This doggy was free. I woke up Saturday morning, looked outside the window and saw this dog munching on some leftover McDonald’s left on the ground. He wasn’t leashed, and I didn’t see anyone nearby. I put on my coat and went outside to see if he was lost. He didn’t appear to be distraught, as his tail was wagging and he was walking up the street going door to door. He seemed to have caught a scent, as his nose was glued firmly to the ground during his walk. Perhaps he was looking for more McDonald’s.

I followed him up the street, wondering if he would eventually walk to his own house. He walked into the neighbouring townhouse complex and continued his quest for more McDonald’s. To my surprise, he found some a few houses up and devoured the soggy french fries without breaking stride. Impressive. As he wandered around I decided that he didn’t really know where he was going and was just looking for more food. The bell on his collar was full of snow, so I figured he’d been outside for awhile.
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Amritsar is a medium sized city about 30 km from the Indian-Pakistan border. The city had a very peaceful, relaxed feel to it compared to other cities we visited — most likely because Amritsar is home to the Golden Temple, the holiest of temples of the Sikh religion. The Golden Temple is an incredible display of marble and gold, and feels very serene. We stayed at the Hari Darshan hotel, which was clean, served great food and was very reasonably priced, considering we had a (somewhat obstructed) view of the Golden Temple complex from our balcony, and we could hear the hymns and readings from the temple from within our room. See the pictures here.
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Agra was not the first city we visited, and we only stayed there one night. It’s about 4 hours by car, south-east of Delhi. Considering Agra is one of the busiest cities for tourists, we didn’t have any difficulty finding a clean, reasonably priced hotel near the Taj Mahal, the reason we went to Agra. We seemed to be on the “tourist strip”, there were a number of hotels in a short area with a restaurants and a Pizza Hut within walking distance (yes a Pizza Hut, and although they had “masala pizza” on the menu, it was like walking into a Canadian restaurant). Tourism may have been a low this time of year, as the hotel we stayed at dropped their price by almost half without us even haggling. See the pictures here.
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Bahar and I went to India for a month! We arrived in Bombay for a wedding, then visited Delhi, Amritsar, Agra and Jaipur. We saw many temples, forts, palaces and spent time with Bahar’s family in Bombay. I enjoyed our trip, it was great to see the culture and lifestyle of a country vastly different from Canada. There are beautiful temples on every corner, so many historic sites to see, traffic was crazy and grinds cities to a halt, and a Canadian dollar goes a very long way in India. We’re writing about our travels and will publish about each city we visited over the next couple weeks. See the pictures here.

We wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy holidays!

From Bahar, Eric and Butters