January 25 – 12:15PM – Agra.

Sitting, once again, on a rooftop café looking at the Taj off in the distance. Over the rooftops the building looks striking, but our tour inside the building and around the grounds today was something that I will remember forever. To have any of my words do any justice to the experience itself would be futile. It is definitely one of those things that you have to see with your own eyes to truly know. We planned to have the Taj as the climax to our trip and it definitely has been a marking point over the last two weeks as well as a marker in life. The 23 hour train ride and crappy hotel in a mostly crappy town is by far worth it and I’m no Robert Frost but the Taj is more than a beautiful ring on the very dirty hand of Agra.


We took all the requisite photos of ourselves around the building (seems like too inferior of a word, building), standing together, standing separate, from the right side, from the left, with sunglasses on, sunglasses off and then just sat at a distance and contemplated the architecture and beauty of the white marble building.
Here’s a little history and info about the Taj. First off, while it looks like a palace, it is actually a tomb. The Shah Jahan, who also founded the city of Delhi, built the Taj as a final resting place for his favorite wife, Empress Mumtaz Mahal, who was one of his many wives and concubines, but, as try I said, his favorite. She died giving birth to his, well he had many wives, so more accurately, her 14th child. The name Taj Mahal is a shortening of her first name down to the last three letters, Taz, and then of course Mahal, her last. It took 20,000 men over 20 years to build the Taj in 1632. Upon Shah Jahan's death, he was entombed next to his favorite wife in the buildings mausoleum. And you can thank Rough Guides for that history lesson.

We are moving on to Delhi by train at 2:00PM today. Tomorrow is Republic Day in Delhi, in all of India actually, sort of a 4th of July type holiday here I guess, so we will be there for that. Party.

I also just remembered a funny occurrence that Kevin told me he experienced yesterday while checking into the hotel. Kevin was finalizing the formalities of check in with the hotel front desk guy when the guy handed him the room key and started telling Kevin all of the things that came with the room. It went something like this, “Mr. Kevin, we provide soap, toilet paper, towel and bird seed.” Kevin said, “Uh, alright, I could be into feeding some birds.” But then the desk guy said, “Oh woops, sorry, my English not so good. Bed sheets not bird seed.” Funny stuff, maybe you had to be there. One thing that might have been useful in Agra was some monkey repellent. We didn’t have any encounters, but yesterday a waiter gave us a “monkey bat” in case monkeys tried to attack our dinner or something. Alright, that’s it for now.