Ok, so here's what happened:
I left my house at around noon-ish on December 24th, for my friend Ani's house. I got there, and we packed up a lot of stuff, and headed to the airport. We got on the plane, and it sucked, the flight was long and sucky all the way to Paris. Once at Paris, we were stuck waiting for the next flight to Delhi for a while, and that was boring, however, upon boarding, due to excessive overbooking, I was randomly upgraded to business class. Business class is a win. Ani was rather angry, and in his words, he "killed me and ate my corpse," however I feel that Business class was well worth it. Unfortunately, I was unable to fully enjoy it, as I fell asleep almost immediately in the 180 degree reclining chair. I woke up about 20 minutes before landing in Delhi, and that was good.
Upon landing in India, we spent an inordinate amount of time waiting for baggage, as each bag was being x-rayed apparently due to a bombing that took place in the Indian parliament on December 13th. After getting our stuff, we piled into two cars, and then I spent the remainder of the year doing your collective moms. All at once.
Moving on, the next day in Delhi, the first tourist event was visiting the Qutab Minar. For those of you who have absolutely no idea what this is, it is a huge ass death tower. It is about 75m tall (for comparison, the Washington Monument is 555 feet tall). Ani suggests that I add that this is about equivalent to 50 of your moms stacked end to end.
After the Qutab Minar I saw the India Gate and Nehru's (India's first Prime Minister) home (now converted to a museum). To be perfectly honest, these were not overwhelmingly impressive, as the history associated with them is unfamiliar to me. This was the total of my touristing around on the 27th.
On the 28th, we departed for Agra. The drive to Agra wasn't bad at all, people in India are crazy drivers. Once there, I saw the Taj Mahal, Akbar's Tomb and Agra Fort. These were all quite impressive, and I will post pictures as soon as I have them. Akbar's Tomb was FRIGGIN HUGE. The architechture is quite intricately carved and it was all together quite impressive. Of course, the pricing system for monuments here is crazy. It's dirt cheap nonetheless compared to the US, but still absurd. It cost about 10-20 rupees for Indians, and ~800 for foreigners (generally at least 10x as much). Rupees these days are about 50 to the dollar.
Next was the Taj. The Taj was even MORE FRIGGIN HUGE. It was really amazing, I mean, it's pretty amazing to see in pictures, but it's much more amazing to see in person. The fact that there's this giant white marble structure covered with intricate carvings, including the entire text of Koran, certainly adds to the effect. I've been having to remove my shoes quite often as they are prohibited in these various sacred monuments. The Agra fort was tremendous, and the history about it was also pretty interesting, although I'm not going to transcribe it here now. I'm actually drawing a bit of a blank about the rest of Agra. I might start using the approach Ani's little brother Shreyas is taking. He's keeping a day to day journal because he needs to present to his classmates when he returns to school in a few weeks.
Anyway, I've lost interest in chronicling my travels, so, I'll do more once I'm in southern India. I'm getting on a two day train ride in about 3 hours from now. ugh.
