Taj Mahal - One down, six to go

Coming home from work a Saturday night, being really tired from a hard week of work and reflections about the coming year wishing for everything except having to be social, planning to just eat, relax, eat some chocolate and maybe read a book - I get the question from my two new Australian house mates if I wanted to follow to Agra to see Taj Mahal. I was thinking, sure that could be interesting, and asked when they were going. The answer was just pack your bags and we leave after dinner. The instict was a big resounding nooooooooooo, but for some reason I answered OK let's go! Thanks Steve and Nick for getting me back to my senses to start exploring things outside work again! =)

Off we went in a bus that arrived early morning even before the gates opened. Fortunately we found an open café that were proud to anounce which items on the menu that were recommended in Lonely Planet. Then we spent the rest of the day exploring Taj Mahal and Agra Fort before we had to take the bus home again. So, now I have ticked one of the new seven wonders of the world of the list and only have six to go!

Line to Taj Mahal 6.30 in the morning

One of the gates of entry

Taj Mahal itself

Taj Mahal and... me! :)

Inside Agra Fort

Inside Agra Fort

On the way home I had ran out of money and went off to find an ATM while waiting for the bus to arrive. Apparently the man who was so confident about the directions to the ATM was wrong, so there was no ATM to be found. I found some kids on the way home though who thought it would be a good idea to start a wet handkerchief war with the foreigner passing by. It really made my day since they were so happy and seemed to feel so special that I gave them my attention. They all seemed to want to become Bollywood movie stars, so we made sure to make a video.

Happy kids 1

Happy kids 2

What happened at work recently is that we hired a new staff member called Ashok. Since I earlier submitted some suggestions on how to improve the training of new staff members I ended up with the great honor to be responsible for his introduction. He seems to be a smart and proactive guy, coming up with many tricky questions putting me to test! I also made an effort to once and for all get rid of my frustrations of not having all the very detailed and specific technical information about our whole product range, so I spent a whole day going through all our documents and catalogues and ended up writing a four pages long document with questions that I sent to our manufacturing facilities! They will probably hate me for it but it felt awesome! =)

I and my colleague Amit also went for getting our hair cut. We went to this small back alley place who charged us 40 rupees (60 euro cent, 7 SEK) for getting the job done!

The result, shot 15 cm in front of our noses...

The applications to the AIESEC International team also came out, and I spent quite some time talking to different people in order to increase my understanding of the current state of the organization. Big thanks to everyone who took the time to help me with it!