Thanksgiving at the Taj

Trip Start Jan 31, 2005

Trip End Mar 30, 2006

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Flag of India Agra, India
Friday, November 25, 2005

We left Rajastan by train, which, like many journeys, had a certain funny component. We arrived at the Bundi train station with only minutes to spare before our train was supposed to leave, only to find that it was running late. We hung out with a French guy we had met at our guesthouse and waited for several minutes. About an hour later, we were happy to see a train pulling in from the right direction. We jumped on, found our seats and the train started rolling. About five minutes later, Allison realized none of us had actually checked if we had gotten on the right train. We showed our tickets to some of the Indian university students around us and they had a good laugh. "Oh, your train was running at least two hours late!" Great. The good thing was that the train we were on was stopping a half hour later at a stop where our real train also would later be stopping. So, we got off at the next stop and spent a few hours being the night's entertainment (no matter what we did in train stations, we always attracted a crowd) while we waited for our real train. It finally arrived, we got on and were on our way to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal and some of India's other biggest tourist attractions.

We arrived early the next morning (Thanksgiving, actually) and headed to a guesthouse we had booked in advance. After spending a few hours recovering from the nearly sleepless train ride, we spent an interesting hour in the Agra post office working to mail home a huge package of stuff we had been carrying around, the obstacle being a customs officer on a power trip.

01 - Carved Pillars at Agra Fort

That finally done, we began a day of unabashed tourism. We first joined the masses at Agra's fort, a massive structure built by the Mughals in their hey-day several hundred years ago. Basically, a massive and beautifully-preserved complex of sandstone and marble buildings with beautiful carvings. Truly royal. We'll load a few photos to give you an idea.

After the fort, we made a stop for lunch and then got in the line for big daddy Taj. We had originally wanted to follow other travelers' advice and visit at dawn, which, for us, would have been Friday morning. But... the Taj Mahal closes each Friday (unknown to us) so it was either see it Thursday afternoon, or don't see it at all. We opted to go. Though it was a terrible time to visit - absolutely crawling with fellow tourists (mainly Indian, actually) - we were glad to have gone. You have to see it with your own eyes to really understand, but its size (photos barely show how enormous it is), color and symmetry make it uniquely beautiful. We were particularly impressed by some of its little details that we didn't know about - for one, the entrance arches to the Taj Mahal and its outer gate are both surrounded by arabic script, which was designed to appear perfectly uniform in size. However, because of the height of both structures, the script at the top is wider than that at the bottom to give the illusion that it is the same width all the way around. Up close, too, the white marble of the building is inlayed with beautiful designs of colored stones. Another interesting thing is that the four white towers surrounding the main part of the building were constructed with a slight tilt so that, in the event of an earthquake, they would fall away from the main building. And, like many may know, the Taj Mahal was built by Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his dead wife - the tombs of both of them are inside. This area is particularly beautifully decorated, though it was hard to appreciate due to the almost ridiculously low lighting and pushing and shoving of the surrounding crowd that flowed through with us. We almost suffered a setback there, too, when Allison almost got thrown out of the site for using a flashlight. After touring the inside, we spent a little while longer admiring it from the outside, chatting with a group of Indian women on a university trip to Agra. Watched the sunset and then took off for Thanksgiving dinner (guess what? Indian food!) and phone calls home.