{"id":524,"date":"2011-08-04T06:01:13","date_gmt":"2011-08-04T05:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/monsoon-meandering.winchcombe.org\/?p=524"},"modified":"2011-08-31T15:58:15","modified_gmt":"2011-08-31T14:58:15","slug":"our-golden-wedding-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monsoon-meandering.winchcombe.org\/index.php\/posts\/524\/our-golden-wedding-anniversary","title":{"rendered":"Our “Golden” Wedding Anniversary"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The

Golden Temple view from our room's balcony<\/p><\/div>\n

Waking up early after a great night out we had little time to celebrate the start of our 17th wedding anniversary as our train for Amritsar was scheduled to leave at 7:20 a.m.. At that time in the morning any train station that has 16 platforms could seem intimidating but other than the station guard telling me that my e-Ticket wasn’t a real ticket we had no problems: it’s great to be confident in your knowledge of a subject, in this case train tickets, so I put the guard straight and he backed down quite quickly.<\/p>\n

The Shatabdi train we took to Amritsar gets there in under 6 hours and is currently one of the fastest trains on the rail network here. Being only a day train it has plane style seats – although you face backwards to travel – and they serve you with food during the trip.<\/p>\n

Arriving at the much smaller-than-New-Delhi station we went for lunch at the Grand Hotel. Within minutes of the kids opening the menu they were in hysterics:<\/p>\n

\n\"Strange\n<\/p>\n

We still didn’t know where to stay; the couple of places I’d seen before on the Net weren’t in the guide book but we went to have a look at the first one I remembered, Hotel CJ International. Investigating the rooms I decided to go for the Suite as a surprise for the wife and kids as the room had a partial view of the Golden Temple.<\/p>\n

A quick shower and change of clothes – well for everyone else as I didn’t pack a second set of clothes – and we’re off to the nightly India-Pakistan Border closing ceremony. I’ll describe that truly bizarre experience in another post later.<\/p>\n

We arrive back and the guide I’d arranged, Gurinder Garry was waiting for us. We were all soaked (humidity and sun, not rain) and so the first thing I ask Gurinder to do is to guide to find a new t-shirt. <\/p>\n

So after our second shower in four hours we set off on a heritage walk that takes us to Kesar da Dhaba, a low key restaurant I’ve heard so much about, where we try the famous Dal Fry and many other great and not-so-great dishes. There’s no foreigners here except us and everyone else is eating with their hands so I jump right and try it myself. I managed to eat the Shahi Paneer quite well but the Black Dal Fry was just a bridge too far and it run everywhere.<\/p>\n

Out of the restaurant we walked through the narrow dimly-lit streets before we reached the complex of the Golden Temple. I waited a long time to see and I was a little anxious about whether I’d built up the expectation far too much. I hadn’t…but I’ll save that for another post.<\/p>\n

We spent an hour or so at the temple and then it was back to the hotel for our third showers of the day and a well earned bed.<\/p>\n

\n\"Suite<\/p>\n<\/fb:like><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Waking up early after a great night out we had little time to celebrate the start of our 17th wedding anniversary as our train for Amritsar was scheduled to leave at 7:20 a.m.. At that time in the morning any train station that has 16 platforms could seem intimidating but other than the station guard […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[21,52],"class_list":["post-524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel","tag-amritsar","tag-temples","uentry","postonpage-1","odd","post-author-kev"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monsoon-meandering.winchcombe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monsoon-meandering.winchcombe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monsoon-meandering.winchcombe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monsoon-meandering.winchcombe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monsoon-meandering.winchcombe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/monsoon-meandering.winchcombe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":881,"href":"https:\/\/monsoon-meandering.winchcombe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions\/881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monsoon-meandering.winchcombe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monsoon-meandering.winchcombe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monsoon-meandering.winchcombe.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}