 _Although India is covered with a veil of faults, it's true beauty is sparkling and magical. We leave in two days for Uganda and I am sad as well as happy. But I have come to the conclusion that I am coming back no matter what my relatives say. Wonder why? I can tell you without thinking.
India is beautiful. When I come again I'm probably only going to travel in Ragasthan, Kashmir and the Himalayas. Pretty much all the cold places. I'd rather be cold then hot because when I was hot in Kerala and Tamil Nadu there was nothing that I could use to cool me down. In the cold places, I can still bundle up really well.There is a possibility that I'll go back to the Kerala backwaters, possibly go on a house boat but I actually think I'd rather be in Pushkar.
Birch wants to come back because . . .
 _Yes indeed, the Pearl Palace Heritage is even more amazing than the Pearl Palace! It is located inside a gated community. I thought the hotel was a castle when I rounded the corner. Everything is hand carved, and all the stone is from India. Our room has a castle carved into the wall and it's so pretty! Truly amazing! Each room is different, and I peeked into a suite that was being cleaned... Beautiful! Actually, this lives up to a 'Palace', far beyond the normal Pearl Palace. But no restaurant beats the Peacock, even though the Pearl Palace Heritage has far better room-service.
-Allie
 _An employee, named Rakesh, at the hotel we're staying at invited our family to his nephew's wedding. We'd been to one back in Kerala while staying at Green Palm Homes but it hadn't been a truly traditional Indian wedding, it was a little more modern. It was a Christian ceremony, with Indian traditions mixed into it.
We got ready and a taxi picked us up, driving us to a small village called Pisagan. There we were dropped off at the grooms house and introduced to a guy named Stewart from Australia. We ate lunch there. We hadn't planned on that since we'd purposely fasted in case the toilets weren't as clean as we'd hoped.
The meal consisted of . . .
 There are lots of modes of road transportation in India, and as far as I know we've traveled by most of them. So let me explain my expierences...
Bicycle Rickshaws:
Bike rickshaws are probably my favorite way of transportation, although we can only ride them for short distances. In Agra we hired two teenaged boys, Bobby and Laloo to take us to dinner and such. Sometimes we'd ask them to bring us to their favorite restaurants, and then they'd get a free dinner.
Buses:
Buses are a great, cheap way to move around, as long as . . .
 __There is a certain alley in Pushkar where all the fried food is and there are at least ten dogs there begging for food. They are all starving, and there was one that just made me ache when I saw it. It was just a couple weeks old, and you could see his ribs. One day he couldn't stand up, and the next day he had disappeared. A lot of dogs fight and one time a dog was biting a puppy at his throat declaring himself the Alpha Dog. The puppy stumbled away, slightly hurt, but in good shape compared to some of the others.
On the bus today . . .
 _Laura's Cafe is my favorite place to eat in Pushkar. Laura was a young women from Vancouver, who came to Pushkar and started a Cafe with some Indian guys. She left and now Bharat runs it with his brother and a chef. Laura taught the chef to cook Western food and the french toast he prepares is absolutely amazing! It has yoghurt and bananas on top with a saucer of syrup on the side! And the pancakes are real - all over Pushkar they serve flavourless crepe dough with several peices of banana on top, but these are actually fluffy with a bowl of fruit and syrup! At dinner we can watch a movie in the movie room, and have pizza! I like the tropicana pizza the best along with tri-caloria. Bharat and his brother, Prasad are really nice and the retaurant is decorated really nicely!
-Allie
 _Cows are literally holy in the Hindu religion. I'm pretty sure that's where the expression 'Holy cow' came from or maybe the only thing the person could think of at the time was cows. Who knows? Anyway, in India there is a special breed of cow. It has a lump at the base of it's neck, and once I touched it and it felt like it was mostly cartilage. Like the cow equivalent to a shark's fin. Cow's are not only holy to Hindus, but to tourists too. If it weren't for the cows, all the cities would be garbage dumpsters. The only food for the cows are the garbage, and many get REALLY fat from it. Or maybe they just got disgestive problems from the germs. Who knows?
-Allie
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 _In India there are millions of exotic fruits, yet my favorite is the guava and banana. Keep in mind that I haven't tried all of them but so far I like guava and banana best. I've already elabarated on bananas, yet guavas have been left unexplained.
Guavas have (fortunately) a peel, and they look like an unappealing green tennis ball at a glance. We discovered their delicious taste when a fruit seller cut one for us when we bought bananas to feed to the monkeys. They have a squishy bit in the middle that is incredibly sweet, and then a crunchy part on the outside. I only eat the sweet part since I have a loose tooth and have to be careful when chewing and it's easier to squish the soft part on the bridge of my mouth rather than crunch down hard. Was that too much detail?
-Allie
 __At the Hotel Everest in Pushkar, our room is on the roof, along with the restaurant. Every morning when we are ready to go out for breakfast, I love to take pictures of the monkeys. At first I thought they were the cutest things ever, and I still think that, but I now have a diffrent perspective.
One day we were walking by the holy lake and a male monkey, about as big as a standard poodle, galloped up to me. At first I thought it was going to go past me, but just to make sure I stepped aside unfortunately a little too late. It lunged at me and tried to grab my new shoes. It ended up ripping the bag that held my guavas! I was trembling for such a long time afterward!
Then there was a time at Amber Fort back in Jaipur when the monkey jumped at Birch. He was taking pictures at a safe distance, but . . .
 __We left Agra and headed for Pushkar, a small holy town. It was built around a holy lake which is in the centre of the town and it is mostly a Hindu population. We stayed at three different hotels, the first two were very dirty. I did all my shopping here so now I have no worries about who I have a present for and who I don't. We shipped all the stuff home which cost more than everything in the package! They sew the package up with cloth because paper is so rare here. On the bus I saw a really fancy hotel, but the outside was made of wood! I was like, 'Oh ya, what a waste!' It reminded me of a lodge, really rustic! But then I remembered that wood is like gold here, so it would literally be like building a hotel made of gold in Canada! So high-end!
Anyway, I'm getting off track. We climbed two mountains in Pushkar - scratch that, hills compared to Canada. At the top of . . .
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