Jo and Dave's Blog: The First Flock Touches Down!

Where are we now?

View Where are we now? in a larger map Jo, Annie, Miles and I are living in Northport, Alabama and working at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. We've been glad to be in one place for a bit after what appeared to be semi-permanently traveling (in actuality for a period of 2.5 years).We started this blog to catalogue some of the adventures when Jo and I were sequentially conducting our dissertation research in India and Brazil. While we've fallen off the blogging bandwagon somewhat during recent trips to Brazil, we're trying to pick it up again now that we're back in India!

Friday, March 18, 2011

The First Flock Touches Down!

This last week we welcomed Dave and Gail Weaver as our first family guests to come through Delhi! Their visit was long in the making on numerous levels.First, has been almost 10 years since Jo first came to India, and she has been working on them, slowly and incessantly, trying to get them to hop across the pond. Their visit was also long in the making as we've been sending various brown boxes of items from Amazon that we can't get here in India. The unpacking of that suitcase was a gatorade, coffee, clothes, quilt, and music filled long awaited and slightly belated Christmas.

What is that small quilt in the above picture? No, it's not for an Elf, but for our baby! Yes, that's right, for those of you who haven't heard yet, we are having a baby!!! More on that all later, but the basics are that the baby will be born here in Delhi in late August.

With only two days in the environs of Delhi we high tailed it to Lodhi gardens, and then down to Agra to see the Taj Mahal.

Our trip to Agra was....rapid. Ask Dave for several other adverbs and adjectives that we could apply...with not a ton of time we hired a driver and car (with AC!) for the 8 hour round-trip drive to Agra. Even with an AC car, however, the 4 hour trip was pretty intense: the distance is less than 120 miles and so given the nice quality of the roads should have taken around half the time, however in India even on the highways one will find camels, elephants, cycle/autorickshaws, and all other manners of controlled insanity...leaving Dave and Gail to both feel a little exasperated.

Having been to the Taj several times previously, I knew that it is an absolute madhouse, making the drive down look peaceful, and so wanted to provide a slightly more peaceful introduction to its beauty. We went first to the Megtab gardens that are directly across the river from the Taj, providing a serene and beautiful view of the mausoleum.