Agra Hotels
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india's armpit
Entry 2 of 9 | show all | print this entry |
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[written jan. 19, 2002]
hello y'all...
so i'm in agra...a city which is all too aware of itself...there are signs everywhere proclaiming that this restaurant or that hotel was mentioned in the lonely planet guidebook. in delhi nothing felt familiar in a western sense...i just had supper in a restaurant that could have been anywhere in canada (it had waiters, and hosts, and booths!!!...still cheaper though ;)...the same could not be said of any of the other places i've eaten in india so far. also, merchants here sound like infomercials that are on at 2 am on american TV...very rehearsed, very hard sells. haggling over a piece of inlaid marble feels more like buying a rotisserie oven. the only upside to the rehearsed sell is that it incorporates a type of tactic that i've never seen before but that makes the whole experience kind of fun (until, of course, they won't let you leave the store without buying something or suffering several long minutes of painful extraction)...what happens is that the whole pitch starts with a very honest explanation of the process of creating whatever handicraft is in question...i've seen this for rugs and inlaid marble...the explanation is accompanied by a demonstration of the items actually being created...it feels kind of like a live exhibit at a museum...generally not for long though. the only cracks in the whole museum thing are when you pull up to the shop in an autorickshaw (the driver getting a commission in this situation of course, so higher prices...at least my driver said outright that he gets 2% but he could have been scaling that number down for my benefit...or i guess his really) and you see the children or employees (often being the children) of the owner notice the white guy in the rickshaw and run to get in place for the demonstration. the making of hand made rugs and hand made inlaid marble is truly fascinating and so much work!!! but the point is for you to sympathize with the difficulty of creating such things and to be willing to pay the outrageous prices...the outrageousness being denoted by the use of negotiating in US dollars and not rupees...!
one thing that i've noticed is that people in india really enjoy or find fascinating my labrette piercing...i get non-stop looks and people pointing to their lower lip and looking confused and asking questions...i've even had several of those encounters turn into photograph requests...the most ridiculous being at the base of the taj mahal with the camera pointed away from the taj!!! can it possibly be that interesting??? i guess so. when i tell people that it's for decoration they tend to understand...indians do many things to decorate themselves after all...but since only woman have piercings (except maybe in some circumstances that i'm not aware of) i wonder what they think of my earrings...? i saw one western woman in delhi with about 10 facial piercings...i figure that she could setup a tent a couple of hours a day, charge admission, and easily pay for her trip.
the taj mahal was all it's cracked up to be...one of those things that i'll never forget in that monumental (ha ha) kind of way. and my visit yesterday to fatehpur sikri (a village about 40 km outside of agra with the ruins of an abandoned town + mosque and palace) was wonderful too...minus the traffic jam and twice a minute near death experiences on the highway (took a bus...infinitely worse than the 401)...i think that fatehpur sikri is the best thing i've seen so far. so agra is a pretty horrible place in general...because of the tourists and what it's done to the psychology of the town to have hoards of rich sightseers wander around a very poor city...but the tourists come because the things in agra are so amazing (i didn't even go and see the agra fort which is supposed to be better than the red fort in old delhi)...so it would be a shame to come to india and miss agra...but agra is so horrible for the very reason(s) why you shouldn't miss it. argh! oh well, i leave tomorrow night for varanasi on an overnight train. i'll write again after i've taken in a bit of varanasi...bye for now.
daniel.
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