The Taj

The Taj      By day five in India I thought I had gotten used to the unusual amount  of attention that our group received due to our foreign appearance. I was wrong, and not just by a little bit. At five am Stacey's alarm went off in the dark hotel room and we both lugged ourselves out of bed to get ready for a big day. We both showered in the bathroom, which was slightly more of an ordeal than one would expect. To give some background on the layout of our bathroom i have to go back to our first day at the transit house. When we all arrived we started claiming rooms, starting with the girls giving the two boys what we thought to be the largest room because we figured that its prime location would make for a good gathering area. This was all fine and dandy until about an hour later when the girls who had arrived in the first room were sitting on the second floor tying to fight off the inevitable jet lag nap. Shikha mentioned in passing that Charles believed that his bathroom did not have a shower. We all kind of chuckled and wrote it of as Charles probably not noticing another bathroom door since all of ours had been locked at first and appeared to be closets. Minutes later Charles wandered into the room and his first words were, "guys, the shower is the bathroom. The bathroom is the shower." since he was met with blank stares he went on to say "no seriously, I could take a shower while sitting on the toilet because there is just a removable shower head and a drain in the corner of the tiny room". Of course we ha to see this for ourselves so when we later had dinner in that room we all flocked to the bathroom and all we could stammer out after looking at the postage stamp sized tiled room was"the bathroom is the shower! The shower is the bathroom!". My second thought was: thank god this is the boys room...Going back to New Delhi, our shower and bathroom were one and the same, though larger than Charles and Sean's so a simple shower drenched the entire room and made later bathroom preparation a swampy one.        At six am we all piled onto the bus and set off for the 4 hour drive to Agra. We were told that we were driving to a McDonald's that was close to the edge of the city so we all settled in for the first leg of the trip. After passing a McDonald's in hour one and then slipping on to hour two we started becoming desperate. Lindsay's earlier joke of rationing out her walnuts started to seem increasingly plausible and an undertone of grumbling filled the bus. Thankfully, by hour three  we pulled in to the McDonalds and the incredible amount of ecstasy that filled the bus would have made an outsider think that we were marooned sailors who found water instead of college kids who reached a generic fast food chain. I have literally never been more excited to see those golden arches. The restaurant served some regular fare such as chi ken sandwiches but there were no beef products and you could get "shake fries" which were normal fries that the purchaser could put in a bag with a packet of spicy seasoning and shake till they were coated.       We were all much happier after the food break and the closer we got to Agra, the more palpable the excitement became in the bus. One of the amazing things that I saw out of my bus window was the menagerie of animals that the streets housed. There were the normal stray dogs but along with them there were oxen lazily strolling in an out of traffic, peacocks perched on some chosen roofs, a lone camel hanging out on the side walk, and at one of our stops we saw a boy with a snake in a basket, to Sean's great dismay. Since the taj is sensitive to car pollution we had to buy our tickets and then take an electric car/bus over to the site itself.       When we finally rounded the corner and saw the taj for the first time the only thing that could be heard among our group were the clicking of the camera shutters. The building was absolutely breath-taking. Gleaming white marble was artfully designed into curving domes and rising minarets while parts of the building were delicately inlaid with black marble embellishments and surrounding the door there were black marble passages from the Quran. Needless to say, the picture taking festivities that followed took about as long as it took to build the taj. Ok, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration but not by much. Sean insightfully compared it to prom and as the clicks and poses went on I was also reminded of night filled with floor length dresses and girls screaming out suggestions for the next "pic". Of course, this time I looked a little different. Sweat has become the clutch  look for all of us on this trip so as the shots went on so did the habitual wiping of my dripping row and fanning of my ballooning Indian style pants.     Now we get to my fixation on the unusual attention we received at these monuments. While this was all going on, we started to realizing a slightly perturbing trend: people seemed to be shifting their cameras from the taj to our group. A man in a dark green polo continually waited until we had a new pose (every one with white shirts! Girls! Roommates! Jumping pic!) and would surreptitiously snap his own picture. After being told off several times it took a full blown confrontation by Sean (for those who don't know him he is 6' tall and not a guy who I would ever want to mess with) for him to slink away, glaring over his shoulder at Sean who watched his retreat. Everywhere we went people whipped out cameras for a quick picture, sneakily filmed us, asked for pictures with us, and pushed their children toward us for a picture with our group. As the day wore on our patience with such antics wore thin and the amount of men turning their home video cameras toward our predominantly female group started to actually become alarming. I felt like a part of a walking circus. An unwilling and sweaty circus. I never thought I would say this but I actually feel for brittney spears after her dramatic spiral down in the media world. Everywhere I turned I was met with a probing camera lens and felt violated and constantly reminded that I don't belong here.      After the taj we visited the Agra Fort which has been around since 1080. I was both impressed with the opulence that still exists and saddened that I would never see this place how it looked before the British looted it for precious stones and tourists graffitied their names into this historically priceless place (for clarification; tourist does not exclusively mean foreigners, much of the graffiti was in Indian script). To add to our "tour de Agra animals" we ran into some bats who were not pleased by our camera flashes that were invading their homes.      After these two visits we headed back to the bus, exhausted and sweaty. After another quick stop by McDonalds we pulled back onto the main road back to our hotel. I am writing this blog post on the bus now as the girls around me dose off and the sound of horns go off in the background. Hopefully I will get this blog up tonight! Tomorrow it is off to more New Delhi historical sites and to the Delhi Haat, a giant open-air market :)