America the Beautiful

I'm not sure what it is, but at the moment I am fascinated with the natural beauty that exists in America. I have been watching the Travel channel and Discovery channel on National Parks and researching Alaska online for my parent's upcoming cruise.

When I was in London and saw the intricate architecture I didn't like how in the US our buildings look so boring in comparison. We are a great nation, so I like for us to have the best of everything. But, we have some of the most amazing natural beauty in the world.

When I think of world class natural beauty I think of the Great Barrier Reef, Switzerland, Bora Bora, etc. I knew we had some things here, but I never realized how awesome they are. I wonder if people in other countries put the Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountains, etc. in that group.

It makes me really proud of my country to see all that is has to offer. I've only seen Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah for myself. I really want to go to other National Parks in America and see the beauty for myself.

I'm Home!

I am safely back in Texas. I am exhausted and not quite adjusted to the time change, but it is so good to be home.

The drive to San Marcos from the airport was so nice. Everything is so beautiful here, much more so than I had noticed before. In India almost all buildings are old, run down, and in bad shape. Here, everything is so new and nice looking.

It was a beautiful sunny day (but cold!) with green trees and wildflowers. The best thing was how peaceful the drive was. It was so quiet, no one honked once!

It is so good to be home with my family. Winston is on cloud nine right now, and so am I.

I'm coming home

"I'm going home, back to the place where I belong. "
- Chris Daughtry

I leave India in 9 and a half hours. I have a 15 and a half hour flight to Chicago, a 4 hour layover, and a 2 and a half hour flight to Austin. I then have a 40 minute drive to San Marcos. I will be traveling for almost 23 hours, but will gain ten and a half hours with the time change. So I leave Delhi Friday at midnight and arrive in Texas around lunch time on Saturday. Hopefully I will sleep on the plane. Otherwise I will have a hard time adjusting to the time difference.

I can't wait to see my husband and my baby boy Winston.

Overall, India has been great. It was a great experience to "live" here for a month and I'm grateful for the opportunity. I saw a lot of neat things and had a lot of new experiences. The highlights were my coworkers, the Taj Mahal, the jeep safari, Amber Fort, and the shopping. The low points were traveling by train and getting scammed a lot. I will never forget this trip of a lifetime where I saw a culture that is completely different from my culture.

Prior to this trip I knew I was lucky to be born in America, but I have now seen why first hand. We have so much that others don't have. I don't just mean that we have food, shelter, money for luxury items, etc. We live in a country with order, reliable electricity, clean water, decent public education, a fair government, where every American has an opportunity to be what they want to be. So many things that we view as basic rights or entitlements are things that other people do not have. We are very blessed to be American citizens.

I'm coming home.

Taj Mahal!

This weekend I went to Agra, the city that has the Taj Mahal. Agra itself is small and not very nice. It was a 4 and a half to 5 hour drive from Delhi on a very bumpy road. The trip is not for anyone who gets easily car sick. I defiantly recommend taking a car over taking a train, but it is still a rough five hours.

The beauty of the Taj Mahal is indescribable. Although it is pretty in the pictures, even they can't do it justice. It is one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and I feel very lucky to have seen it in person. I would even say that everything I have been through was worth it for the opportunity to see the Taj Mahal with my own eyes.

The Taj is made of white marble from a city near Jaipur. It is the hardest marble in the world. It took 22 years to build the Taj Mahal. The workers cut the marble by sawing through it using a wire and had to lift all the blocks of marble by hand. What makes the Taj truly beautiful is the floral design on it. Paint will not stay on marble, so to add the flower design the floral design was first carved into the marble and then gemstones from around the world were glued to the marble. This is called marble inlay.

Marble is translucent so in the moonlight they say the Taj Mahal looks like a block of ice. If you ever go to the Taj Mahal plan your trip to coincide with a full moon. The Taj Mahal closes at sunset, but on nights of a full moon they open it back up at night. I did not get to see it by moonlight (no full moon) but I imagine it is breathtaking.

