Post-blur report from Jaipur

---

Sorry for the long pause. We've been busy with...stuff. Stomach stuff. Not cool. Let's just leave it at that.
We left Varanasi on January 21st taking the night train to Agra (13h train ride) to see 'the Taj' and some other nice buildings, both not being on the top of our game so to speak. The train ride about 11h of pure shivering (note to self: buy blanket - BUY BLANKET), but we managed to survive - feeling a bit more sorry for the guy in the bed next to us who seemed to have a bad dream (made cow-sounds all night out of nowhere). We arrived in Agra around noon the following day - and did not leave Hotel Kamal for the whole day. Our highlight of the day was seeing the Taj Mahal from our rooftop restaurant at sunset. Good thoughts - good things ahead!

Or so we thought. After calling it an early night we went to bed, covered with 6 blankets which we found laying around and the ones we brought (= 1) we looked forward to a good nights sleep - ready to embrace some serious sights the following day.
As it turned out we were apparently the only ones who wanted to sleep. We 'witnessed' several live acts of what you might call the "Dog-Fight-and-Barking Show", the "Honk-As-Loud-As-You-Can-At-3AM Show" - and - the "Mice-Sneaking-Under-Bathroom-Door-and-Dancing-Around-the-Room Show".
We did not get much sleep.

Waking up at 11am the day after we decided to take our time, eat toast and drink tea (the only thing we could eat for 48h) and get to the Taj Mahal in the afternoon to see the sunset. Not feeling that we had enough energy to go around Agra to see all the monuments we decided to dedicate the time and energy we had to the Taj Mahal. And yes - even though it is super tourist'y and pushy - it's still great to have been there. We were a bit bummed about the fact that it did not feel that 'holy' or at least sacred and important, and it did not seem to be the purpose either to be frank. But again, the park surrounding the Taj Mahal allowed some peace and serenity to enter our minds which was truly needed. We were very pleased with our visit.

So we had one more night in Agra before leaving for Jaipur the morning after at 6am. The night was not as bad as the first one, but well, our lovely guests were present but we just decided to go for a new strategy - to ignore.

Long story short - now we're in Jaipur, staying at one of Anna's friends Nitin in a really nice house where rooms are generally rented out to AIESEC interns when coming here for their internships, but also for other people staying here for a shorter period of time. So the crowd is really international having people from Brazil, US, Canada, Marocco, Switzerland etc staying under the same roof. We truly enjoy it here and are so grateful to be able to stay here!

Tomorrow we will go to our final stop in India - New Dehli. We booked a hostel today so we have a place to stay when we arrive tomorrow night - more about New Dehli in our final blog entry about India.

Hopefully we can find a place where we can find a cable (there, the truth is out - we FORGOT it) so we can actually upload some photos from our amazing weeks in India - and the coming 6 weeks too of course.

Hugs - A&C

(Extra love to the comments we've gotten - yummy we want more!)

---