Day 11 in India

From there, we went to Warangal Fort.  The “fort” was more of ruins than an actual fort.  It was incredible to see how detailed the architecture was when the fort was built several hundreds of years ago.  I am always amazed that without modern machinery how much they were able to do.  As much “progress” as we have made in the last century that our architecture is not comparable to what has been built in previous centuries.

After the Warangal fort, we visited the 1,000 Pillar Temple.  The carvings in the stone work at the 1,000 Pillar Temple was so detailed and incredible.  While at the 1,000 Pillar Temple, I was asked several times if someone could take their picture with me.  The most shocking part to me was it was several women, who wore a scarf over the lower portion of their face.  For the picture, the women raised the lower portion over their head so their entire face was exposed for the photograph.  This struck me as odd; but, I was glad that they felt comfortable doing so.

Finally, we were taken to the hotel where we settled in for the night.  At the hotel, I had some work to do on our project but my luggage was in route to the hotel I had to borrow someone’s power source for my laptop.  Then, I learned that to have internet access, I needed to be in the “lobby” which was a small room.  Dinner was served at 8:30pm in the hotel restaurant.  After the day that we had it was nice to have dinner in the same building without having to be transported anywhere.

This hotel the bathroom initially appeared to be part of the closet.  In the bathroom, the shower and toilet were almost adjacent with just a pull around shower curtain to separate them.  It was slightly amusing.

Also, somewhere around 3am, I hear a strange noise.  I stay in bed and be very quiet as I did not want to wake up my roommate.  The noise continued and sounded almost as a celebration.  If I were in the States, I probably would have popped my head outside my room to ask them to be quiet or to see what was going on; however, I was cautious and did not want to cause any trouble.  Apparently, there was some sort of bachelor party going on in one of the rooms across the hall from mine.  If the noise level and time of day is any indicator then the party must have been a success.  Finally, I was able to get a little more sleep prior to our journey back to Hyderabad.

Posted 18 January, 2011, at 0100 local time.