Incredible !ndia (4) – TRAVICARIOUS

On our way bussing from Jaipur to Agra (home of the Taj Mahal), we stopped to get a real feel for a small town in India. Wow! I will try to give you can idea of what we found!

We got off the bus and all 34 of us marched down the street. It was mostly single file. You can see why. It was down right dangerous to walk down the streets!

This is a new building going up. They hold up the second floor with sticks. OSHA is nowhere to be found.

Click on the video. Notice the standing water. Notice the trash. Notice the GIANT crane coming right at us! And the scooters and the cars.

We stopped to see sort of a hardware store. This is our tour guide, Sameer, displaying the different types of brooms available.

Each of those little roll-up garage doors is someone’s little business.

Note the walls. You took your life in your hands while walking because you mostly had to look down to watch for uneven ground and cow poop, while completely missing a giant crane that might be going by.

This was interesting. He was making and pouring little candies from this wok. But instead of spooning out little spoonsful from the pot, the pot was on a chain and he just tipped the pot and moved it quickly. I was too afraid to taste this type of street food. Probably for the better.

I must preface this, explaining that the day before Sameer told us that the sacred cow urine was good medicine and people would drink a spoonful a day; and they would use it for medicine in your eye.

So when Angie yelled “He’s urinating!”, I couldn’t help myself and told her to put some of it in her eye. That got a good laugh.

Click on the video.

Sameer elected our Bus Driver Assistant to get this head massaged. Too funny. (He didn’t want to mess up his hairdo.)

You can’t see it, but the towel had probably not been washed in a year!!

When someone asked about getting a haircut here, Sameer said “Tell them to put in a new blade.” WAY too scary for me!!

Click.

Just MORE of everything I was seeing on our walk. The orange vegetable was a carrot! And the blankets were being transported on a scooter with two men. And, yup, that’s a camel. Don’t ask me why. I don’t think they are indigenous to India.

We arrived in Agra. On this trip, I was blessed to meet and hang with Ashna. She’s half my age, who bravely came on the trip alone. She thought nothing of going to town to see what’s there — even after dark.

Tom usually takes a nap in the afternoon while I may venture a couple blocks from the hotel; and we head to bed by 9 PM.

So there I am, out after dark, with Ashna, Jeff, also half my age, and his daughter, age 15, and their cousin, Anthony. We were all just out to have lots of fun.

Therse are Ashna’s photos — she’s great at it.

We made this video for $1 USD. Too fun!!

Ashna’s grandparents are Hindu who moved from India to Suriname (the country at the top of South America between British and French Guiana), where she spoke Dutch as her native language. She learned to understand Hindi from her parents talking secretly. Then Ashna moved to NYC and learned English and became an engineer.

Travel certainly helps me realize how interesting, rich, sad, scary, and empowering another person’s backstory can be.

I was born in Minnesota, only knew white people, only knew Catholics or Lutherans, never learned a second language and didn’t venture a move to another state until I was 30. Pretty sheltered!

Gate1Travel funds this school. It started with a farmer contributing a couple acres of his farm and one teacher. Now they teach 250 kids who wouldn’t have an education otherwise. I brought markers, pencils, crayons, and an IPAD. I just threw it out there one pickleball day “Does anyone have an IPAD they want to donate?” And Dani said “YES!” and actually brought it to me the next day.

Ironically, I don’t own an IPAD. But I think karmically, you lose, if you steal an IPAD from poor Indian children.

It was a Sunday when we visited, so we only saw a couple kids/students.

From the pictures, needless to say, the classrooms are barely utilitarian. Look at how the fans are wired!

We stopped at a step well. INGENIOUS!! India is quite a dry country. In order to gather the rain water, they built this step well. So that no matter what level the rainwater went to, they could save it, walk to it and gather it. They also had ways of dropping buckets below and pulling them up without walking all the way down there. So impressive!

I learned how the word defaced originated. The warring people who took over these temples smashed off the faces of the statues

The ruins of a temple. Again, off with the shoes.

Here is another artsy photo. I cropped it and I think its fabulous.

WOW! WOW! WOW! The Taj Mahal.

The story is that a king was married to the love of his life. She had 14 of his children and was pregnant 17 times. She finally died at 39 (what do you EXPECT after 17 pregnancies?) and her husband had this beautiful tomb built to honor her — the Taj Mahal.

It’s marble with inlaid colored stones. Amazing.

But two of their five sons killed the other three sons and put their father on house arrest for eight (or six) years in a palace across the river from this Taj Mahal which he built for his wife, where he could only look at her tomb. The two sons wanted to be the ones to inherit; but they did let the sisters remain alive and live in the palace.

Once the king died, the sons allowed his tomb be placed next to his wife’s. His tomb is the only thing that is not exactly symmetrical in the entire Taj Mahal.

We had a professional photographer take out photos. What a hoot!

I took this pic myself!

This was the entrance. The 22 points at the top are supposed to represent the 22 years it took to build the Taj. I’m not sure I believe it. But even the entrance was beautiful.

Amazing.

I couldn’t stop taking photos!

This is the river that separated the king from his wife’s tomb.

This is the palace where the king was kept on house arrest.

Again, Wow.

Look at the shape of the flower beds.

And look at the air quality. Both Tom and I came home with coughs. I blame the air quality of India — the worst in the world.

Ashna took most of these photos. My head exploded when she took a photo of my eye — with the Taj in my pupil!!! Look closely.

These are photos the professional photographer sent Ashna. I think they are mind-blowing. And I love, love a reflection photo.

Tom posing for the photog.

This is one of the 20 photos I bought from the professional.

This is exciting to me because PRINCESS DIANA sat on this very seat. Friend, Annie, explained Di’s photo on this seat was a statement.

The princess, 30, strikes a stunning pose as she sits sweetly in front of the vast white marble structure dressed in a purple skirt and matching shoes.

But if you look more closely, Diana’s solo figure paints a picture of loneliness.

And it was that very image that set the tone for what was to come. Just months after the photo was taken, Diana and her husband Prince Charles announced their separation.

After the Taj we went to see how they inlaid the stones into the marble. It’s back breaking and time consuming work. They run the grinding wheel by hand so they have control on how much they sand off. Someone else chips out the marble so the little colored stones can be glued into an exact shaped spot.

They also use marble gotten only in India and it’s translucent — as proven when they shine a flashlight through it.

Then we went to the sandstone Agra Fort with a maze of walled courtyards mosques and lavish private chambers reflecting the grandeur of the Mughal Empire.

This may have been a museum.

Yup, monkeys. While we were sitting around the high walls of the building one monkey jumped over the wall an onto a grass enclosure and the screeching and screaming was outrageous. Other monkeys would not allow him in and he came screaming back over the wall again and ran through the crowd of people.

That night was a Bollywood night. These two dancers were great! And then we all got out there to dance.

I don’t know what type of booze it was, but it was 80 proof. The joke was Jeff kept pushing Angie, the med student to take shots. So a couple times, I took her glass and ‘took one for the team’. Everyone was having a good time.

Play the video