India part 6

Of all the historical sites we visited, I liked this one the best. It is called Fatehpur Sikri outside of Agra. It was built as a little city, which was eventually abandoned because of lack of water. The inside of the city required a ticket, so it was pretty much empty besides us.

This is a five-story building, and looks out onto the courtyard.

Here's a close up of some of the detail that went into the sandstone carvings. Back when the city was built, it was painted and covered in tapestries.

Here Kathy and I are standing on a lifesize Parcheesi board. Did you know this game was from India? I didn't.

A little walk away was another ancient site, called Itmad Ud Daula. It was the first tomb built out of white marble, so it is called the "baby Taj." Since it is a religious site and it's also free, there were a lot more Indian tourists around.

Here's an example of the "screens" inside the mosque. They are all hand sanded out of a large piece of marble. Clearly there was no sandpaper back then, so little fingers sanded these holes in the marble using water and sand. People tie little strings on this particular screen, which is on the other side of the tomb. There is some signifance to the strings which I can't recall at the moment.

Here's the architecture that surrounds the tomb. I think you can almost get a sense of how grand the architecture is from these photos when you compare the people to the size of the entrance.


Outside of the entrance, people picnic and buy from these fruit and vegetable vendors. There was actually a sign that said that you can't build a fire there.

After Kathy took a picture of the vendors, a man approached Kathy and said something about her photographing his family. She immediately got defensive, thinking he was accusing her of something. She said, "no, no, I was taking pictures of the vegetables!" He said, "You take a picture of my family, now I'll take a picture of you." So the family gathered around, anxious to get a photo with a real, live white person! The little girls in the front were so cute. The one on the right was wearing the sunglasses. The dad pushed the middle girl into the picture and told her to take the sunglasses off of her sister. She took them off her sister... then put them on herself and posed like she was a movie star!

All around the entrance are scripture from the Qur'an.

Here I am with our guide, Rajiv. We spent three days with him and since I'm totally nosy, I asked lots of questions and we learned a lot about life in India. Since this is a religious site, I had to cover up my scandously bare legs with this lovely red cover-up. I wonder how many hundreds of people wore that thing. In addition to covering up, we had to take off our shoes at a lot of the religious sites. I decided that I was meant to be from this culture because I love being barefoot.

Back to Fatehpur Sikri. There were a bunch of teen age boys hanging around. I asked Rajiv what they were doing, and he said that they jump into that water for money. We shrugged and decided it was something we had to do. He rolled his eyes and I could just hear him thinking, "Whatever, you weirdo Americans." Here's one of the guys jumping, then he climbed up the wall to get his 50 cents from Trevor. After two boys jumped, we took off because we could have been there all day.