I have finally found a word to describe my day to day. Cacophony! As in, the cacophonous noises you hear when you walk down a street, sit in a mall, or try to go to sleep. Though let me just say, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I generally love the rush of so many melding sounds, many of which are new. A peacock squalling in the air, Hindu prayers late into the night, even the honking of horns ( which is basically a language of its own) are nice!

Saturday, we had an adventure to the Taj. We slept over at the  SIT house and 10 of us headed out at 5am for the  5 1/2 hour ride to Agra, the former capital of the Mughal empire.  We went with a single minded purpose, to see the Taj and head home; and that is exactly what we did. The Taj was gorgeous. Looking back at the pictures it doesn’t look real and was absolutely worth the 11 hours of driving. In all though I wouldn’t necessarily go back, this is in contrast to Machu Pichu which  I would go back to in a second.   I fully recognize that any reservation I have on returning to the Taj is at least partially due to how much we were bugged. Melissa and I ( my red headed hair twin) decided to wear our hair down for twin pictures.  Well, that’s all fine and dandy except that gets us even more attention than normal. The result? A bunch of hilarious photos of us, the Taj, and 15 of our closest Indian brothers. And we couldn’t really sit down for the entire time we were there.  In general however, it’s pretty crazy that I can rank two wonders of the world.  I can only guess which one is next!

Finally, a brief list of things I love, with a few things I could still use some time to get used to:

The Love List:

Everything my host mother cooks

Bucket Showers

Chopti’s so fresh they are still filled with air

Chai ( which means Tea, not our American Chai, I still don’t like that)

Walking barefoot through the Taj Mahal

Camels ( and monkeys, and peacocks)

The Adhan 

Rickshaw rides

Hindi

Things that still need time:

The eastern toilet ( google it if you please)

Traffic circles ( and crossing streets in general)

The lake of water I currently have to wade through to get to school