I shouldn’t have watched Lisa write the entry, because now I’m having trouble thinking what to write.

Since our last installment, we spent a bit more time in Shimla up in the Himalayan foothills. We had intended to post some news on Sunday, but the whole town’s commerce shuts down (just like the good ole days in Iowa when I was a youngster). Since then we’ve gone for a couple of hikes in the mountains. Once to Kamna Devi Mandir, a temple to Durga (a form of the goddess who is the appearance of nature and the mother of the universe). It was a nice walk to the base of the “hill” that has the temple at the top, then a wicked uphill to the top. We took off our shoes, stepped inside, tried to chat with a worshipper, and left with the name “Durga” and some prashad, which tasted a bit like peanut butter. (Hopefully the karma that we sullied by not eating the too sweet delicacy was made up for by the alms we earlier gave to some begger-children in the little town of Boileauganj on the way. The sad thing is that they were begging outside of a school that was in session…)

The next day we took another early morning walk down the mountainside to a place called Annandale. The good thing about jet lag is that when you wake up with the Violent Femmes running through your head at 4:30, you can be out walking by 8:00. The road that we walked along seemed almost impossible to drive because of the 30% grade, so we had it to ourselves. A steep walk, it ended at a golf course-cum-helipad (as they say around here) that was a military reserve. So no photography allowed, which was too bad, because it was the most absurd thing I’ve seen recently.

Monday we took the train back down the mountain. Lisa and I enjoyed it much better than the hot trip up, and we had some nice company. The man in the safari suit was a spy, or so we decided after he also had the seats in front of us on the other train to Delhi. He and his wife are professors at Delhi University, and when I got them talking about Hindi, there was a lot of merriment in the seats around us.(Lisa note - merriment resulted when the woman asked Jeff what he could say in Hindi. When he replied “Main hindustani nahi hoon” (I’m not Indian), she got this look like that was the most absurd thing for him to learn as it was quite obvious to everyone that we weren’t Indian).

Yesterday we went to Agra and the Taj Mahal. We had the same Sikh driver for the trip down the highway (that Lisa described) as ferried us about when we first came to Delhi. On the way he again took us to another shop where we could buy various crafty and touristy items, including a beautiful marble Taj Mahal for only 4 lakh rupees (about $9,000).

The highway on the map runs straightish from Delhi through slums, past the ‘burbs — or what passes for them here — and out into the country. As with so many things about India, my expectations were totally off. The reality is that we drove for an hour covering about 5 miles and then about 3-3 1/2 hours more before getting to Agra. Our driver hit a detour and promptly got lost, so we saw all of Agra, fine parts and low. Lisa mentioned a bit about the highway, but she left out the part about the people hanging on the backs of jeeps, riding in wagon carts, and almost tumbling out of rickshaws. Plus women ride side-saddle with kids in tow, amazing!

The Taj was beatiful. It’s made out of marble and changes color with the light. Semiprecious stones are inlaid in its surface. I could go on and on, but I can’t do it justice. Our government approved complimentary guide gave us a nice tour, and — though he didn’t always get our jokes — was a pretty friendly fellow. “Bill Clinton! Good man. Like him very much!” We agreed. “George W. Bush has not come to Taj Mahal.” It’s a pity, we agreed. (Lisa again - many of you may know that the Taj Mahal is this great monument to love as the Shah built it as the tomb of his Persian wife who bore him 14 children. What isn’t as frequently advertised is that he had two other wives, both Indian, and both of whom bore him no children. They got little tiny tombs outside the Taj Mahal grounds. Moral of the story, if you want a humongous mausoleum built, it helps to be Persian and fertile).

After our tour, yet another opportunity for us to part with our money. The things are nice and not exactly expensive, just overpriced and essentially the same. Overpriced and forced upon us.

That’s pretty much a big part of this trip: we’re in a place that is — in all senses of the word — “foreign” to us and seems in many ways disingenuous. We want to go and see things but everyone pulls on us to buy things and go places we don’t want. We could conceivably tell people to just leave us the hell alone, but that would be perpetuating the “ugly American” stereotype. There’s no way to blend in; our whiteness projects. Plus there’s no way to escape our differentness. C’est la vie.

Tomorrow we’re off to Rajasthan. A monsoon blew in as we came down the mountain on Monday, dropping the temperature from 115 degrees to 85 or 90 in Delhi, but I expect it will still be hot in the desert.

We’ll keep you posted.