monkeys, monkeys, monkeys!

We were up late again last night at the hotel social hour connecting with some other travelers and making plans to visit the Taj Mahal and other sites in and around Agra.  Last night we settled on taking the train with other folks and planned to go to the train stations this morning.  Neither of us wanted to get up this morning and after some more research this morning the group decided to just hire a car to take us there and around to the different sites.  It's going to cost 1350 rupees each (about $30) plus the entrance fees, but you can't be this close and not go to one of the seven wonders of the world!

Today we hopped on the metro again, this time to explore New Delhi sites.  We went to the India gate war memorial; it's huge but being renovated so lots of scaffolding around it.  Took a couple pics and then got asked to be in a few pics with other people. =)  It's pretty funny really...either people ask us to be in their pics or we'll just be walking by and people will not-so-subtly be taking our picture.  After that we walked to the National Museum repeatedly telling the many auto rickshaws that we didn't want a ride and were happy walking!  (That was partially a lie because we were really very hot and sweaty but determined to tough it out and holding out hope for A/C at the museum!)  Sadly, most of the museum was not air conditioned and I thought Michelle might cry when she realized that!  Actually, a few exhibits were a bit air conditioned and our body temperatures were almost back to normal by the time we left!  The museum was quite big and had lots of cool archaeological things from the Indus valley and as old as the ancient Egyptians.  I was really impressed with the intricacy of the carvings and the detailed, organized city plans.  There were some great brass, terra cotta and wood sculptures and carvings.

Then we walked up a nice big boulevard to the Parliament building and the Presidential palace but there wasn't much to see there so we continued on south to find the Indira Gandhi memorial museum.  There were lots of round-a-bouts and the free city map and the guidebook maps were not exactly the same so we ended up walking quite a ways out of our way.  By this time (maybe 3pm) I was tired of walking and STARVING (we hadn't eaten since one egg at breakfast) and was getting pretty crabby.  But I was distracted from my agony as soon as the first monkey crossed the road in front of us!  Then we looked up and saw that the whole tree ahead of us was full of monkeys!  We saw maybe a total of 20 monkeys in the tree and walking along the fence or road.  The coolest part was seeing 3 or 4 momma monkeys with little babies!  We stopped and took a bunch of pictures and the security guard at the compound across the street was laughing at us I think.  But I didn't care; I could've sat there for an hour watching them!  But I as hungry and holding out hope that there would be food carts selling food to the tourists at the museum so on we walked. =)  Sadly, I was wrong and there were no carts by the museum.  We did enjoy the museum despite being tired and hungry!

We walked a different way back towards the presidential palace and were so relieved to get to the metro and sit down in the air conditioning for a few minutes.  We snagged a 15 rupee sandwich at the metro stop and walked back to our hotel.  We'd planned to go to a local restaurant for dinner but once we hit the AC of our hotel we decided to just order in and shower instead!  The shower felt great and the food was yummy (we got dal mahkani and butter paneer masala).  We're back down in the lobby again to check in online and write this blog but will have to work hard to not get sucked into the social hour for too long because our car leaves for Agra tomorrow morning at 5am!  And before we go to bed we need to do a lot of laundry using our extra shower water so that we have clean clothes to take to Thailand.

Oh yeah, happy 4th of July!
-mari