INDIA - Part One: India is Different

Chennai, India

India’s here. And it let us know early. I was up at 6:30, again bright and early to watch us pull into port. In the past, this has generally been a good time. This morning, there was no land in sight yet. Usually, we get a nice sunrise over something. In Puerto Rico it was over El Morro, in Brazil it was over the skyline of Salvador, in South Africa it was over Table Mountain, and we pulled into Mauritius late so we missed sunrise and therefore doesn’t count. In India, the sun rose over the cloud of haze and pollution hugging the lowest part of the atmosphere – the hundred or so feet that we all operate in. Already, even before I could see India, I could tell that India was a horse of a different color.

And still, even before I could see India – I could smell it. I’ve been asked by a surprising number of friends back home to let them know if India smells, because they’ve heard that it does. I can unequivocally answer that with one word – yes. But as a teaser of what’s to come, it’s not that simple. The smell that first hit us on the way in was dominated by the smell of wood burning, with some coal mixed in there as well. And those smells of fuels burning would only be the beginning. Oh, would they only be the beginning.

I next did something that I thought would be a good idea. After my anxious breakfast, I called home. I Emailed home the night before to say that if when I called, Mom and Dad could provide some encouraging words. I hinted that I wanted something good so that’s why I gave them some preparation time. It was quite helpful, but it’s weird getting encouraging words from New York about India as land comes into sight and I can’t help but think that as my eyes grow wider that maybe there can be nothing that will quell my anxiety.

As I said before, as we pulled into our previous ports, there has been some kind of landscape. Every port has had it. Even Mauritius has high mountains just behind the port area. But India, again, is different. India is flat. There are no buildings more than a few stories high. From standing on top of the ship, there’s nothing to look at craning your head upwards, it’s all hugging the ground, just like the smog and pollution. But not all of India is flat. And I’ll be heading over that way soon enough.

I was up at the front of the ship as we were docking, and it was quite an entertaining spectacle to see. There was a four man band playing down on the dock. It took us over a couple hours in total from when we pulled into earshot of the band and when we were allowed to start leaving the ship, and they didn’t stop the entire time. They were like machines. The best part of all was that they were standing a little too close to the ship, I think. Because it’s an active port area, there’s always stuff moving around, and one of those big, giant orange cranes that are always all over ports starts to move from the aft of the ship to be in the front, and it started heading straight towards the Indian band.

I guess nobody bothered to tell them or, more accurately, they didn’t look to their right, because this giant crane was headed straight for them and once the window of opportunity passed to move out of the way, they had to stay where they were and let the crane roll over them. It’s not like there was a low clearance under the crane – there was a good fifteen or so feet of space underneath, but from my vantage point, watching this crane make the band disappear, and still hear the faint sounds of the band trickle up to the ship was quite entertaining. And after the crane rolled away, there was the band, playing as if nothing had ever happened.

While I was out on the deck, Dan, the RD for my corner of the ship, was telling me about something that happened at the Chennai port years and years ago. I’m still debating about whether or not this was something that I wanted to know or not, but I think I break even in the end. Anyway, he told me that a number of years ago, the librarian for the ship was standing on the dock and saw a bus coming. She saw the bus coming, and moved out of the way, but didn’t move far enough away to avoid the mirrors at the front of the bus, and they hit her and killer her. So he told me to watch out for the mirrors because they stick out kind of far. I thanked him for the advice as I wasn’t too enthralled to learn that there was something else potentially dangerous out there that I didn’t already know.

Then comes immigration. Unlike in previous ports (are you sensing a theme here?) we had to go through two rounds of immigration, just for kicks. The first time we went through we had to pick up a form, and the other time we had to meet face to face with the immigration people. It was simple enough, but when you’ve got to do this with as many people as we do, it takes a while, and it was a bit of a mess.

I decided that because I hadn’t packed yet that I was just going to hang out on the ship until we departed for my trip later in the afternoon. A decision I was absolutely fine with. That also allowed me to hop on the internet at a time when it was running faster. Not much faster, but fast enough to get my Emails downloaded. It was also while I was online here that I read about an earthquake they had just off the coast of Japan, somewhere that we’ll be sooner rather than later. I was worried about that rather than what everyone else was worried about. Apparently there was a bombing somewhere in northwestern India a couple months ago. People were worried about that. I’m not, but the Japan earthquake on the other hand… With all the seismic activity going on in this part of the world with earthquakes in Afghanistan and the Solomon Islands, I can sense something boiling to the surface that I don’t like.

