Con- Agra

I finally peeled myself away from Rishikesh; it was hard to move on because I had met some really cool people and developed some solid relationships—such is the life of a traveler. I spent twelve hours in transit to get to Agra to see the Taj Mahal.; I met a girl from Germany on the train and we decide to get a taxi together to share a room to save on costs. We accidentally slept in too late to see the sun rise, so we split up and I went for a nature walk and ran into an unexpected view of the Taj through trees and flowers—stunning! This city is extremely intense, so I tried to keep to myself for most of the day. A group of boys were bugging me so I decided to try out one of the Hindi phrases the girls in Goa taught me, “ Kudakevaste maya picha chordo!” Meaning, “for the love of God, leave me alone.” The outcome wasn’t anywhere nearly as effected as anticipated; they boys thought this was hilarious and attached themselves to me even more until I finally veered off into a hidden restaurant.

The next morning we got up at 5:30 to be in the first group into the Taj when it opened at sunrise; It’s gorgeous! Not a whole lot to it, there’s only a decorated tomb inside so the whole point is to spend $15 to get on the grounds to take photos. It was nice being there so early because I have a lot of shots with no tourists in it; the area was so quiet!

After, I got an e-mail from my mom freaking out about the staph infection on my face; saying I had to go to a hospital. I decided to first try the Dr. near the guesthouse that the receptionist told me was “very, very good.” I sat in the office, which was in a house and there wre maybe twenty Indians sitting and waiting in the hallway for the Doctor. I sat for over an hour while the “doctor” stitched a kid up in back and everyone in the waiting room stared at me through the slits in the door or, if they were bold enough, walked right inside the door and just stood a few feet away look at me like I might disappear or shape shift—no blinking, can’t miss a thing! It was so frustrating because I was there to get medical attention; I look disgusting, I feel hideous and I really don’t want to be dealing with being a spectacle. Finally, the Dr. comes in and asks what’s wrong. I brush my bangs aside to show home my pussy scabs and he starts writing a big list of pills and creams and tell ms me to go. Woah, woah, wait; so, do you know what this is?

Yes, I know. And he waves me out.

Ok, you should TELL me. At least let me know what these things on the list are

Pills, pills, creams; go with the boy.

UGH! The boy tries to bring me to the pharmacy and I just start getting really upset; I’m not going to blindly take a ton of pills without an explanation. Never mind, I’m going to the hospital that’s in the Lonely Planet. I get a rickshaw driver that agrees to bring me to all the places I need to go for 100 rupees. Thank God he was cool—I went to the District hospital and would have been completely lost without the driver’s help. There are hundreds of Indians everywhere and I kept getting shuffled from crumbling room to crumbling room, one man at a desk to another. They hardly looked at me; one guy writes down some words and I’m brought to the front of a long line where they snip off a bunch of pills and send me to yet another man in a dark room behind a desk, where I figure they are going to now make me pay for all of these pills that I don’t want—he was clearly just there to take inventory, wrote down everything, and since I was about three seconds from full out crying, he tried to explain then pills to me. He said a few words I recognized as helpful which calmed me down a bit. By the way, all of this was free.

After all this stress, I went to a nearby “classy” hotel where I could pay a dollar to use their gym—horray treadmill! I think, however, this was one of the very first joggers ever created; it had a metal frame at a slight incline, the belt was on metal rollers and if you didn’t hold on, you immediately went into an all out sprint and flew off. I ran for a while, then decided to go back to the pharmacy to purchase penicillin, a drug I was familiar with and could trust, at a whopping 14 cents a pill☺ I love the price of medication here. Anyone need me to pick them up anything? I hung out at a café, watching a movie and chatting with a guy from the UK until it was train time, yet again—next stop, Varanassi.

AWKWARD MOMENT

On the way to the Agra Guesthouse, the taxi driver asked me if I had come from Delhi. I said, no Rishikesh, which is actually further. He said, oh, I knew. You know how I knew? Because of the smell coming from you. Ouch. Sorry, I’ve been sweating on a train for twelve hours; your entire country smells like a mixture of garbage, feces, and spices, who are you to judge?