. The buildings are all very symmetrical and there is a ton of symbolism in everything. The whole Taj is made of marble and based on the time of day glows a different color because marble is translucent. When you get near the Taj there was flowers and beautiful murals made of precious and semi-precious stones all over. The tomb of Mumtaz (the wife of the man who made the Taj) is so beautifully decorated with also many Muslim prayers on the walls which are all made from precious stones. (I’m sorry I cannot think of their holy book). I thought it was so interesting that in such a Hindu country the world wonder of their country is Muslim.
After we saw the Taj for a few hours we then went to a marble factory where the ancestors of those who built the Taj Mahal work and do repairs to the Taj and also make products. After we left Agra and headed to Fatehpur Sikr a world heritage site just outside of Agra. The palace was built by emperor Akbar and 3 buildings are in the palace for his 3 wives (one Muslim, one Christian and one Hindu). The palace is about 400 years old and shows the importance of the unity of the three religions. It was beautifully build and we went just at sunset which was amazing at the top of the hill. At the palace we could see much of the poverty and the people were desperate for any form of money. If you have seen the movie Slumdog Millionaire (which you should because it is really well done), the story about an Indian boy from Mumbai and his life there is a segment on the child beggars. I was really hard to get around without seeing them. Kids who have disabilities or a strong urge for money. They would follow us around and harass us until we gave them money. It was sad and as much as I would have loved to make a donation you really don’t know who is actually getting that money and what situation these kids are actually in. Giving them money might be perpetuating their lifestyle and or the problem.
After we saw the palace we headed to a mall for dinner and then to our train station to wait for our train which we found out when arriving that it was late. The train station was a large platform with hundreds of people everywhere. People on the floor, people standing, EVERYWHERE. We were SO out of place, literally the only white people at the station and we were being watched by everyone in the room. We chose a place to sit and we covered up a bit because we were a bit uncomfortable to be in the middle of a foreign place that obviously was not used to foreigners. We all got in a circle on the floor (which was pretty dirty, but we were tired of standing and we were already had gone 2 days with no shower so who cared). We watched each other’s backs and tried to pass time.
At one point a giant cow came by and stood for a good 5 minutes stiffing my friends hair, we all laughed at the situation and how crazy the situation we were in was. We were sitting in the middle of a sketchy train station, being stared at, waiting for a train, a cow hovering over us, having not showered in 2 days, having little sleep, having trouble getting around. We just were so overwhelmed that all we could do was laugh at how crazy our day was going. Our train got to the station at almost midnight, we had a crazy time finding our cart, but we did find it. Basically it was really scary at first when we got on the train. It smelled, there was people EVERYWHERE, standing, sitting in each other, on the floor, trash everywhere, the beds were metal with a plastic small padded cushion and people in groups on the beds (including the ones we had reserved). We were so exhausted and we were shown to a small area which was out reserved for us. It was supposed to be women only, 3 tiers of beds on each side of the nook. Each bed was taken and we had one bench of seats for 3 people of which us 4 squeezed onto and quickly tried to sleep without freaking out too much about the fact we had no personal space and literally people everywhere staring at us. Oh how I could write a book about the train we went on. Now looking back, you might ask “why didn’t you just get off the train”. 1) We had already dealt with a lot of craziness so we accepted this pretty fast 2) we had gotten on in the middle of nowhere, there was nowhere else to go.
The ticket man came by at around 2am and saw us sleeping sitting up and in a crushed group and asked if we wanted a bed, we obviously said yes. So he kicked the men out of our nook and helped us lock into place the other two tiers of beds in the nook. I slept on the top nook, on my backpack, purse around me and against the wall of the nook. I fell asleep pretty fast. Everyone else did too and we set an alarm for 7am because what was supposed to be our arrival time in Varanasi and oh how was that time wrong……
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