Agra

This past weekend, we finally made it to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. It's about four hours away by car, so we were out on the road by 6:30am to get there before all the crowds arrived. A lot of people don't actually what it is. Some people think it's a temple, some a government building, but it's actually a tomb. It was built as a mausoleum by an emperor for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. I've heard different stories about the construction of the monument, that the emperor brought in thousands of workers and cut their hands off so that they couldn't build another beautiful structure like the Taj ever again.

There's a lot more than meets the eye when you look at the beautiful building. As we walked through it, we noticed a lot of inscriptions and carvings all over the walls and ceilings of the place. It turns out there are passages of the Quran written throughout. One other really interesting thing about the way the Taj was constructed is how the designs of all the flowers and designs were placed onto the stone marble structure. From far away, one might guess that maybe they were engraved or painted on, but what we learned was that every single flower and design was put together by what could end up being hundreds of small shards of different stones arranged in a particular pattern. Each stone had to be the exact color desired for the design and was hand cut to fit its exact place on the wall. We found out that a simple flower could have over a hundred tiny shavings put together to get the image of a flower.


We walked around outside the local Agra markets and stumbled across a shop that was making handicrafts in the same way the designs in the Taj Mahal were made. There were about eight guys sitting next to their wheels, carving tiny stones in precise shapes to make things like flowers and leaves to be placed on boxes and plates. The guy next to me is either telling me to "watch my hand" or "not to touch" (there were about 7 flowers laid out right next to me that hadn't been glued together yet).


Of course, our friend Caroline was like a celebrity again!


...I thought this was slightly humorous.


Group picture of the four of us - myself, Jin from UPenn med school, Caroline, and Emily from UPenn nursing and UMich alum 04!


Besides the Taj Mahal, the other big site to visit is the Agra Fort. It's similar to the Red Fort in New Delhi and was built in the 17th century as a military outpost. This picture is of the entrance once we entered. We heard that this fort was built specifically to have ambiguous entrances so that the enemy wouldn't know where to invade from.


As different rulers came to power over the course of history, each ruler decided to add different things to the fort. As we walked through, we saw things ranging from a mosque to a tomb. This was another space on the inside with intricate carvings and designs like we found at the Taj Mahal.


Picture of a pond inside of the fort. Just kidding! It's monsoon season and it rained really heavily for about an hour just as we were leaving the Taj. We felt bad for a couple reasons - one, the line to get in was really long just as it started to rain and two, the streets started flooding badly soon after the downpours came and our car probably splashed quite a few bikers and walkers trying to keep dry!