UP Trip - Day 2 Brindavan - Agra- Mathura.

Before the main blof, 

On the second day, I got up early walked a bit near our place of stay. It felt good that I was walking the streets where Krishna had walked. Even took some of the sand from there and smeared on my forehead. It was very cold early in the morning, and I managed to find a tea vendor. But he and his wife had to make tea from scratch which meant it would take more time than a regular tea shop. But no sooner did she start making the tea, some other customers appeared and lined up and even got their tea before I did.

Second day onwards we realized that our place of stay is attached to a resort and hence we could order our food from the resort waiters who were walking around, and we could get resort-quality food and service. For the second day, we headed to Prem Mandir again having failed to make it inside on the previous day evening due to the crowd. This time, we could enter easily, and the temple was good. It was big, spacious and had a big sculpture depicting the Govardhana Giri leela of Krishna. The whole experience was good.

We thought of visiting the ISKCON temple in Brindavan but later dropped the idea in order to visit other places since we thought ISKCON temples would look the same everywhere.

This time we found a high-quality food-court called Bikanervala near Prem Mandir and had good food there. From there we headed straight to the Taj Mahal. It was only the second time I was visiting Taj Mahal in my whole life and the first time for Rishabh. We hired a guide to explain the details to us. Rishabh was not too impressed with Taj Mahal and felt it "overrated". But I liked it nevertheless. During my first trip to the Taj just after completing college, we had gone to the main building where the tomb of Mumtaz was. But this time due to time constraints and lack of interest from the family and the guide, we did not go to the main building which had the tomb part.

My colleague late Udaya Kumar who had worked in NCR for a few years once made an interesting point that we should not visit Mathura temple after visiting the Taj since one should not go to a temple straight after visiting a tomb. That way, it was good that we skipped the tomb since the next planned stop was the Mathura temple, which is a standard stop for the tourists.

It was a good experience to have the darshan in the Mathura Krishna temple and see the people dancing and celebrating in front of the main deity. In this temple, the gents and the ladies had to go through separate entrances and security checks because of which we got separated from the ladies of our family and we had the entire visit separately and finally met at the entrance only. Since it was night, we could not see in detail the prison where the Lord was born.

The ladies in our family had a bad experience with one of the lady police officers at the entrance treating them rudely during the checking process.

When we came back to the room it was very cold but we managed to sleep just with our Rajais.