India Part 2

I think I left off with the week in Goa. After Goa, we took a two night train ride to Delhi. It was the same train for the entire duration and it was a total of about 40 hours.

The scenery was nice.

As you can imagine, that is a lot of time on a train. It really wasn't so bad though. Trains are not like planes where you are cramped up the whole way. You can get up and walk around. You can even get off at the stops and wait until the train starts moving to hop back on. We passed our time doing things like reading, talking, watching scenery, playing card games, sleeping, eating, listening to music, and trying to combine these activities.

Once we finally got to Delhi on the 2nd morning. We spent about half the day getting hotel rooms lined up and purchasing train tickets to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. We almost got swindled while attempting to get our train tickets but luckily we caught our mistake before it was too late. I did however manage to get yelled at by a very angry Indian travel agent in what was a rather embarrassing scene. After we got our stuff all lined up we decided to see a little bit of Old Delhi. To get there we decided to take the metro. For a small fee of 8 rupees (45 rupees to the dollar) we got to travel on a very nice but somewhat crowded subway. From the subway station we walked about 10 minutes to reach the Jama Masjid which was built by Shah Jahan who is the same guy who built the Taj Mahal. It is a giant Mosque which can accommodate 25,000 people for prayers. I got yelled at here as well (it wasn't a good day for me in this regards) but after I did a very over-the-top apology these guys seemed to genuinely like me. After the Jama Masjid we went to Karim's a famous Mughlai restaurant. We had nan and some various meat and vegetable dishes that were quite delicious. Afterward, we went for a walk through Old Delhi at night. Eventually we started asking for a metro station so we could get back to our hotel. We kept getting pointed along and when we finally got to the station we realized that we had walked all the way back to the part of town we were staying in! We settled in for a nice rest after two days of sleeping on the train dreaming of our adventures to the Taj Mahal soon to follow.

Jama Masjid