The Face of India

Today was just a chance to relax and recharge our batteries which we needed. We did manage to quickly visit the local Muslim mosque in Agra where we ran into some local school girls who approached us in hopes of scoring some pens and oddly enough...........hand lotion???? The only thing we could offer was a pen that Belle had and they happily snatched it up. We found out that they were all sisters and I think I got the one picture which I will post on www.flickr.com (username="DELHIBELLY'06") when I have a chance which I will call "The Face of India". One of the things that make this trip like the one in Nepal very special is the children that you run into.

You see so much poverty and despair around you that you start getting a little depressed but then you meet the kids like we did at the mosque today and you see the innocence, hope and Life in their eyes. This is the future of India so you hope the optimism you see in their eyes translates to a better future for this country. After, we were taken by our rickshaw driver who by the way is only 15 years old and who probably works harder in a week than all of us combined for a year, to a jewellery shop which I thought we were going to stop in and take a quick look.....WRONG.......it appears that Belle has an infatuation with silver so we must have spent at least a couple of hours as she worked away the rupees on a couple of items she had her eyes on.

You could definitely tell that she has done this before as more than a couple of times the vendor looked at me with that exasperated "are you kidding me" smile and probably in hopes of me saving him. The vendor's name is Raju and we found out that he also had a restaurant next door so we decided to have dinner there that night(hopefully no dancing). We started talking and he told us that he is fluent in spanish and he takes annual trips to Spain and his scheme is that he wears on ring on each finger(customs cannot do anything about this) and by the time his trip is over, not only is it paid for but he has made a lot of extra cash on the side by selling all of his rings.