hands down, best mahal i've ever seen

hello again friends! i hope you haven't given up on me. my last few days in india were internet-free, but there is still a lot to put up here, so stick around. (you may or may not have noticed that i am posting this at 4 in the morning. jet lag is dumb).

for starters, here is the taj mahal! definitely the best mahal i've ever seen. it is, in a word, enormous and took 20,000 people 22 years to build. see for yourself...



the front gate of the taj mahal. the border has quotes from the koran inlaid in marble (each character is made from one single piece). the size of the characters looks uniform, but the bottom is really smaller than the top. tricky.



there it is! i shed a little tear when it came into view. partly because it really is stunning. and partly because i just couldn't believe i was there. at the taj mahal. that's something you just never think is going to happen, you know?



my team: melissa, ruby and colleen. those teeny-tiny specs you see next to the taj are people. like i said, the thing is enormous.



in another tricky architectural optical illusion, the four towers around the taj mahal are actually not straight. they lean to the outside. if i understood the guide correctly (always a maybe), they were built that way so if there was ever an earthquake, the poles would fall out, not in, so the taj mahal itself wouldn't be crushed.



just a little guest house, off to the side of the taj. there is a mosque on the other side. again, the people specs should give you an idea of scale. (and, just f your information, you have to wear those little booties.)

while we were in town, we also went to agra fort, where the man who had the taj mahal built (his name escapes me) was imprisoned by his son. the father wanted to build a mirror image of the taj, but in black marble, for himself, but his son thought that was a really bad idea, so house arrest it was. some of agra fort was also built as a tribute to the father's second wife.



the front of the fort. you can't see them, but there were monkeys running around on the tops of the walls. pretty rad.



as the second wife was hindu, architecture in agra fort makes use of lotus flower-like shapes, as well as other elements of the hindu tradition.




the whole gang: ruby, me, team leader scott, melissa and colleen.




in a truly cruel irony, papa could see the taj mahal from the room where he spent the remainder of his life. the wife for whom it was built died six months before it was completed.




one of many open spaces, used for dancing and other cultural entertainment.

as i am sure you can imagine, our jaunt to agra was definitely a highlight of the trip. the only bummer was that northern india was really polluted, and cold (we had to wear long sleeves!). though now it seems like a tropical heat wave compared to the weather that greeted me at home.

stay tuned for me riding an elephant, some of my favorite images of indian life, and final reflections...