Monday, May 16-- Trip to Aurangabad

1st order of business—> Happy Bday Dad! <3 I hope you got the card from the boys and I! 

Our day was scheduled to begin promptly at 5am. As we met in the main house, we sat around and waited for the bus to arrive as we munched on some toast, omelets, and fruit and read books, played on phones, and groggily talked to others in the room. After almost an hour of waiting we get the memo that our bus was in Pune (about 2.5-3 hours minimum) away from Walchandnagar where we were located…. Thankfully the beautiful sunrise we witnessed made up for the disappointing start to our travels. 

When the bus arrives, it’s a huge coach style bus! I think there were 34 or 35 seats and there is only 14 SWE people on the trip. Guess what guys, I was able to do the math and determine we could all have our own row of two seats to ourselves if we wanted, thanks engineering! lol Our drive was long and bumpy-> man I thought Ann Arbor had some rough roads and bad pothole…consider my perception forever changed! Maybe the Detroit car companies should consider making a trip to India to scan and model the roads here so that they can over-design and have wonderful cars that perform well in the smaller potholes in the US. Thankfully, many of us did get a chance to catch up on some rest on the bus and a few of us were even able to finish books they were reading (don’t ask me how they managed to read with the amount our bus bounced). Also, never have I ever been on a bus with as annoying of horn. This is actually a problem when in India because the horn is literally used every time that the vehicle passes and that is very frequently in our case! In the words of a Kathy, “the horn is like a regular horn having seizures repeatedly”. I have a recording but I’m not sure if it will do justice. Listen here. Unfortunately the delay in departure meant that we didn’t arrive to our hotel in Aurangabad until 5:45pm. After checking in we did get a chance to do some brief sightseeing before dark. We visited the “Mini Taj Mahal” in Aurangabad. Our tour guide was telling us how much of a bad imitation this structure is in comparison to the real Taj, but the interesting thing is when you haven’t seen the real things, the “mini” or “bad” Taj still seems very impressive. Also the trend seems to continue. I don’t think we’ve been to an attraction yet that at least one member of our group hasn’t been asked for a picture with a local. Tonight we were part of a family portrait at the “mini Taj” and this afternoon during our lunch stop at a small shop in the middle of nowhere, we were even asked to be in another photo with a few of the restaurant workers! 

P.S. I'm so excited to finally get to post a picture of someone taking pictures with us, it has been an interesting experience...