Amritsar

It is with much sadness I drink a final pitcher of beer and munch on my final plate of peanute masala in Amritsar. This location has been an unsuspecting highlight of the trip. With bellies extremely full from a few days of eating food that has been out-of-this-world, we wait to board an overnight bus back to Delhi. There we get picked up by a driver who will take us to our final destination, the Taj Mahal in Agra. What is to not like of a city that has good food, friendly people, great sites, and a bed that has magical powers where you sleep like a log? Our visit started off a bit slow. Due to heavy fog our train was late getting in. We were pretty tired by the ride and I think we both felt a bit off kilter being in new surroundings. We had a great dinner and fell fast asleep, sleeping in until 10:30 the next day. We had just gotten accustomed to our surroundings in Rajasthan. While each city was very different, there was an undercurrent of Rajasthan that made all of the places a bit similar. A theme of old dynasties, exquisite service, poverty, cow poo, rural country sides, and of course a huge fort. Amritsar, a Punjab city has none of this. For all intense and purposes it is a fairly normal city. It even has a mall. Celebrations Mall. We went there today, curious what an Indian mall entailed. They do a lot of things well, malls might not be one of them. It was an incredible shift of worlds though. Before going to the mall we spent some time wandering through the old city trying to find a well known restaurant called Kesar Da Daba. We got lost along the way and needed to ask for some directions a few times. Fortunately it is a well known restaurant so everyone could point us in the right direction. This restaurant has been in the family for a few hundred years. The restaurant has two parts. There is a room where you eat. The tables and walls look like the restaurant has been around for a few hundred years. Next door is the kitchen. Men sit on benches, leaning against the wall looking out on the street. Huge pots sit in front of them. This is where they cooked up all our fabulous food. I've used this in a previous blog post but the food tasted like a few hundred years of perfection. It was so so so good. All washed down with a huge glass of lassi thick enough we needed spoons. I would have loved to stay to enjoy the atmosphere but it was getting busy and people started hovering over our table when it looked like we were near completion. Then we jumped in an auto-rickshaw and went to the mall. We had a few hours to kill so we bought tickets for the latest Mission Impossible movie. It was dusk when we got out of the movie theatre. I waited for Dave as he collected our camera batteries from security. We had 3 security checks before getting into the theatre. We had to leave our camera batteries with a "coat check-like" man. I suppose this is their attempt to prevent piroting movies. I was feeling skeptical about getting an auto-rickshaw back to the hotel because the mall was a bit out of town. There was one right outside the mall so we headed straight for him, only to find out he had been booked! I immediately thought of our life in Singapore and taxi bookings through our iphone apps and I wondered how one goes about booking an auto-rickshaw. Same same but different I guess. The driver was kind enough to wave down another auto-rickshaw for us. This benefited us in two ways. One, we got a ride. And two, I think we tend to get a better price when a local flags us a ride. This reminds of me of the situation last night. A well-known restaurant called Makhan had evaded us our first night. Try as we might we could not find it. We asked our hotel guy to give instructions to an auto-rickshaw driver to get us there. HAH! Within minutes we were surrounded by guys who were more than welcome to take us but had no idea where the restaurant was. So the hotel guy asked the hotel's taxi driver to drop us off on his way home. The taxi driver got us there no problem. We ushered us into the restaurant, barked some orders at people, bowed to us and left. I guess we had been officially handed over in the care of the restaurant. But that was fine because we knew we were in for a great feast. Again, huge pots of deliciousness cooked away at the front of the restaurant. We sat down and the head guy came over and helped us through our order. We got lots of attention just by being there. It was NOT place tourists would find by just wandering around. One guy from another table came wandering up, stuck his hand out and introduced himself as Paul. "Hello Paul, where do you come from?" "I'm fron near here, but live in Abbortsford." Crazy to hear that name from home all the way here in India. We chatted with Paul, and he finished his converation by telling us he would give us our mobile number and if we needed anything he would help us. So we get our food. Again, delicious. Again, the tandoori chicken I could have lived off of and died a happy person. It was that good. It was obviously a drinking place because there were many men with big bottles of whiskey drinking and eating. By the time a family left I was the only woman there. At one point a man got up, alcohol hitting him hard and he walked right into our table. The entire restaurant watched us. Wrong table to bump into I think. He was ushered out. The table to the other side of us told us we should eat at "safe" establishments. Anyway, we eat our food. We tell the owner that we have been in India for 2 weeks and their food was by far the BEST food we have eaten. We get business cards and walk out the entrance. Now we are on a dark road outside of town. We wonder how we are going to get home, and there is Paul! A bit more drunk than the last time we talked, but there he is nonetheless. He helps us get an auto-rickshaw. Helps with instructions about where our hotel is, and off we go. Before Amritsar we had been saying we felt like we had travelled quite "safe" in this trip. We were fortunate that most of the restaurants at our hotels were quite good and so we just chose to eat there. Also we knew we would have a better chance of not getting sick eating at our hotel. I'm happy that (for the most part) we avoided being sick but you do miss out by eating in the tourist run establishments. Amritsar enabled us to get off the tourist track. Every place we ate was either down some alley or in an obscure location, and the food was terrific. And along the way we had a chance to chat with the locals. (Most of the time we needed help finding our way). So what I'm saying is if you have an opportunity to go to Amritsar you SHOULD! Well, I should get going. I have my beer to finish and Dave has left me one more spoonful of peanute masala. We board a bus in a few hours and then we are nearly back to Singapore. Time has gone by so quickly. I am actually surpsied how much I have enjoyed India. Taj Maha here we come.