India to New York

Two weeks in India went by pretty fast. This was probably partly due to the fact that I got sick three times in the fortnight. We didn't want to try to do too much as we knew that getting around to different places would take some time. So we just checked out Varanasi, Agra, Jaipur and Delhi. It was winter time so the weather was pretty nice. It was warm most days and cool in the evening but there was quite a bit of pollution around, especially in Agra and Jaipur and I think this might be the reason I still haven't been able to shake the sore throat I got in Nepal.

Varanasi actually turned out to be the most relaxing of all the places we went. As long as you didn't venture out into the main bazaar it wasn't too crazy and you could just chill out. We took it easy and just walked along the ghats, took a boat ride, walked around the main bazaar etc.

In Agra we did the usual - Agra Fort, Fatephur Sikri (well, Paul did this one by himself as I was stuck in bed - again) and the Taj Mahal. In Jaipur we did a rickshaw tour of some of the main tourist places but to be honest it was a little disappointing (was I blind or was the pink city not even that pink?????). Jaipur was a little bit of a hard town to travel as the budget accommodation was spread out all over the place which made finding a place on the spur of the moment hard. Some of it was also not very central which meant we needed to get a rickshaw to go anywhere.

In Delhi we did a couple of days sightseeing - the National Museum, Connaught Place and a few other things. Our flight to New York was scheduled for 4.30am on the 19th and we decided to go to the airport the evening before and hopefully catch some sleep in the airport. We met up with Alex and Felicity for dinner before we left and unfortunately I started to feel sick (again) over dinner. I was so annoyed that I had to get sick again just when I was about to leave India. I ended up spending the whole evening in the airport with my head in the toilet bowl and Etihad almost wouldn't give me my boarding pass to get on the plane. Luckily they relented when I faked a miraculous recovery and we got on board where Paul promptly started to feel sick and spent most of the flight rushing to the loo! We were such a sorry pair. We were so excited about finally having a flight with food and free movies but we didn't get to eat hardly any food and Paul didn't watch hardly any movies!

We stopped over in Abu Dhabi for a couple of hours before getting back on the plane for another 14 hours to New York. We finally arrived at about 4.00pm (NY time) and had to find our way to our apartment, which luckily didn't prove to be too difficult.

The apartment we are staying in is really nice and has everything that we need. It is so nice to finally have hot water in the shower (and to not have to worry about keeping your lips tightly pressed together the whole time!). Actually it's just nice to be in America in general - everything just works! It's quite a relief after India. The only downside has been spending the first few days trying to recover from our tummy bugs - at least I've had time to do some cooking which I had started to really miss.

Today we finally roused ourselves and took the ferry to Staten Island to look at the Statue of Liberty and the view of Manhattan. I thought that the Statue of Liberty looked rather small in real life - obviously I have seen it close up on way too many cinema screens! Plus I thought it was way out in the sea by itself, not so close to other bits of land (probably movies again). After that we went to catch a glimpse of Ground Zero where the twin towers used to stand. At the moment it is still just a construction site. It just so happened that right next to this area was a huge discount department store and I stayed there for hours trying on jeans (and a few other things). The clothes were really quite heavily discounted but you really had to trawl through to find the good stuff. Paul eventually gave up and went home without me. And I still didn't even get a chance to look at the shoes.....