 View from Agra Fort…. Just as Ajanta and Ellora was the “must see” for Axle, the Taj Mahal was the “must see” for Karin. So, after pulling in some two hours late and being greeted by our short, very tidy and courteous Sikh driver—Mr. Lucky—getting some breakfast, and checking in to our hotel, we wasted no time going out to see what Agra had in store for us.
As with yesterday, I had to take some time away from the vacation to go to school, so I skipped out on the Agra Fort. I knew I had lots of forts coming my way in Jaipur, so I didn’t feel like I was missing out on too much….
Continue reading “Sun. Jan 21 – Agra, Agra Fort, and the Taj Mahal” »
 There’s Ananda! At the foot of Buddha! Although I really wanted to go to Ajanta, I had to do some homework. It turns out that my timing was off somewhere along the line and I thought I had a few more days to work on one of my assignments and it wasn’t until looking over my calendar to see what else was coming up did I realize that my assignment was actually due very soon.
I pretty much spent the day in the hotel, ordering cup after cup of coffee (well, actually, I usually just ordered two cups at a time…) and doing my work. It as a bit of an adventure in power supply since there were both scheduled and unscheduled power outages, so I found myself having to do a bit of manual writing instead of typing…. Oh, the horror!!! (At least I now know that my penmanship hasn’t gotten as bad as I thought it would have….)
Continue reading “Sat. Jan 20 – Ajanta (and studying) and a train to Agra” »
 It’s hard to consider some of these as “caves” but they really are carved into the mountain. There’s a cool story about why the main structure was carved out of the mountain rather than built like a normal building, but that’s for another day… This day was both spectacular and—for the lack of a more eloquent phrase—spectacularly-shitty….
What made it spectacular? Well, the caves are pretty impressive. Imagine a mountain out of which dozens of caves have been carved. Some of the structures carved out were even three stories high. Imagine also that in one stretch of caves you can see some amazing sculpting representing Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religions, and even for a non-religious person like myself, it was pretty impressive.
Continue reading “Fri. Jan 19 – Ellora Caves” »
Yesterday was the three-and-a-half-year anniversary of my getting married to Amy! Pretty exciting! (At least for me, but I always tend to get excited by these monthly anniversaries that we get to celebrate).
Continue reading “Three Point Five” »
This day was interesting because we managed to pack in three different modes of transportation in one day. We started out early in the morning driving from Mysore to Bangalore. In Bangalore, we got on a plane to go to Mumbai. In Mumbai, we got a train to go to Jagaon.
Continue reading “Thurs. Jan 18 – Various Modes of Transportation” »
 Child labor in the flower market…. The main attraction in Mysore for us was the palace and the market. The last time that Amy and I went to Mysore, we didn’t get a chance to visit the palace, and from what everyone had told us, it was something that we had to see at some point. Overall, palaces aren’t totally my thing, but it is always interesting to see how people lived at a certain period in time. The residence was also pretty interesting, especially the displays of what the maharaja collected….
Continue reading “Wed. Jan 17 – Mysore” »
The houseboat was a nice contrast to the busyness that seems to go on everywhere else, but these good things must come to an end, right?
After we made our way back to our starting point, we said goodbye to the staff of the houseboat, and said hello to our driver who would be taking us on a slow, bumpy road to Mysore.
Continue reading “Tues. Jan 16 – Floating Some More & Driving to Mysore” »
So, it has been sort of refreshingly quiet the last few weeks. Mostly, it’s because I’m not in a class at the moment, but that should change by Tuesday. There was some problem processing my financial aid application, so they delayed the start date of my class for a couple of weeks, so this has actually given me a chance to do some stuff for myself and stuff like organizing and uploading lots of photos to my site.
Apparently, my account with iPower should be upgradeable to 200GB of storage (from 50GB) for free, but, since that would require them actually moving my site to a new server, I figure I’ll hold off until I actually need that much space.
Continue reading “What’s been going on….” »
Pretty much, a houseboat experience is something like this: you get up in the morning, have breakfast, lay around waiting for breakfast to digest (they bring coffee to help with this), have lunch, lay around waiting for lunch to digest (in between, you get tea or coffee and biscuits to help you with that), watch the sunset, have dinner, and go to sleep.
 Thank god for the new 4GB memory card that Axle bought for me to accompany the new camera.... Gave me a good chance to take lots more photos of the sunset than was necessary.... Continue reading “Mon. Jan 15 – Floating Around (on a Houseboat in Kerala)” »
This was, again, another car ride. Not as long as our first, and surprisingly on schedule. We got to cross the mountains, so again, we had a chance to see some more varied scenery and vegetation on the way—tea plantations, rubber plantations, forests, and so on….
 Speeding by the tea and rubber plantations.... Continue reading “Sun. Jan 14 – Madurai to Allepy & Houseboat” »
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