I wrote this awhile ago but never finished... I suppose I'll post it for now and finish later 
I just returned 2 days ago from a 2 week trip to India and Bangladesh. This was an incredible experience for me and I am really glad I made the time to go there.
I experienced some really amazing and wonderful things...
When we arrived in India, the first thing that we experienced was the heat and the crazy driving that they do there. There is no point to the lane markings--nobody follows them. There is a constant cacaphony of honking as you drive down the road. You're sharing with pedestrians, bicyclists, scooters, auto-rickshaws, bicycle-rickshaws, semi-trucks, busses, and yes, even cows.
The next thing that struck us was the poverty that surrounded us everywhere where we looked. As we pulled up towards the hotel in Karol Bagh, a beggar woman with an infant came up to the car and started begging us for money to feed the child. The baby had no clothes, and had a rash on it's bottom. It was really heart breaking and a little scary, especially since I didn't expect that kind of aggression in their tactics. In North America, people are pretty passive... they will hold signs up or put a hat on the ground. Very rarely will they approach you and I've never seen any who will knock on the car windows.
In India, the highlight of the trip was to see the Taj Mahal. We took a million shots in and around the Taj... it is truly stunning. We got up at the crack of dawn to catch the Taj with fewer tourists around. Since June is the low season for tourism in India, there were even fewer than there normally are.
There were a ton of false tour guides and children selling trinkets around the Taj... as well as every other tourist spot we went to. We got had by 1 of the fake guides at the Sikandra tomb, even after being warned by our driver. I suppose I should have seen this coming... what happened was, we had to take our shoes off to go inside the tomb, and then this guy latched onto us by asking "Hey where are you from? Do you know the history here?" I didn't realize it until a few minutes later that he was a fake guide who wanted to get some money from us. At the conclusion of his 15 min tour of the place, he asked for money and after we gave him 50 rupees (about $1), he asked for more. I was annoyed that he was so demanding, so I walked away.
To be continued...
