Day 3

We took it easy, went to Café Coffee Day for some intense sweet Nescafe-ish drinks, then headed to the Hanuman temple for the first temple venture. We ditched our shoes and went through the temple gate, into the main chamber with Hanuman, the monkey god who is holy for saving the god Rama’s wife from the evil demon Ravana. We did the circle of the temple and looked at the various idols of deities, as well as the large Shiva linga being washed with holy water. We then left the temple and got henna painted our our hands (mendhi) and feet (except Sherry). Chilaryji got to bargain in Hindi for the first time, and we got badgered for a while by a few beggars while we waited for the henna to dry to we could head to lunch. In spite of it being morning, the plaza was still crowded and had a lot of vendors out there. Sherry was particularly popular with local kids and beggars, they can tell she’s “surprisingly loaded” and a big softie. We left the increasing heat to go eat masala dosas in the yummy South Indian restaurant near our hotel, then went to our first Bollywood movie in India, where we first discovered that Krys’ calculator was a weapon of some kind. We saw “Bhootnath”, a movie about a little kid who befriends a ghost…. And who knows what else. It had a couple fun songs and dances, but sadly no romance. Afterwards we headed back to the hotel, ate in the restaurant downstairs, and then some of us went to have a cocktail in the hotel bar, where we discovered alcohol has three sin taxes on it… needless to say that was the last cocktail we’ve had. We crashed early to get ready for the Agra trip in the morning. Sherry had earlier proved herself an expert travel planner and negotiator when she found a private car to Agra for much less than the expensive car the hotel wanted to book for us.