A crazy schedule. I met up with two other UCLA students from another program on Friday for a day trip to Delhi. We left from Hyderabad at 4:30am, flew two hours to Northern India to the capital Delhi, got in a hired car who drove us five hours South to Agra where the Taj Mahal lives. It was raining as it's monsoon season here now, and the Taj Mahal isn't open to walk through on Fridays... but it was still magnificent from across the river we got a very good look. The guy who built it for his favorite of his three wives (the "romantic" story about the building of the Taj Mahal is somehow slightly less romantic when you learn he built it for one of three wives), was imprisoned in this fort across the river when his son launched mutiny and overthrew his father the king. The fort has a great view of of the Taj and we viewed it from there. Some of the same marble inlay is used in the constrution of the fort and I have some beautiful pictures on my camera when I get home to unload them. THEN we drove back another five hours by car to the Delhi airport to fly back to Hyderabad for the start of school the next day. Well, the traffic in Delhi is unpredictable - between the cows wandering around in the road, the camels pulling loads of brick and wood and other building materials, the monkeys crossing the road, the people riding motorcycles three at a time and also cramming six people into little two person tuk-tuks... we ended up missing our flight back to Hyderabad. So we napped at the airport and flew back in the morning just in time for class. IndiGo is a local discount airline that looks and feels nearly exactly like JetBlue. In fact their websites looks similiar and their color schemes are the same and it's clearly an intentional mimicry. More to blog about later but off to class for now.
Saturday
Delhi and Agra
A crazy schedule. I met up with two other UCLA students from another program on Friday for a day trip to Delhi. We left from Hyderabad at 4:30am, flew two hours to Northern India to the capital Delhi, got in a hired car who drove us five hours South to Agra where the Taj Mahal lives. It was raining as it's monsoon season here now, and the Taj Mahal isn't open to walk through on Fridays... but it was still magnificent from across the river we got a very good look. The guy who built it for his favorite of his three wives (the "romantic" story about the building of the Taj Mahal is somehow slightly less romantic when you learn he built it for one of three wives), was imprisoned in this fort across the river when his son launched mutiny and overthrew his father the king. The fort has a great view of of the Taj and we viewed it from there. Some of the same marble inlay is used in the constrution of the fort and I have some beautiful pictures on my camera when I get home to unload them. THEN we drove back another five hours by car to the Delhi airport to fly back to Hyderabad for the start of school the next day. Well, the traffic in Delhi is unpredictable - between the cows wandering around in the road, the camels pulling loads of brick and wood and other building materials, the monkeys crossing the road, the people riding motorcycles three at a time and also cramming six people into little two person tuk-tuks... we ended up missing our flight back to Hyderabad. So we napped at the airport and flew back in the morning just in time for class. IndiGo is a local discount airline that looks and feels nearly exactly like JetBlue. In fact their websites looks similiar and their color schemes are the same and it's clearly an intentional mimicry. More to blog about later but off to class for now.
