We took a weekend trip to Mumbai where we visited the Gateway to India. The Gateway was built as a gift for the kind and queen of England when they arrived by boat in India. We took a boat ride from the Gateway to Elephanta Island where we visited ancient caves and did some great shopping!

 

Every once in a while random people come up to us and want to take a picture like we are famous or something! I think they have just never seen a white person before. This has been my favorite celebrity moment yet! I love the guy in the cowboy hat.

 

We went to the club at the Taj hotel on Saturday night. Unfortunately House music is really popular in India so we didn't stay too long. We did meet some Australian Cricket player who were in Mumbai for a big tournament. We later learned that Australia has the best Cricket team in the world...I knew we should have taken pictures with them!

  

See the rest of the Mumbai pictures.

This is the yoga studio I go to. I love it! I didn't know what to do with myself during my first class when everyone started in unison, "OOOOAAAAMMMMMMM..."; now I know when the OAMs are coming so I join in :) HAHA...

 
  

Mahabalipuram was the second place we went this weekend. Its a small beach town about an hour south of Chennai. The hotel that we initially booked was AWFUL! Their website was very misleading and our room was prison like. We went to dinner at a really nice resort called GRT and decided to ask if they had any last minute cancellations. They did! We stayed in a SUPER nice suite and checked out of our first hotel.

See more Mahabalipuram pics here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/anna712/Mahabalipuram

 
 
  

Here are some pictures of my apartment. The pool downstairs is really nice although I haven't used it yet. The apartment looks nice from a distance but there are always little things that don't work right or that we have problems with. For example, last night we were locked out for 45 minutes because our doorknob was broken. I am learning that even the nicest places in India are not 100% perfect:)

See more pictures of the apartment here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/anna712/JayabheriApartment

 
 
  

This weekend I took my first trip in India. Charise, Stacy and I flew to Chennai, took a 3 hour car ride to Pondicherry, spent one night there then took a 2 hour car ride the next to Mahabalipuram. Both towns are on the water and were really nice. Pondicherry was originally settled by the French so there is a lot of French architecture and restaurants there.

This weekend was Gandhi's birthday so there was a staircase leading up to the Gandhi statue so people can walk up there and touch him.

Here are more pics of Pondi:

http://picasaweb.google.com/anna712/Pondicherry02



 

This was the first weekend that I went out siteseeing. We visited the Golconda Fort which protected the king and his 360 queens in the 17th century. Our tour guide was hilarious...he talked about how back then they didn't have phones (oh really?) so they built the fort in a way that they could make use of echos in order to communicate. About every five minutes he would stop, take off his shoes (I don't know why), say 'my friends, come here', and he would clap and yell things so that we could here the echo. We got the point after the first 2 times, but he felt the need to show us all of the different echos throughout the 1.5 hour tour.

See the rest of my pics from the fort here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/anna712/GolcondaFort

Next we went to Charminar which is Hyderabad's landmark in the Old City. The Charminar is a huge 4 tower building in the middle of the city and has a mosque on the second floor. All around the Charminar are bazaars where they sell bangle bracelets, fabrics, food (which I didn't get near) and all kinds of other handicrafts. Little did we know that Ramadan began yesterday, so the Old City was more packed than usual. Trying to cross the streets is like Frogger and pedestrians definitely don't have the right of way!

View my web album to see the rest of my pics from Charminar:

http://picasaweb.google.com/anna712/Charminar

I'll definitley be adding more pics of billboards and signs to this post. There are some pretty funny ones here but hard to capture a picture of because we are usually driving when we see them.

We had an 8 hour layover in Singapore where we took a bus/boat tour of the city. Singapore is super clean and organized so I loved it! We learned that by law every building must be re-painted every five years which is how they keep everything looking nice.

View the rest of my photos from my trip to India here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/anna712/JourneyToIndia