Originally posted: March 10th, 2014
March 8th
SATURDAY’S A RUGBY DAY! Except not in India. When you go on a kickass roadtrip with a couple friends and a drive to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and the Fatehpur Sikri, even better. Apoorva, Nilesh, Nilesh’s driver, and I left at 6 am and embarked on a 5.5 hour ride (traffic) to Fatehpur Sikri, a jive place built buy Akbar who ruled over the Mughal Empire from his seat at this mountaintop palatial area. He had three wives, a Christian wife, a Muslim wife, and a Hindu wife. The Hindu wife was his favorite wife because she was the only one that could bear him children. This red sandstone and white marble acropolis had examples of impressive architecture galore. I could spend hours describing everything I saw, but for the sake of time, know that it’s oh so very impressive!
Gardens in the Fatehpur Sikri
West gate in the background, with Apoorva and Nilesh
On the way out, Nilesh was bragging about buying a knife for only 200 rs. Little did he know he got HAD, another kid (the whole place is crawling with 7 year olds peddling goods) offered me a knife for 200, which means I could have talked him into giving it to me for 80. Nilesh was pissed. Also, I had a 10 year old pulling on my arm through the window of the bus telling me to get off the bus and fight him. He wanted to fight me for money. He offered me “One thousand million rupees” to come down off the bus and fight. He wanted to catch a beatdown. Alright kid. Na. Props to him on his confidence and fighting spirit though!
We also saw a little kid yell at us “YO! MICHAEL JACKSON!” and then proceeded to do the double arm roll with a twist and a hand-on-the-nutsack-hip-pop in true MJ fashion. He still had a way to go on the hat tricks though.
Next we hit up the Taj Mahal. When I first walked through the gate-no, back up. FIRST of all, a ticket costs 20 rupees, if you’re Indian. My ticket, being a whitey from another country, cost me 750!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!?! What rubbish. Anyway, when I first walked through the gate I could immediately understand what all the hype was about. I could tell why it was worth 8 or 9 hours in a car. It was unfathomably jaw dropping. All white, towering above the skyline (the whole outer contour of the Taj IS the skyline, as it was designed so that when you look at it, there is nothing but sky visible behind it. No hills, no trees, no other buildings. It’s just the Taj set against a a beautifully cloudless powder blue sky. The original bluescreen backdrop. I felt like I had walked into a video game, because surely mere mortals could only pull something like this off in a digital realm. Right? No. This was real. I walked up and touched it with my own two hands. The archtecture incorporated the use of illusion, the mathematics of perspective (shoutout to Annalisa Crannell), stone inlay, and beautifully clean marble to build one of the most magnificent structures on the planet. Apoorva had Nilesh and I going nuts with her mystery question. “Everything about the Taj is symmetrical from the gate all the way down the hundreds of yards of garden through the building. Each side is an exact mirror image of it’s other half. All except for one thing. What is it?” I, who pride myself on my powers of observation, was going nuts looking for the tiniest detail that was not mirrored on the other side. A flower on a wall with an extra petal, a minaret with an extra layer of marble, a color that was different. Eventually I saw it and realized Apoorva had built it up so much when really it was the most obvious thing in the world. I won’t say in case any of you are going to the Taj and want to find out for yourself. Anyway, I loved my time there, even though I had had to pee since before we even rolled up and they gave me a free bottle of water cause I’m a “High Paying Gent.” On the way out our tour guide (not Apoorva, the other one) took us to a shop and showed us a tutorial on how the stone inlay is done, which was actually one of the things I was most curious about.
Taj Mahal from afar!
After the Taj we went to a Pizza Hut, ordered a pitcher of god-awful iced tea and a delicious pizza, and hit the road. We slept some, then Apoops took the reigns in the DJ booth, the windows were rolled down, and Nilesh and I had a dance party for the last two hours of the trip, much to the shock of everyone on the road around us. We even got too excited for the car and pulled over to dance on the side of the road a bit until two guys on a motorbike pulled up next to us and started talking in rapid Hindi to my co-adventurers. I thought they were just making sure we were alright or offering us help or hitting on Apoorva or making fun of our dancing but I realized I should take them seriously when I saw the guy on the back had a submachine gun slung around his back. They were cops, and they had told us to make less noise. Oh.
By the time we arrived home, Apoorva was absolutely exhausted and went straight to bed, but this was the night (day in the US) of the EIWA Championships!!! I fired up flowrestling and watched F&M compete at Easterns! It was not a great performance but nothing makes me feel like home more than watching F&M Wrestling. Stayed up way too late watching the tournament before passing out.
Let Ice Cube play out, kick back and ease off the gas….. Today was a good day
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RySHMuLN4Jg