This was a week in India. A pilgrimage to the Taj Mahal and an unnecessarily quick race through the golden triangle of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. Plus Varanasi and Haridwar. No proper preparation of the camera, the heat and the cultural shock made us return with only so few photos, and no photos of Rishikesh at all.
I decided to split this story into parts — one for each city. Some general, country-wide observations are below.
Rishikesh
We were traveling inside sleeper class train cars, because the better classes had air conditioning which were making it too cold, as per other travelers' opinions that we didn't check. Sleeper class trains have no glass in windows — only thick horizontal bars of metal. Also they are cheaper and crazier.
There were lots of power sockets to charge devices, but they were cranky, lax, dirty and having parameters of current not similar to those in Ukraine. I had to support the charger with a cardboard box so that it didn't fall out — in the international airport terminal of Delhi. Witness the two power sockets near a stinky and messy WC inside a sleeper class train car. They were at the height of my shoulders and were charging very slowly, but they existed.
India's attitude towards privacy manifested itself in the form of PNR charts with names of people coupled with numbers of their seats glued to public boards standing at train stations especially for this purpose. Also, copies of that could sometimes be glued to the train car exterior, using a glue strong enough to withstand the air drag — for hundreds of kilometers, as did the one on the photo below. There were lots of mononyms. Long names were trimmed. Each seat of the sleeper class had four passengers.
I did an experiment: googled a name from this chart 12 years later. The person had social media profiles, was still alive and had reproduced. That's the kind of privacy we deserve!
When we were finally leaving for Ukraine, the airplane captain announced the weather in Kyiv. It was +18°C there, compared to the frying pan of +46°C in India, which made every single passenger chuckle. Five hours later and it was even worse — only +9°C. Not a single person had any clothes except sweaty shorts and t-shirts, and everyone had prepared to freeze to their deaths. But it was so our own outside, that we felt no cold at all.
This trip contained my first, second and third airplane flights as an adult, and I got my own pic of clouds and a wing!