Delhi Belly Strikes – Even CPH Students Are Not Immune

Meagan and I are currently spending the second evening in a row alone in our hotel room; resting, recovering, timing out when to take various doses of medication, trying to stay hydrated—and taking turns in the bathroom. We truly thought we had managed to avoid sickness almost completely on this trip… until yesterday morning. Meagan started feeling sick first, and I stayed in our room with her not wanting to leave her alone. At first I was actually a little relieved to have a mini break in our non-stop schedule since arriving in India. But about 4-6 hours after she presented with her initial symptoms, they started hitting me. Luckily, our professors and all the other students were very supportive and helpful to us last night and we did sleep soundly through the night, even getting up this morning, going over to IRRAD with the group, and thinking we were on the mend. Unfortunately, that was not the case, because after about 20 minutes at IRRAD nausea had overtaken me again, and I had to run to the restroom. Our professors called a car to drive us back to the hotel where we have been resting ever since. After sleeping all day, and my antibiotics beginning to finally kick in, I am feeling MUCH better right now. Delhi belly, a more polite and very commonly used expression among travelers to India, struck nearly everyone in our group at some point on this trip. Yesterday, we were among the 4 total students in our group who were sick.

Well, since I wrote about such unpleasant subject matter, I thought it was best I leave you with some beautiful pictures from our last weekend trip to Jaipur and Agra. The palace that is in the middle of the lake, and looks like its floating, is the lake palace in Jaipur. It was originally built by a king for fishing and bird watching, and currently is under renovation to be an expensive hotel and resort. The (semi) group photo was at the City Palace in Jaipur, near by the Observatory, where the world’s largest sundial is located (third photo).

The last two are more photos of the Taj Mahal, which was a tomb (not a palace as commonly thought) built by a Mughal emporer king for his third (and favorite) wife when she died during childbirth. The close up photo shows some of the semi-precious stone design inlayed in the weather proof marble of which the Taj is built. The Taj is both magnificent but eerie, because the king killed many of the 20,000 workers he hired to construct the tomb upon its completion—so that no one could ever build an exact replicate.