India!!

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Hi everyone,

Well as you can see from the fact that this is my first blog entry, I have failed completely on keeping you all up to date with our travels. Trouble is quite often its a choice between going back to the hotel and writing my blog or going off and exploring more of the fantastic city I am currently in.... Not much of a choice lol. As a result we are nearly a month in to our amazing trip and I have so much to tell you I would be sat here for days trying to write it all out, so here is all I am going to say about India....

India is genuinely the most amazing place I have ever been to!! It is probably the most poverty stricken country I've visited, and yet it is by far the friendliest and happy place I've been. Everybody always has a smile on their face, and everybody goes out of their way to say hello and talk to you. The best day I had in India was when we visited the village of Alipura and we went to a school on its outskirts. The school was shut but the children who had collected around us soon found the school monitor (who was a boy of about 7) who had the key, and opened up the school for us to look around. When we had seen the school we asked if they knew their national anthem and the next thing we know the school monitor had organise the children in to three lines, boys, girls and youngsters, all in height order and they started singing their national anthem at the top of their voices. It was amazing!! The monitor kept looking over at us and we were wondering if he was checking that we were paying attention or not but it turns out he was trying to see past us to the wall behind which had the national anthem written up. After the children sang their national anthem, we all sang ours back to them and then we handed out pens (and gave notebooks to the school to distribute later). This was a magical day and one that I will always remember.

One of the fantastic things about our tour was that it got the balance between seeing all the tourist sights and visiting the villages and meeting the locals, just right. We had a fantastic tour leader called Shiv, who knew everything and anything about India, and we also had a lovely group on our tour, there was only 7 of us in total, four kiwis, one Aussie and us. We all got along great and we hope to meet up with them in a few months when we visit their countries.

All in all India was amazing, and we were sad when we had to leave, I must admit I did shed a few tears, but I know that I will be back! These four paragraphs do not even touch on the incredible time I had in India and when I get back I will have to write up our time their in more detail!

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