The Taj Trip- The Conclusion

Guess I never quite finished the day. Here goes!

After touring the Agra Fort, we searched out a place that served ‘Continental Food’ as well as the local Indian cuisine. We found it and it only took us about 2 hours to get our food and eat.

Boo.

That really set us behind schedule. 

We climbed back into the cozy taxi for an hour and a half ride through the crazy Indian ‘country’, if you can call it that.  It was fascinating to me to see how people live outside the city. It was sad, but I was glad for the opportunity to experience it, even if just looking through a backseat car window. I was especially interested in the common usage of cow patties. Call me crazy for my interest. The droppings(?!) get collected, dried and then burned as cooking fuel. Oh my. I didn’t know whether I should be thankful that God provided a cheap fuel for cooking or be angry that the enemy has twisted God’s plan and made it commonplace for people to collect POO and cook their food over it as the poo-smoke fills their homes and their lungs. I lean towards the latter…

Aaaaaanyway….  I don’t think anyone comes to this blog to read about poo.

So… eventually we arrived at another fort, Sikri fort, which we’d heard was even more fabulous than Agra Fort!

We took a quick rickshaw ride up the entrance.

Took 10 minutes to see what we could see without paying to go in,

then we took the rickshaw (auto, as they call them here) back down to the car.

We loaded back up, turned around and drove the hour and half back to the city to catch our train. It got dark, we got stuck in traffic and we had the most fabulous time Christmas caroling through Agra in the taxi. We sang every song we could think of, save “Silent Night” ‘cause as Katrina put it, evening in an Indian city is hardly silent and it just didn’t seem appropriate!!

We boarded this (not so nice) train at 7pm and had one of the longest three hour rides of our lives.

Don’t be fooled by this peaceful moment. This was an exception to the ride. The kids were caaa-raaaazy and we were just so worn out!

We arrived in the Delhi station at 10:25pm.  Another rickshaw ride took us back to the flat!

Then we crashed.

Halleluiah and Amen!