Walking Tour

India is beautiful.

Sure, there are plenty of issues, plenty of unpleasant, plenty of "What in the world?" moments.

But India is beautiful.

On Wednesday we all got to go on a 3 hour walking tour of an old part of the city. (Kyle stayed home with the kids so that I could go with everyone!) We headed out bright and early in the morning and took the Metro (my first time!) north to meet Ifte, our tour guide. His company does several tours of different areas of town, but the one that we went on was through one of the really old, native areas of the city. 

It was so fun to obviously be a tourist and not feel bad taking pictures of random things. No trying to fly under the radar on this tour :)

Here are some of the pictures I took of our beautiful city.

A temple built into a tree!

A temple area that's a part of a private family's estate

This area was built w/ these big seating areas to encourage community coming together to talk!

Not sure about you, but our laundry never looks this picturesque

I thought it was funny to have this old elegant building with a bright pink one in the background

 One of the markets we walked through

Ifte bought us traditional sweets from a sweet shop that's been open since the 1800s. This is them weighing flour and sugar in the back.

 One house that we "trespassed" in had this amazing courtyard area (that's as far as we went in, we didn't go into the people's actual house). It was just beautiful.

 Ifte told us that the owner of the house loved the courtyard because it was like his own private piece of the sky.

 And this is my favorite picture I've taken in India so far...maybe one of my favorites I've ever taken:

Just beautiful.

It was so fun to see a different part of the city and hear all of Ifte's stories of people who lived here, histories behind the buildings, and just learn more about the culture and way of life. I had so much fun.

And this wasn't from the tour, this was a picture I took out of our window today, but I think it's just incredible.

This is the building next to us, the wall that borders the roof, and this beautiful flower is growing right up out of the wall. God can bring life out of the hardest of places.