"You, Slow Come!!"

OK, I'm going to have to cut the cute song-titles to my blog posts in the interest of time for now. I've been incredibly busy at work and this site has been down. So I'm quite behind!

Sunday as I mentioned earlier I went to work for a few hours. The rest of our friends were sunning themselves at the Taj Krishna pool, so I was not too happy to be in the office. Luckily, I only worked for a few hours, and then Kathryn and I went to meet up with Emre, Paula and H. We headed to Golconda Fort - it is MASSIVE and about 500 years old (I wasn't paying that close of attention!). The outside perimeter of the fort was 7K (almost 5mi). Once we walked in, this little Indian dude offered to give us a tour - we did not know what we were in for! He walked SO fast because he wanted to get the tour done before this light show that started at 7pm. Of course we all kind of wanted to idle around and take photos, not run up and down stairs. So he kept yelling "Please come!" and when it was dangerous/steep/crumbling rock/dark he would yell "Slow come! Please, slow come!" Pretty funny. It was dusk when we arrived to the fort, so we started doing some of our tour in the dark. I saw our guide walking up 3 steps into a very dark chamber and thought....no way. "You!" He called to me. "Slow come! Three steps." I couldn't see a thing, but I could hear bats, lots of bats screeching and flapping around not too far from me! I put my jacket over my head and ran through to get to the other side. Emre followed me, but everyone else was too scared (or not as stupid as we were) and found another way around.

At 7pm, our tour was over and we were ready for the light show. It took place in this big stone courtyard and started 30 min late due to the electricity going out (I told you it is a problem!) A narrator with a deep, stately Indian accent told the story of Golconda fort, how it was built, how it was the center of this Golconda city, which one day was named Hyderabad instead. Other parts of the story were told with different voices and lights all around us. My favorite part was they showed a light projection of a giant diamond and asked "Have you heard of diamonds?" to which the other voices said "Yes, we've heard of them!" The narrator said that there was one huge diamond which used to be part of Golconda, but it was taken by the Brits and is now part of the crown jewels. All of us were so tired and the show was quite long, and the air outside was quite comfortable so...we all fell asleep at some point! Oh well.

After the fort we headed to Fusion 9, a restaurant that serves many different types of food. It was nice to have chicken as I've been mostly veg since I've been here. Again, we couldn't really talk during dinner, only eat because we were so hungry and tired! The highlight of the meal was the "sizzling brownie," a brownie served in a skillet with chocolate sauce and ice cream. Since I'm not eating very much here (or often) things like this are really exciting!

Fortunately Monday we had another event with good food...pictures of the fort to come, by the way.