After I finished with my Emails, I decided that it was a good time to start packing. But I found another way to procrastinate first. Today is Day 50 on our trip. We’ve hit halfway on our voyage. We’ve come a long way and have a long way to go. So I grabbed my camera and filmed a video tour of some parts of the ship. I would post it up online, but the file size is a bit too large and would essentially cost a lot of money in my internet minutes, and it’s just not that worth it. I’ll get it up once I get home. So look for it towards the end of May. Can you stand the anticipation?!

So, I decided to pack everything that I wouldn’t care about losing. It’s the opposite of taking all that you can’t leave behind. I hear that some people toss all their India stuff away after they use it because it’s just dirty and gross. Unlike in other ports (there it is again) they’ve transformed the ship a little bit. The entrance back into the ship from the gangway has the floors all covered in plastic, as well as other high traffic areas of the ship. And probably the most disheartening part of all are the signs they have posted on doors leading to the outside. The signs say, verbatim, “Flies transmit diseases like Malaria, Polio, Leprosy, Anthrax, & numerous others!! Keep ‘em out! Please close all doors – do not invite unwanted guests onboard!” Isn’t that a lovely welcome message for India? They won’t even have the snack bar open on Deck 7 for health reasons. They won’t even have meals served on Deck 6 because there are motion sensitive sliding glass doors there and the stuff from the outside could come in.

We met in the Union for our trip, and then I ventured out into India. I had been out on the back deck earlier in the day, but at this time in the afternoon, it was by far the hottest and most humid that it’s been on our entire voyage so far. The people from Colorado said that they really noticed the difference in the heavy air compared to the light stuff they have way up in the mountains. Once we were all in the buses, we left the port, and the ship, and would hopefully see it again in four days time.

It’s going to be difficult to accurately convey what the drive to the airport was like, so bear with me. India’s a different place. Nothing can prepare you for what you see in India. The cars driving on the roads, the buildings, the traffic, the people everywhere, it’s sensory overload to the max. It took a while to notice, but every time we went over a body of water, like a river, the smell that would invade the bus would knock you over. It’s not the smell we had on the way in this morning. It’s a smell that has no definition, it’s a smell that you try to forget, but you can’t because you can’t figure out what it is. All you know is that nothing good comes from a smell like that, and because of that, it bothers you. Three or four people on one motorbike weaving in and out of heavy traffic, buildings on top of buildings, concrete and steel everywhere, billboards at every turn, it’s unbelievable. Then stuff really starts to hit you when you look closely. The people sitting on the streets, the man relieving himself on the wall next to a beggar, the dirt the squalor, and you just try to figure out how it got this way, and what made it this way.

And that’s where the paths diverge. I’ve been told this entire voyage so far that I will either love India or hate India, with no middle ground. I made sure when I stepped off the ship I had a blank slate, a tabula rasa, so I was open for anything India had to offer me, ready to make a decision when I leave in five days. I’ve just told you the senses that hit me on the half hour drive to the airport. That’s a half hour out of five days. Some people can look at that list and say how lovely and wonderful and unique that makes the culture, and some people can look at that list and say how appalling, disgusting, and uncomfortable India is. Those are the two ends of the extreme, and I’m starting in dead center, trying to remain there for as long as possible. That’s the goal. What I write are intended to be my observations, at least early in my Indian blog portion. As the Indian blog progresses, you get more of an answer to the spectrum, and I’ll figure it out as I go along, too.

So then we arrive at the airport, and because India is the way it is, you have to have your boarding passes to enter the airport and there are ticket counters outside. I think our tour guides from Chennai were in line to get them. They didn’t really tell us that they were, but we assumed that when they disappeared without a trace or warning that they were off doing something for us. We kept a relatively tight group out in front of the entrance to the hotel, and no matter how much someone says that they weren’t worried about India, you should have seen them reacting to the bugs that were flying around. From the moment that the first bug/mosquito was spotted, there was a calm panic that people should be getting their bug repellant on right away. I already had some on, so I watched everyone do it, and it was quite entertaining, because by the time they finished, our tickets arrived and we went into the airport. But, it wasn’t like the act was completely useless, there are plenty of bugs inside the airport anyway.

The first line we got in was the one for security. Let’s paint the word picture here: There are about four or five lines for security, and we’re not sure if there are some lines that we should or should not be in, so we’re all in the same two long lines, and all the Indians are lining up in the other lines and moving ahead much quicker than we are. Because I’m the adventurous person that I am, although that spirit is mildly quenched here in India, I hopped into another quicker moving line full of Indians. My group suggested that I get back into line where I was because nobody else from our group was in that line. I agreed with some confusion about the whole process. But confusion would be common in India, especially for the remainder of our time here in the Chennai airport.

