Hey everybody, this is Jackie and Kenji doing a joint post again. We are in Delhi right now, and we are going to fly out to Goa tonight, which is a beach town. Unfortunately, it's monsoon season, so it will probably be raining. Tomorrow night there is supposed to be a festival which should be fun.

Since we last posted, a lot has happened. The first day we were in Delhi, we just walked around and enjoyed an air conditioned restaurant for at least 4 hours. Dellhi is a lot cleaner than pretty much every city we've seen so far, there are actually parks and grass, and traffic is less chaotic (a little). The next day, we met up with everyone. Kenji met them all for the first time, he thought they were really nice. We went to the train station where we proceeded to get scammed into going all the way across town to buy our train tickets at a tourist office. The tourist office was in our guidebook, which was why we trusted them, sort of. Eventually, after hours of sitting around trying to figure out what we were going to do, we finally headed back to the train station where we bought tickets on the second floor in a room a little bit hidden away. We bought three seperate train tickets, from Delhi to Jaipur to Agra and back to Delhi, for less than $12. After that, we debated on what to do. The girls wanted to go see the sex and the city movie, which Kenji was not happy about. But we ended up going out to a rooftop restaurant for dinner which was really nice, and then later a bar/pub. It was so smoky in there, Jackie's eyes were watering (I guess in California we aren't used to the smoke). Our train left at 4:30 a.m. the next morning, so we got up at 3 after going to bed at midnight. The train was 6 hours, and near the bathroom, so it smelled pretty gross. Natasha had these perfume wipes that helped a lot.

Once we arrived in Jaipur, we found a hotel. From there, we walked around for a long time. We went to lunch at this really authentic local place, where everyone else was Indian. The food was really good, we ate a lot. We didn't even have to order, everyone had the same thing, and they'd come around with trays of food and would refill it on your plate. You could get as many chapattis and as much rice and curry as you wanted for cheap, by Indian standards, which is basically free in the US.

We walked towards the old city after lunch. It is surrounded by walls, except for 4 entrances. We went to a few sites, including a minaret, which was basically a tower in the middle of the city. That was really cool, we got to walk up to the top where it was breezy and we had a birds eye view of the whole city. There aren't really tall buildings in most cities because it's hard to build water systems that can go up very high. This minaret was pretty much the talllest thing in Jaipur. We also walked through the bazaars, where they were selling everything from clothes to floor tiles.

After that, we headed outside the city to two different spots. The first was this huge fort, with walls off the side that looked like the great wall of China, because they stretch at least a mile in each direction. We walked in the heat up to the top, and got drinks at the top. Jackie was feeling pretty tired at this point, because she was running on low sleep (which, for those of you who know her, doesn't work well for her). She also wasn't drinking juice or soda like the rest of us, and was probably losing a lot of electrolytes from the heat.

We then went to the Monkey temple, or Galta as it's called. It was on the other side of a giant hill. At the top of the hill there was a sun temple, where we got little bracelets. The paths was rocks laid down like cobblestones but not shaped. We get to the other side of the hill, and there are a ton of people swimming in this pool thats carved into the side of the mountain. On our way down we were walking by this woman who pulled out a cobra out of a basket right near us. Natasha FREAKED out, and we kind of ran past her. Near the temple, there were 3 pools, one of them, where the people swam, looked a little cleaner, but there was a dirtier one where monkeys were swimming. This guy came up to us and wouldn't leave us alone, he called Kenji WWF guy, Jackie Jackie Chan, and Natasha the dancer. We went into the temple, where this holy man hit us a few times with a feather, gave us an orange dot on our forehead, and asked for a donation. By the way, this temple was really cool because it was in the middle of a little mountainous area, so the view was really nice. By the time we were making our way back, Jackie started to feel really sick, her head was hurting. We pretty much went right back to the hotel. On our way back, we were bargaining with several different guys, and we ended up picking one. The other two rickshaw drivers got really pissed and blocked us in. We reversed and got out of there, but the other two ran into each other and broke off the front headlight of one of the rickshaws. That driver got out and started savagely beating the other driver with one of his sandals. We got out of there in a hurry!

Jackie crashed at the hotel, while Natasha and Kenji went out to dinner. The room was really hot, and none of us got much sleep, although we were all really tired. The next morning we had to go to the train station at 5 a.m. for a 6:10 train. Needless to say, waking up was difficult. In Agra, we got an AC hotel, where Jackie stayed for the day. Kenji and Natasha met up with the rest of the group, and went to the Taj Mahal. The Taj was about what Kenji expected, it was beautiful. Afterwards, Natasha, Kelsey, and Kenji went to a few more sites, while the rest of the group stayed at the Taj, and then went back to their hotel. We went to the Agra Fort, which was a huge fort. On the outside, there was a jungle area, where they used to have lions, tigers, and elephants to protect the castle. It had a good view of the Taj Mahal, and the guy that owned it or built it had a harem of around 400 women. He used to play chess, sitting above a giant chess board where the concubines from his harem would move the pieces. From there we caught bike ricks to a mosque. One of the drivers let Kenji bike for a little while, which was surprisingly hard, considering the skinny frame of the guys who were biking us around. The mosque was beautiful from the outside, but once we got inside it wasn't anything special. There were tons of kids running around asking for money and trying to grab at our cameras. We were taking pictures, and there would be 40 kids swarming around during the pictures, I felt like a missionary.

That night we all went out to dinner, including Jackie, who felt slightly better, on a rooftop with a view of the Taj Mahal. The food took forever, but it was nice to have everyone together. The next morning we had another 4 hour non-AC train ride into Delhi. We got up at 5 for the third morning in a row (the first morning was 3 a.m.), and got settled in the train. About 20 minutes in, guys came with tickets that had the same seat as ours. We argued for about 10 minutes, then they realized that our ticket was actually for the following day. The train counter must have printed out the wrong day, and none of the 5 of us had checked that detail. As a result, we had to stand or sit on the edge of someone elses seat or on the floor for the next 3 hours. We sat, hugging our knees on the ground, for about 2 hours while 40 guys packed in the train, standing room only. Julia fell asleep on a potbellied man with a dirty green shirt. She also sat by a sink that was leaking chewing tobacco water and she had to get up and realighn the pipes. One of the guys was really friendly, and Kenji ended up talking with him for a while. He kept talking in Hindi to his friends, and we're sure he was making fun of us. There is a fine line between nice and creepy, which a lot of Indian dudes tend to flirt with.

Back at Delhi, Natasha left us, so it was just Kenji, Jackie, Stephanie, and Julia. We found a hotel, and went to lunch, then headed over to the Lotus temple. This temple was the cleanest, most beautiful area that we've seen in India. We stayed there for several hours just lying on the grass in a small park nearby. It was serene.

This morning we all woke up and got fruit from the fruit stand. Mangoes and Bananas are super good. We'll miss north Indian food, but have realized that we almost like the authentic places better than the fancy restaurants. From the outside of the authentic places, you feel hesitant to go in, but once you sit down in the restaurant it's fine, and the food is a lot better and less expensive.

That's about all of the interesting things that have happened so far- we'll post again later!