Meeting of the Indian Council

Last night all three of us get together for an official meeting, with me as their president (since the president of Indian right now is a woman, Pratibha Patil) and supreme ruler of awesomeness. Can I just off handedly say that it is going to be amazing have not just one, but THREE boys to boss around and get to do my bidding on this trip!

So the meeting convened with beers and buffalo chicken pizza (very indian, I know). First order of business was to finish the visa dance, and we did it all together! We put all the pieces together (giggled a lot at each others passport pictures), dotted all the i's, signed by the X's, etc. Stuffed them all in one envelope, with our precious passports and Bryan shipped them out UPS today (yeah Bryan! Thanks for dealing with all the shippings stuff!).

So after that was done, all the real fun began. Where do want to go? What do we want to do? What do people like to see? Cities? Temples? Camels? How long do we spend in the North verses the South? So many fun things for me to ponder. So we discussed and debated, argued, flipped through guide books and in general had a pretty informative time. We kind of, sort of got somewhere. Here are the places we MUST go:

Delhi (DUH! we are flying into there)
Jodhpur
Agra (The Taj!)
Varanasi
Bombay

Most of these are in the northern part of India, and that is where most of the cities are, and the more spectacular architecture. I requested that we spend a day outside of the major cities, in a smaller town, or near a temple or possibly a UNESCO site (you should totally not ignore that link, there are lots of things to learn there!). So we may travel around the north, city to city and seeing all the really famous things and the grand culture of the Sultans and Rajas. In the south however, we may simply fly in to Chennai (Madras) and hope our way smaller town to smaller town over to Bombay. I really like that idea a lot, but Chris sounds like he wants to travel the big towns more. We will see.

We are planning on meeting again before we go, after I get back from Seattle, and we will make some more finalized decisions then. We want to have any plane flights with in India, books before we get there. Right now however, we have gotten the really panicky stuff done, and so I am going to take a few days off to digest all the information.