Taj Mahal this weekend!

Going to the Taj Mahal this Saturday and Sunday! Looking forward to taking lots of pictures and seeing how giant and beautiful it is. The popular places are the Taj Mahal of course, Fort Agra, and I'm going to eat dinner and sightsee at the Oberoi Amarvilas. Room rates there start at $600 a night, up to the thousands! Dinner was recommended by the NY Times and entrees are a more reasonable $10-30. Hopefully there will be some good shopping vendors there too. Work pays for all my hotels here even if I'm travelling on the weekend. And I think they pay for most of my flights too since I can't "go home" every weekend. It's called flex trips and I just pay the taxes. If they can't reimburse me, that's ok, b/c then I'm just paying for personal weekend flights.

The Accenture Pune is in a gated IT community, but still some dirt roads and ok infrastructure. The building itself is pretty decent. The 16 person team is very nice and they take me to the cafeteria for lunch, which is really the only place to go b/c the surrounding area is empty. Lunch is 30 rupees, which is like 70 cents! Mostly vegetarian and they have fruit which I am so tempted to eat everywhere. Only peelable fruit for me though. But they have lots of curry, spiced food, rice, naan and roti type bread. They are all right out of college except for the supervisor who I am on the same level with. Surpringly a quarter women on the team, but the rest of the building is heavily male. They took me on a stroll outside after lunch around the building. They are from different places in the country but leave in apartments near work now since they were placed at this office.

I eat whatever Indian cooked food that looks good and write down what it is if it's labelled at the hotel. The included breakfast is awesome in a beautiful restaurant called Spice Kitchen, both Indian and American food. And freshed squeezed juices, like orange, pineapple, watermelon, a delight. I've eaten medu wada, aloo paratha, poori, rice congee, aloo bhaji, pongal, sambhar, and idli. It's buffet style so I just get a little of everything. Not eating Indian 3 times a day anymore b/c it gets old, so eating continental food too a little bit. It would be different if it were Vietnam, I could eat that all the time. But a lot of India reminds me of Vietnam, in terms of 3rd world but still good cultural aspects.

Looking forward to weekends when I can actually get out and do fun touristy things. Scheduling my next weekend trip to Goa beach town, and I think my last weekend will be Mumbai. I want to visit some temples. I brought a head scarf at the advice of a friend, and hope to see colorful scarves to bring home too. Don't know how I'm gonna fit much in my full suitcase though. Wanna ride an elephant like another friend suggested, but don't think I'll have time to visit a reserve. The Holi Festival is this weekend. According to Wikitravel, it's the Spring Festival of India with lots of colors. It welcomes spring and wins the blessings of Gods for good harvests and fertility of the land. It's the second most important festival in India after Diwali. Said to be full of fun, frolic, and exhuberance. They throw colored powder each other and one guy told me they even fill balloons with the powder to hit people with.

In the mornings I eat breakfast outside near the waterfall walls and sometimes sit by the pool until the hotel car takes me to the office. Most of the people are older here but there was one cute young guy with glasses and we were the only ones sitting outside. The only sucky thing is the hotel's 45 minutes away with all this traffic and I'm getting the worst motion sickness from the stop-and-go. I asked to be driven in a van tomorrow b/c that's the only car I haven't gotten nautious in, and I'll ask to sit in the front. Still trying to get fully onto Indian time, I'd say I'm half way there. Gotta force myself to sleep on a regular pattern.