While we’re in line, there’s a television screen listing things that you can’t take on the plane. In the states, they list important things in a large group like ‘weapons’ and don’t get into much specific about which weapons, I guess because people know. But in India, they felt the need to tell us not to bring the following items onto the airplanes: sabers, screwdrivers, bats, mace, spiked ball & chain, hammer, flamethrowers, nuclear material, bombs, swords, Tasers, nunchucks, daggers, and of course nail clippers and nail files.

Towards the front of the line, they were handing out luggage tags to everyone with carry-on items. I already had mine on from Brazil, so I didn’t think that I needed one, and the guy didn’t thrust one into my arms as I walked by so, I figured that it was a non-issue. Apparently, I was wrong because as I put my bag down on the conveyor belt, an irate Indian man in an official looking uniform began to yell at me. Obviously, I don’t understand Indian dialects, of which there are almost 20 I believe, so I put a dumb face on until he resorted to pointing and grunting, which everyone always does, and sure enough he did. I needed a luggage tag on my bag. I guess that’s the high tech way that they monitor bags. So I went back to where the guy was passing them out and then quickly wrote my name on the tag and passed the bag through the conveyor and went through the metal detector that was turned off. But it was supposed to be turned off because they wanded everyone on the other side. The wander knew that we were a bunch of students so he kept asking me questions about where and what I was studying while he was wanding me extensively. I smiled and answered everything in the way I thought he’d want an answer and he let me through.

That was the line for the men. As I came out on the other side and met back up with some of the girls on our trip, they had a much rougher time on their side of security. All the women that pass through security there had to be taken to the other side of the security area and behind a very unofficial-looking bed sheet. I didn’t notice anything happening back there, but it sounded like the girls were wanded a little too thoroughly, because they all came out with a wide-eyed stare on their faces that told me that something wrong just happened. This has to be the only place in the world where the women are wanded more extensively than the men. I still can’t figure that one out, but then again, we are in India, the land of difference.

Once we got through security, we found that there were two other Semester at Sea trips waiting there for their flights, too. One group left shortly after we arrived, and then about 20 minutes later, another group showed up. We had an hour wait until our flight, and the two remaining groups shared a flight that left about 15 minutes before us on an airline that looked much more reputable.

They told us in preport that internationally imported bottled water was the way to go, so I looked at the little convenience store they had right outside the gate in front of the bathrooms and I didn’t see one international product there. India’s a big country, and they’ve got to have a rather large domestic market, so they’ve got to sell their products somewhere. It might as well be to people waiting to get on an airplane.

Let me tell you, when they announce that boarding is going to begin for a flight, Indians line up in the blink of an eye in a phenomenon called a non-Western line. Let’s examine this term. Western lines are straight and you get on line behind the person in front of you in a very orderly fashion. Non-Western lines are in the shape of a ‘V’ with the point at the front of a line. You can get on line anywhere outside of the line as long as you maintain the shape of the ‘V’, so it’s silly to get on line in the back when you could squeeze in on the side. Us Americans have a tough time with the concept of a non-Western line, and we really didn’t participate in it. We got in line behind one another and clung together like a small school of fish in a big sea of Indians.

We took a tram out to the airplane that I think would have been a quicker walk, but I guess that we can’t just waltz across the tarmac like we own the place. I think there are safety and security issues involved with that. I think.

In comparison to the flights in the other two countries I’ve been in, my flight in India wasn’t all that bad. It seemed like the aircraft was built within the last two decades and that the company flying it seemed reputable, so I really couldn’t complain about it. The flight was almost three hours but it’s a long way to go from southern to northern India.

Because it’s not a flight in the US, they gave us a meal. I was hesitant to believe that Indian airline food was safe to eat, but I was hungry and I took my two Pepto pills beforehand and ate anything that looked like it resembled food as opposed to garnish. They sat us alphabetically on the flight so Brenda sat across from me in the aisle. I figure that the last person that’s going to get sick from the food because she knows what to eat and what not to eat is going to be Brenda. I sat with my meal in front of me, and watched Brenda pick and choose what she was going to eat, and then I followed suit. I looked at the little brownie they gave us and I figured that nothing could be wrong with a brownie. But, with the brownie perched inches from my mouth, I watched Brenda pick up her brownie, look at it, and then put it back down. I froze. And I looked at Brenda, and waited for a clue as to why she didn’t eat it. With the brownie still perched near my mouth, I asked her, and she started laughing hysterically because it was fine, she just wasn’t hungry.

