Leaving Delhi to get to Agra took forever, oh my god the traffic was eye-popping...the honking and noise and craziness, but oddly enough no road rage. I guess if you live in a city this congested, you learn to adjust and cope with it. There were some pretty unusual sights to see.
Children selling fresh roses are everywhere. Smart little girls, as soon as they see a camera they hide their faces, they will only let you take their picture if you buy a rose. Kind of hard to buy something when the bus windows don't open. (Yeah, yeah, I know I just finished saying I hate taking pictures from a bus window, but I didn't say I didn't do it, just that I hate it. Insert sheepish grin)
This is a tobacco shop, note the huge grin on the face of the fellow on the right, they want their picture taken, and happily pose for free.
The buildings seem a tad wonky, perhaps that is why this one wasn't finished?
Not sure what this is, but I didn't want to get "scaned" so I stayed on the other side of the road.
Finally we arrived at the Taj Mahal. It was quite extraordinary to see, although it's not anywhere that I have always yearned to visit, so it wasn't overwhelming or emotional for me. I felt like I was trudging along, sort of like this:
I was sort of surprised at how many monkeys were on the grounds. This fellow just looks exhausted.
It was crowded, but not as jam-packed as I had expected, funny thing though, you know how we like to take pictures of other foreign people in the clothes of their culture? Well, I've never seen so many people who think that we are the exotic ones and want to have their picture taken with us! Even in Africa I didn't find this. If we sat for a rest, there were literally families and families who wanted us to hold their children, or sit by their wives and have our picture taken with them. It was very strange.
Sometimes it was really hard to get away.
This little one wanted to show us her pretty shoes. She was too afraid to actually sit with us though.
After the Taj Mahal we had to go to a marble cutting/inlay/polishing demonstration and then of course they herd you into their shop to purchase. Their shop is, of course, the best and the cheapest in all of India. I'll say, the art of cutting the gemstones and doing the inlay into marble was pretty amazing, but they insisted that everything was totally handmade by the small group of men in the family business. So. There were well over 8,000 pieces in the store, from huge tables to small trinkets, but there is no earthy way that all these items are hand made. A normal plate-size item takes about a week. They obviously have a machine of some sort somewhere. I did not fall off the proverbial turnip truck.
On to better stories and pictures!
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