Amritsar - Jallianwala Bagh and Pakistan Border Ceremony

We arrived in Amritsar. As usual, we decided to walk to our desired Lonely Planet hotel, and took a couple wrong turns along the way, making for a very long 1.5-km walk. Though we can blame the difficulty finding the place on the construction that we tried to go around instead of walking through. Silly us, we must have forgotten that we were in India. And then when we got there, there didn't seem to be any other hotels nearby to price compare with (in hindsight this was only because of our direction of approach), but we managed to get a decent price anyway. Up until we met that Asian-American couple in Udaipur who explained hotels to us, we thought there had just been a decent bit of price inflation (like 50%-100%), but now that we know how it works we can generally get the Lonely Planet rate, or sometimes, like today, do better.

From Drop Box

After checking in, we walked to the Old City for lunch. We saw paneer tikka masala on the menu for the first time and decided to try it (very spicy) and also decided on some good old palak paneer, which we haven't ordered since Bharatpur. The palak paneer was basically just like back home... which seems to be a source of disappointment at this point, at least to Mary.

After lunch we booked a shared taxi for the Pakistan border ceremony. With a little time to kill, we wandered into the Jallianwala Bagh, a park commemorating the Indians killed by the British military here in 1919. It's a beautiful park now, but you can see the bullet holes in the walls in several places. For those who've seen the Ghandi movie, it's *that* massacre. It was a moving place to visit.

From Drop Box

In the afternoon, we grabbed a shared taxi out to the Pakistan border to see the elaborate ceremony and pre-ceremony. Josh in real time: India has really packed the stands and they are playing music and running flags. The music picks up and now women are dancing in the road. Instant dance party at the border. There are probably 50 women and girls dancing now. I can't tell what Pakistan is doing, but there are fewer people and I can hear music, but the crowd is less animated. Overall the feel is more that of a sports game than anything else. As the guidebook says, it's like a page out of the Ministry of Silly Walks.

From Drop Box

From Drop Box

Pizza for dinner, and apparently Josh can't count to 4, and thus secured the greater 'half' of the pizza for himself. So Mary needed dessert. Bed is comfy, which is more than can be said for the train. Night all.