I spent a couple hours just admiring the Taj Mahal at sunset, but as I was walking away to leave when I turned back around it still looked more beautiful then I remembered.

The Taj also has a really nice love story attached to it. The king who built the Taj Mahal loved his wife dearly and they were never apart. She died while giving birth after 20 years of marriage and the king was utterly depressed. He did not want to work anymore so he divided up his kingdom to his children and spent the next 22 years having the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his wife.

The craftsmen who built the Taj Mahal have kept the marble inlay process a closely guarded secret. Today there are shops in Agra of the descendants of these craftsmen where you can purchase items made of the same type of marble used in the Taj Mahal with the gemstone inlay floral design. You can buy anything from a small box to large table tops that take months of work to complete.

If you are wealthy and would like to furnish your home with beautiful things of amazing quality, you should come to India. You can get many handmade items of really good quality at good prices if you know where to shop and how to bargain.

Safari Pics

Wow, I forgot to post more safari and Jaipur pictures. Here they are:

Safari Pics

Here are a few pictures from my safari. I'll post more pictures from my trip later today.

Safai, Jaipur, and Train Travel

My safari at Ranthambhore National Park and day trip to Jaipur was good, but very exhausting. It is nice to be back in my 5 star hotel with soft bedding, marble bathroom, turn down service, etc. I am still very sleep deprived, but it was worth it.

Safari
The hotel I stayed in on Friday and Saturday night was adequate, but not what I was hoping for. The bed was a little softer than sleeping on the floor, there were ants in the bathroom, and only the room is air conditioned so the rest of the hotel is hot. But the food was good and at night they had live music which was very nice.

I went on a morning safari at 6 am and an evening safari at 4 pm. We did not get to see any tigers, but we did get to see some other cool things. We saw Amber deer (the largest kind of deer in India), spotted deer, antelope, two owls, crocodiles, monkeys, banya trees, a tiger paw print, and a lot of birds. The coolest things we saw is a 4 day old deer and baby monkeys that were less than a week old. We almost saw a leopard (very rare since they are nocturnal and shy) but it ran off as we got there. It was cool to know that hiding in the trees near us was a leopard, but it would have been neat to see. The banya trees were really neat. They have what looks like roots that grow down from the branches into the ground and the support the branches and even become another trunk of the tree. One tree in the park is 900 years old.

Between safaris we went to Ranthambhore Fort. It is in the park on top of a huge hill and you can see the whole park from there. It is a 1,000 year old fort, and was really nice.

Jaipur
I was really looking forward to Jaipur since so many people had told me how nice it was and how it was the best shopping in India. Although it had some really nice things to see, it is not a nice city. It looked just like the India I had been exposed to so far. Since it was Sunday the tour guide told me the markets I wanted to go to were closed. On the way back to the train station however, I saw that the markets were open. The guide pretended to be surprised, but he had lived in Jaipur for 40 years and these markets are very popular so I knew he had lied.

Fortunately the shops my guide took me to (that secretly give him commission for everything I buy there) were good. Jaipur is amazing for shopping. If you want to decorate your home with goods from India or if you like jewelry, go to Jaipur for a week. The prices are good and you can get some really neat things. I had a traditional Indian shirt made for me for about $10. I picked the fabric, they took my measurements, and made me the shirt right there. I bought lots of souvenirs and had a lot of fun shopping but I wish I had more time.

The jewelry there is beautiful. They specialize in diamonds, emeralds, and rubies and the prices are great. I didn't have the budget to buy any of those items of course, but they were beautiful. There are also a lot of artists in Jaipur who do really detailed paintings on silk and rice paper that you need to use a magnifying glass to see all the detail.

I rode an elephant, which was neat but very rough. Each step the elephant takes moves your body a lot and after a ten minute ride I was very nauseous. There is a palace inside a fort near Jaipur that is called Amber Fort. It was very beautiful and you could tell that in its prime was an amazing palace. There was a lot of marble, as marble is mined in Jaipur, and the paintings on the walls were made of real gold, emeralds, and rubies. The palace was occupied by the king that invented Kama sutra, and the Kama sutra pictures are drawings of him and his wives. He was said to have over 300 mistresses in addition to his 6 wives. The palace had a natural air conditioning and heat system built into it.

