Taj Mahal
Taj Mahal 052
Originally uploaded by Roland de LaonMonday November 9th thru Friday November 14th
The new team started OJT this week. My schedule has switched to 12-9. I don’t get a chance to do much in the morning before work, but I am trying to work out before work and then eat breakfast. In the evening after work I have just been eating a very light dinner after work and then going to bed around 1am. We did go buy a Cottage Industries Emporium and I picked up a couple of things that I wanted for myself. I still need to buy a couple more things for the wife and then the remaining purchases will be gifts. Tomorrow we are going to the Taj Majal which should be quite exciting. We are going to visit a couple of different forts along the way. I will let you all know how it goes. I should find several nice marble items there.
As a side note, they have some rather bizarre commercials over here. There is two that are for cell phones, one is a guy repeatedly saying “I miss you so much it hurts” for a voice SMS, the other is a phone that does Karaoke.
Saturday November 15th
Went to the Taj Mahal. Its about a 3.5 hr ride from Gurgaon to Agra. The pollution is some of the worst I have ever seen. It was so bad that you could look at the sun at 8am and it was the same orange color it normally shows when its setting at dusk. We finally arrived about 11am. We went to the Taj first, words can’t describe quite how pretty the Taj Mahal is. I took a ton of pics. The closer you get to the Taj, the more impressive it gets. All of the colors that you see were added to the white marble by hand using tools to carve the marble, grind the stones, and then hand fit them to the marble. We then went to lunch and had butter chicken with garlic nan. We finished the day off by going to Sikendra. Humayun’s Tomb is the tomb of Humayun, the son of Babar. Akbar is the son of Humayun and Sikendra is his tomb. The Taj Mahal was built by Akbar’s son Shah Jahan and houses his wife, daughter, daughter’s kids, and him. You would not believe the number of people that were at the Taj Mahal. Sikendra was the first fort that the symbology on the sides of the fort were not a combination of Indian and Muslim. All in all it was a great day, and its not every day that you can say you saw one of the wonders of the world. I picked up a couple of marble elephants for pretty much pennies. Tomorrow I go shopping.