India or not? A hard decision

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I spent the early part of the morning researching what we will need for India and Egypt visa. Egypt is easy as you can get it when you arrive. It looks like India takes about 5 days to get, but hard to discern from their web site.

We have been oscillating in our feeling about the India leg and finally had the discussion over breakfast. In the end, we decided not to go. I feel badly about this because I am not sure when we would get the chance again. On the other hand, 10 days wasn't going to be enough time to see much beyond the usual tourist spots and the targeting of tourist and westerners, particularly in the November attacks in Mumbai,and the recent fuel strike stranding transportation sort of was the final straw.

Benjamin and Joshua are desperately in need of some clothes, so we got a taxi and headed off in search of a Mall Evy had seen advertised. Unfortunately, when we got there is seemed to be all high end international brand stores with little in the way of children's clothing and prices that seemed very high for Thailand. Only Joshua managed to find some pants on sale. We ended up for lunch in a food court where you are issued a little card with a bar code when you enter. You then pick your menu choices from the various stands (where they fortunately have plastic wrapped examples of the dishes for us to point to). At each stand, they scan your card and finally, when you leave the food court, they are able to charge you for what you ate. It seemed a bit strange at first, but is quite efficient.

After a taxi ride home in Bangkok rush hour traffic, we had a not so great dinner in our hotel and called it a night.

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