The Life And Times Of Kimberly

The hotel we decided to stay in we pretty empty which lead me to believe we could haggle on the super inflated price the man told us. Sean and I did a great job working on the guy and we ended up getting the honeymoon suite, complete with a round bed and satin sheets, for almost half the price he originally quoted. It still makes me laugh to think about that ridiculous round bed with square sheets.

As I mentioned before, Gorakhpur normally doesnt have many tourists so the two of us walking around the streets looking for a restaurant became quite the scene.

When we were in Gorakhpur the first time before heading out to Kushinagar was had a hard time finding a restaurant that looked okay. That proved to be a problem the second time we were there as well. After walking around for a bit we stopped and asked a police officer. We have found that the police officers are very helpful.

One of the officers was convinced every time we said restaurant what we really meant to say was train station. Even after we made eating gestures he still thought we mean train station. This goes to show that they arent use to people actually staying there. Finally another officer mentioned Hotel Shiva (or atleast that is what I heard). They pointed in a general direction and we set out walking. We really had no idea if we were right but we figured we could ask directions as we went.

We stopped a couple times to ask directions and they would tell us to get in a rickshaw. We probably would have done that if we had any smaller bills than 100’s. We just kept walking. Finally we decide we need to stop and get some directions, from a group of police officers.

As we are standing there trying to tell them where we would like to go slowly a group of people start gathering. The police officer gets on his phone to get directions for the rickshaw driver that has stopped, probably hoping to get a good amount for taking us somewhere. As the officer is getting the information the chai boy comes by to give the officers some. Since we are standing there he makes the boy give us some. We are pretty sure that police get free chai.

The officer explains the directions to the rickshaw driver, but we tell the officer that we only have a 100 rupee. So he send somebody to get a change while he takes down all of the drivers information to make sure he only makes up pay 10 rupees. On a side note, if we had negotiated that deal it would have cost us close to 40. Finally after getting our change and the officer saying again a few times about only charging us 10 rupees we are on our way.

The restaurant was good, even they were surprised to see us there. We got lucky again when the front desk guy at the hotel where the restaurant was told the rickshaw driver to only charge us 10 rupees. Clearly in our time in India so far we have been paying way too much for rickshaws. Then again everything is a bit more expensive for foreigners than locals.

The next afternoon we headed to the train station to catch our train to Agra only to find out that it was 5 hours delayed. We are not in a place that has lots of options to hang out in so we ended up at an internet cafe for a bit, a somewhat sketchy restaurant, and then a second restaurant for a drink before heading back to the train station to wait. At this point we had killed almost 4 hours.

Sadly though, when we got to the train station we found out that it was 6 hours late. Which meant more waiting.

We ended in the air conditioned waiting room, that was really just fan conditioned. But it was still a nicer place to wait than out on the platforms. We met some interesting people while we waited.

I was sitting trying to read a newspaper when a man came over and said that the young girls he was with wanted to talk to me. I was happy to talk to them, thinking maybe they wanted to practice their english. What they really wanted to talk about was their spirituality and their belief in a form of yoga. You should check out Sean’s blog he does a good explanation of it.

While the man was talking to Sean and I the girl next to me asks me if I am interested in meditation. I said I didnt know, since I dont know a lot of about it and I am not even sure if I would be interested in it. By me not saying no lead the man to get up and look for a dark quiet room to show me some meditation. Although I didnt realize that was happening. Sean’s reaction to the whole thing was great. He had this horrified look on his face thinking that I was going to go do meditation in a dark room with this strange man.

Clearly I hadnt understood what the man was doing and so when Sean explained what the man wanted to do I tried to nicely tell them I wasnt interested. This made the girl next to me a little upset that I wouldnt even try it. Clearly she didnt understand that it is weird to go in a dark room with a stranger to perform meditation.

After the whole meditation thing the girl started chatting with me about other things such as marriage, cooking, and school while she was doing henna on my hand. It was fun talking to her especially on her views on marriage and the duties of the wife.

After waiting 8 1/2 hours for our train it finally arrived and we were on our way to Agra.

Filed under: Uncategorized on September 11th, 2008