All the things that have happened since the last time we wrote

And those are a lot of things. Sorry for our negligence. So the weekend after Amritsar we went to Jaipur in the beautiful state of Rajasthan. Before I begin, let me say that you can tell the difference between my posts and Derek's posts because mine are historical...and Derek's are interesting. Jaipur was established in 1727 by Maharaja Jai Singh II as the new capital of Kachwaha dynasty. It has been claimed to be the first planned city in India. I'm not sure what that means; the traffic didn't seem to be any better than any of the other cities we had visited. But we did meet a nice auto driver who acted as our tour guide for the entire day. Some of the places we visited included Amber Fort, Jantar Mantar, Jal Mahal (Water Palace), Surya Temple (otherwise known as the monkey temple) and Chokhi Dhani (otherwise known as Indian Disney Land). Amber Fort (pronounced Ah-mer instead of like the girl's name) was a beautiful Fort up in the mountains. We could have spent hours exploring the miles of walls of Amber Fort. Maharaja Jai Singh II, who created Jantar Mantar, was an astronomer. The site contains the largest sundial in the world as well as a lot of other contraptions that track the orbits of planets and the movements of the stars. It was one of our favorite places. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves for Jal Mahal and Surya Temple. Chokhi Dhani was amazing. It is a really popular tourist attraction for Indian tourists, but not that popular with foreign tourists. There are huge figures of dinosaurs and other scary animals as well as festive statues of people playing instruments and dancing. We went through the Indian version of the Jurassic Park ride, which was a little cave structure with dinosaur sounds playing on loud speakers. When you reach the end of the cave, there is a "life-size" t-rex waiting to greet you and take pictures with you. There were some great traditional dancers as well who got Derek and I to get on stage, and the best part was dinner. Dinner was a traditional Rajasthani meal in which we sat on the floor with a stainless steel tray and bowls. The servers came around putting different curries and breads in our serving tray until we were too full to eat anymore. It was delicious! Ok, enough about Jaipur already. The next weekend we stayed in Delhi to go shopping and run some last minute errands. My goodest Irish friend Richard came to visit us briefly, and then returned to work at his NGO in Kolkatta. Our last week in Delhi was a good one. I had a lot of work to finish with the WHO and Derek took care of all of the things we forgot to do. I think I'll write a separate post about work with the WHO soon, but for now we're in Kerala in the city of Kochin where we visited our first beach in the last two months! We're about to get on a train to Kannur where we'll be meeting some relatives for a few days before returning to Singapore. Home is on the horizon!