Sunday, July 14, 2013

Weekend Trip to Aurangabad

This weekend we took our first trip outside of Loni to the Aurangabad area. It was fun to get out of Loni and see more of India and now whenever people we interact with ask us if we've been anywhere else in India we can say yes. I also took lots of pictures this weekend so I have only a small amount that I'm putting on the blog (still quite a bit). So if you'd like to see more sometime just let me know and I can show you. I will also probably upload more on facebook at some point.

Our weekend started off early Saturday morning at 6 am when our driver came to pick us up. We then headed to the Ellora caves, which are "caves" that are carved out of rocks with structures and such. They were really neat to see and it's really hard to believe that they were built so many years ago since the work is so intricate. This is also when we got the first taste of what being Americans or white means in India. We got asked tons of times to take our picture with random people. We obliged at first, but then as the weekend continued we just said no. We all decided that we would not be ok being celebrities and having random people come up and ask to take a picture of you or else just take pictures of you just standing around.
Group in front of the first cave we went into






Our backs were sweaty from all the walking so we looked really cool for a little while to air out



Then we headed to the Ajanta caves next. These are similar caves, but have a lot more paintings on the walls rather than carvings. I personally thought that these were better and enjoyed them much more. A lot of these caves were dark and had lights in them so it was a little harder to take pictures (especially of the paintings on the walls), but I still got quite a few good ones.

Sign when paying for our ticket. Don't worry I had my epi-pen and Heather was my lookout for bees since I never seemed to see them








Then we headed to Aurangabad and went to our hotel for the night. For supper we ate in our hotel, but they had American food on the menu. I ordered pizza and it was so good. It was also really nice to sleep in a comfortable bed with a normal pillow.

Sunday morning we got up and headed for Bibi Ka Maqbara, which is the mini taj mahal.







Then we headed to the Daulatabad Fort. This was a really cool place and I decided would have been a great place to take seniors pics. It included lots of stairs though so we were pretty tired by the time we made it all the way up the hill and back down.



The structures on the left side of the pictures towards the top of the hill is where we climbed to










After this we were a little tired of outdoor activities and walking around since that is what we had been doing the past 2 days so we headed to the Prozone Mall, which was like a typical American mall with extra security. We had to have our bags searched and go through a metal detector to get into the mall and then at most of the stores you had to check your bag before you went in and then pick it up when you were done. That part was a little strange, but otherwise we had a pleasant shopping experience. It was nice to be at a place that seemed very familiar and for lunch we even had KFC (which I made everyone, but myself that a picture in). It was also a little strange feeling since it almost felt like we were in the US, but then knew that we were in India. I ended up buying some shirts and some sarree fabric that I am hoping to make a blanket out of.





After our shopping experience we headed back to PIMS and got unpacked. I'm glad we went for our weekend trip, but now I'm feeling tired and like I'm not really ready to start our week tomorrow. I feel like I need a day to recover from all of this excitement.

1 comment: