It was another early morning for us all today. We woke up at 5:30 AM and piled onto a bus for a 3 hour long drive to the city of Agra. I slept for 2.5 hours within this drive, and woke up rested. The landscape I woke up to looked very different from New Delhi, but it still had extremely busy traffic like in Delhi.
When we got off of our bus, we were at an elephant sanctuary called Wildlife SOS. We learned about what this sanctuary does for its elephants, which was very inspiring. This organization adopts elephants which have been abused, such as for labor or entertainment, and nurses them back to health. We even got to feed and pet the elephants on our visit, which was an amazing experience.
After a few hours of feeding, washing, and learning about all of the elephants, we sat down for a small lunch inside of the sanctuary. During this lunch, I bought souvenirs as gifts for people back home, such as earrings and an elephant batik. I was glad to buy these, because all of the money made from them go towards supporting the Wildlife SOS foundation as they help more animals in the future.
Once we finished, we left to drive to our hotel in Agra called the Howard Plaza. Traffic was pretty bad, just like it was in New Delhi, so we were stopped for a lot of the drive. While we were stopped, people would often come up to the windows of our small bus and try to sell us things or ask for money. In one specific instance, two young boys came to our window. One boy was asking for money, while the other was trying to sell a bottle of strawberry flavored water. After minutes of constant begging, one of the girls on our trip gave the boy 100 rupees in exchange for the water so he would leave us alone. After this, however, the other boy would not leave our bus and continued to walk or even run after us when we would begin to drive again. After an even longer time of him begging, Elizabeth gave the boy her packed lunch that she was given for the day so he would finally leave us alone.
After sitting in traffic for a while, we made it to our hotel. We checked in quickly, and then made our way to an array of beautiful gardens behind the Taj Mahal. While walking around, I made friends with some other people who were visiting the gardens and also got to see many random puppies that happened to be running around. Despite the extremely hot temperature, it was extremely beautiful to see.
Next we were off to the Trident Hotel to have dinner. There was an amazing buffet with delicious food, and we all ate until we were stuffed. The most interesting parts of the night happened after dinner, however. While exploring the hotel, I found a man in a small room who was throwing clay and spinning pottery. After watching him do it for a while, he even let me try! After I did that, we were all directed to the courtyard outside where we were given two shows. First, there was a very eccentric puppet show by a father and son. It was so funny and strange, and almost surreal because of how weird it was. After the puppet show, we got to see a magic show in the courtyard. I was so excited for this, because I love magic tricks so much. Once the magician was finished, he even showed us how he did all of his tricks which was so cool.
After these two shows, we all got back in our bus and went back to the hotel. It was a fantastic day, but we had to go to bed early because we needed to wake up bright and early the next morning…….. To go visit the Taj Mahal!!!