Day 5: The Sizzle Dazzle Brownie

Hey there Readers,

I wanted to let you know why the posts aren’t updated regularly. Pretty much Bandhu turns the internet off after about 11 and most days we arrive later so I don’t have the chance to upload them. The electricity also fluctuates and goes on and off. Just a little note in case you were wondering. I also made it so that anyone can comment, which I hope should work now. So, today the day consisted mostly of driving, hours and hours of it. So we woke up at around 7:30 and prepared ourselves for the grueling 3 hour car ride. The Family, Mom, and I all ate breakfast and piled into the car. The car ride was pretty tedious and dull, probably because most of us were trying to catch up on a bit of sleep so it passed pretty quickly, at least for me. We arrived at the entrance area at around noon and the smell was pretty bad.  We found out it was Camel waste, to be precise. From the parking lot we had two options, take a rickshaw to the entrance of the Taj or a camel. I think this was the first time I had seen a camel out of a zoo and I’ve decided that they are pretty nasty animals. Each one had a harness with a kind of carriage trailing behind. It was filthy and the smell was so repulsive. Thankfully we decided to take a rickshaw but we had to haggle for a fair price, which gets so annoying after a while because you have to argue about the price of everything. We got in and drove the three minutes to the entrance. First we got tickets. There were two lines, one for Indian visitors and one for foreigners. This was a little bit ridiculous because the price for the Indian ticket was 20 rupees but for us, we had to pay 750 rupees each, over 35x more expensive. Everywhere people would attempt to discreetly take our picture as they walked by, but most of them failed on the discreet portion of the action. So, back to my day, we got our ridiculously overpriced tickets and went to the lines for entry. Now there were three separate lines, one for women, men, and high quality tickets. Having 750 rupee tickets, we went in the latter. So we reached a man who looked at our tickets and confirmed our high quality tickets. Now this is the ridiculous part, Ryan and I were to continue down the HQ line but the man literally forced the rest of the group under the bar and into the woman’s line, which we thought was totally sexist. So we went through the usual security where I discovered to my dismay that candy was considered contraband in the Taj. So I went through the metal detector and they checked my bag. Now remember I told you that my mom used candy to discipline the little kids, well it was a lot of candy, and ALL of it was in my bag. Once there was a sizeable amount of sugar piled up next to my bag I offered some to everyone and the guys behind me went for it. Here I was holding up the security line into the Taj Mahal with everyone staring at me and the massive pile of candy next to me and the people around me are literally shoving it into to their mouths as fast as possible. It was pretty awesome. So they confiscated my ‘contraband’ and we entered the grounds of the Taj. We then went through a big ornate portal and on the other side we saw the Taj Mahal. There was a long water feature ahead of us and at the end was the massive, white building. What I noticed was that everything seemed to be symmetrical right up to the stones. We walked over to the immense structure and we had to take off our shoes and man was it hot. The stones were exposed to the hot Indian sun all day so it felt as if I was walking barefoot on coals. Thankfully there was a carpet that ran all the way into the Taj so we stayed on there for the most part. I’m going to be completely honest with you, but the inside just wasn’t that impressive. I mean, everywhere there were flower designs made of inlaid precious stones but it wasn’t well lit so it was difficult to really appreciate it. In the center were the two marble replicas of the coffins. As the story goes, once upon a time there was this maharajah who built this massive tomb his wife who was the love of his life. Now they are united forever. That’s my version of the story at least. So we walked around for a bit and what really surprised me was that inside the actual monument there were people sleeping. I mean I got used to it everywhere else but seeing it in probably the most famous building in India was pretty shocking. Eventually we left from the back exit where we were approached by groups of people who wanted their picture taken with us. We took a rickshaw back to the rank, camel smelling parking lot and found our driver. Once again we prepared ourselves for yet another three hour drive. It was extremely monotonous but then all of a sudden Julie shouts out two fateful words. “Pizza Hut!” so we immediately got our driver to pull up to the kind of mall facility where it was located and we could finally finish our quest for Pizza Hut. It was sheer bliss. After days of living off of chapatti, my pizza with chicken and mushrooms and cheese stuffed crusts was sensationally mind blowing. We all enjoyed every minute of it and afterwards we went into the coffee shop next door (they don’t really drink coffee here either) and I found possibly the best named desert of the year. Here I was able to enjoy the Sizzle Dazzle Brownie that we dubbed SDB. So having had our fill of Western food and drinks, we returned to the car and finished our journey which took another two hours. We were so exhausted that we just had a shower and went straight to bed.