We also went to a palace and museum in the center of Jaipur that is the current home of royalty. It was also very beautiful. There were many other things to see in Jaipur that are supposed to be really nice, but we just didn't have time.


Traveling by Train in India
My coworker from LA and I went to the train station directly from work on Friday. One of my trainees from work went to the train station with us to help us because I had heard that the station is very busy and that finding the train may be hard.

The station was so busy and all the writing and announcements were in Hindi. We would have been lost without his help, thanks to God for having him there to help us. Train stations in India are really dirty. There are people sleeping on the ground by the platforms, I saw a few rats, and it is just gross.

On the first and second train we were in a 4 person cabin, each person had their own bed bunk style twin bed. On the first train I had an upper bunk and on the second train we had the cabin to ourselves. It was first class Indian train travel, but not luxurious by American standards. The bed was hard, I doubt the sheets were clean, the train seemed very old, etc. But it was more than adequate, and it is nice to get to lie down and get some sleep. They do not announce the train stops so I kept waking up to check the time because I was terrified we would miss our stop.

The third train was airplane style, two seats on each side and an aisle in the middle. This was a really bad experience because there were children yelling and playing down the isles, people were talking a lot, and the train was playing music. We were exhausted and wanted to sleep, but there was no way we could. The train was supposed to take 4 hours, but it ended up taking 6 hours and we got to the train station at midnight. The last two hours were really hard because we kept thinking we were almost there (since no announcements are made). Imagine being on the worst flight of your life and it lasting 6 hours, it was brutal.

Even though the first train left on time we got there 2 hours late, which we learned is normal. I don't know why trains here have schedules. We were on three trains, two were 2 hours late and one was an hour and a half late. From Friday evening to Sunday evening we spent 16 hours either on a train or waiting for a delayed train. Finding our train at each station was difficult. They sometimes make an announcement in English with a recorded woman's voice announcing which train is arriving on which platform, but we could only recognize a few words here and there because the voice has a very thick accent.

Eventually we learned the system of how a foreigner survives a train station. There are men in red shirts called porters, you tell them your train and seat number and they carry your bags for you, take you to the right area on the platform (the trains are VERY long), stay with you till the train arrives and then show you to your seat. 50 rupees is a tip they are happy with, a little over $1. It is definitely worth it.

Traveler Tips:

I do not recommend coming to India on vacation, but I guess it is for some people. If you do ever come here are some tips.

• Spend lot of time shopping in Jaipur; it must be some of the best shopping in the world.
• Only travel by train in India if you do not care when you arrive at your destination and ONLY take first class AC. The other classes are really bad (first is bad enough) and in economy people are packed in and only some lucky ones even get a seat.
• If you are in a city for multiple days do not hire a permanent driver, hire a taxi each time you want to go somewhere and negotiate the price before hand. A driver will not take you where you want to go to eat or shop. He will take you to where the shop owner pays him and lie to you if need be.
• Stay in a really nice hotel, you will need a nice place to rest that has 4/5 star restaurants in it. Mid-range hotels can be very cheap ($15+) and 4/5 star hotels are pretty expensive ($200+) so you will be tempted to stay in a 2 star hotel. But you need easy access to high quality food (or you will get very sick) and a nice retreat after a long day so if you travel here, do it right.
• Go on wildlife tours. It is nice to get away from the busy cities and to see animals in India that are not wild in the US.
• Have several days when you get back to rest, because you will be physically and mentally exhausted.

Pooped Out

I have really been looking forward to posting all about my safari, Jaipur, and train travel this weekend. But I have only had 12 hours sleep over the last three nights. I am so tired the sentences I am tryng to write aren't even making sense. I am going to try and wake up really early tomorrow to post about my trip and show some pictures.


Here's a couple pictures for now.

Here is me riding an elephant:

How many monkeys can you count? (You can click on the picture to see a larger version)