In seven hours we will be landing in Denver. Presently, we are enduring our layover at JFK airport in New York. In the last thirty-two hours we have surmounted some not insignificant and unexpected detours. But let's start with two days ago when we were in Agra...
Our journey to Agra began before dawn on Tuesday, August 16. We boarded the fancy-shmancy Shatobdi Express train - A/C, morning tea, breakfast, and only a two-hour ride. After two months in India we've become pretty comfortable dealnig with pushy rickshaw wallahs, but when we arrived we had to figure out what to do with a seemingly nice one. We hired him for the day.
Sameer, said rickshaw wallah, was a gem. He showed us sites we would otherwise have missed, including a riverside view of the Taj Mahal, the "Baby Taj", and an alley-way restaurant that only those "in the know" could find. He also took us to jewelry and marble demonstrations. He even helped Aimee haggle for a special gift at one of the shops. At no point were we concerned about Sameer's intentions. However, we wanted desperately to know the intentions of the passenger seated with his machine gun in front of us on the train ride back to Delhi. Though they remain a mystery, we made it back to Delhi incident-free, only to be confronted with a group of protestors marching in support of Anna Hazare, an anti-corruption leader who was arrested on Tuesday. Perhaps it was time to leave Delhi.
And leave Delhi we did, but our flight was fifteen minutes late. Ergo, when we arrived in Mumbai we learned quickly that we had missed the very important flight to JFK. In the words of Sally Wall, one last "personal f***ing growth experience." We had to exercise both firmness and patience to finally find the sympathetic Duty Manager who arranged our flight to Newark, New Jersey and transportation to JFK from there. He even let us in to the First Class Maharaja Lounge while we waited. Though it was 1:30 a.m. and not 8:00 p.m. when we finally departed, we were on our way home.
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