In addition to watching Brenda with the brownie, I watched what she did with the food that was sitting on top of a bed of spinach. They tell us in every port that lettuce is a high culprit for disease because you never know what it’s washed in, if the water is safe or not. In addition, in India, imagine India being different here again, 75% of all the spinach in India has high levels of lead in it. And there was food sitting on a bed of spinach. I’ve never been briefed on the ways and means of spinach-lead cross contamination, but I watched Brenda look at it and move on, and because it was just cooked vegetables, I didn’t feel to bad about leaving that part of my meal untouched.

After landing in Delhi, we walked out of the airport to another smell, although not as potent as some of the ones we had earlier in the day, and much like a line of ants, we followed our tour guides out of the airport and into the tour buses waiting for us. The swarm of other people at the airport with signs to pick other people up gawked at us like we were farm animals being herded around. They must be thinking, “ugh, more tourists,” but of course that’s translated because I don’t speak any of the Indian dialects. There was a street between the terminal and the parking lot, and they walked us right across the street without stopping, blocking traffic in both directions. What was interesting was that in most countries we would have been honked at. But India is different, and honking means something completely different that I’ll enlighten you about in a little while.

They drove us to the Hotel Ashok in downtown Delhi. At least I think it was downtown Delhi. Delhi is one of, if not the biggest cities in all of India. It’s certainly the busiest, and they drove us around on our bus at night, so none of us were exactly sure where we were. I had a preconception that stuff could only reach a certain level of ‘nice’ in India before it plateaus out at a sub par level. I was wrong. The hotel we were at was gigantic and immaculate. To be honest, when we walked by the giant fountain outside the grand entryway, I was taken aback a bit, and really surprised. There were restaurants and shops all along the lower level and it was all in expensive stone and just looked expensive.

All the other groups that left before us in the airport in Chennai were also staying at this hotel, so I found a few friends from a couple different trips and met them for dinner in a modern looking restaurant. And when I say modern, it would be modern looking for a large, Western metropolitan city, too. I ate on the plane and I really wasn’t very hungry, so I tried to just order a Fanta. I gave up after a good minute and figured that it was a sign to stop. So I enjoyed everyone else’s company during dinner and tried to keep the conversation lively because we were all a bit tired.

After dinner I found that the bar had Evian – otherwise known as imported water. There was a glowing aura around it when I saw completely safe drinking water. It was from France, but I guess there are worse places to get water from – like India. For some reason, it took about 15 minutes for my Evian purchase, so by that time, I was dead tired and ready for bed. I went up to the room and flipped through the channels for a while, and then decided that based on when our wake-up call is arriving in the morning, I should fall asleep quick.

When the telephone rang at 4am, I was having mixed emotions. I was excited to get the day started because it’s Taj Mahal day, but then again, I was getting up at 4am. I really shouldn’t complain though because that’s when my Mom wakes up on a daily basis. I should have another talk with her about that…

I woke my roommate up shortly after and we were both one of the first ones to be checked out, and down and waiting for everyone else in the lobby at 4:15. I didn’t come on Semester at Sea to spend most of my in-port nights partying, but I think that was the plan of a number of people, because as people started to trickle down from their rooms, they had clearly only gone to bed about an hour prior and were still quite toasted from earlier in the evening. This is all well and good except that when they’re late, they make us late for our train. Yes, we had to get up this early to catch a train out of Delhi into Agra.

Now, the smarter readers, and even the more perceptive ones, will ask themselves why we didn’t just fly into Agra from Chennai. Long story short: you can’t, you can’t fly into there from anywhere, you’ve got to take a train into Agra.

We were supposed to leave at 4:45, with everyone on the buses by 4:30. By the time all the drunks made it down to the bus it was after 5, and we have no idea how long it takes to get to the train station, so we’re all concerned we’re going to miss our 5:45 train. By the time we all get on the bus, and our boxed breakfasts get passed out, everyone’s a little antsy and annoyed at the drunks. And I’m sitting next to one of them. If you’re a reader of the other blogs, this is the same guy that woke up naked on the street in Salvador, Brazil, to give you a frame of reference. To me, that indicates a problem. But I’m not one to judge.

So the guy sitting next to me gets a boxed lunch, which only takes about two minutes to fall off his lap, and then the tour guide starts handing out tickets for the train. I knew this would be trouble when it started, but there’s only so much one can do. In India tickets are not what tickets are in other lands. Our tour guide hands us a piece of paper, not much larger than a postage stamp, which has our train car and seat assignment. It’s not a ticket though, it’s a piece of white paper with someone’s handwriting on it. It’s probably the most unofficial ticket I’ve held in my entire life. The guy sitting next to me jammed his into one of his pockets and then fell asleep during that motion.

We drove in the dark again to the Delhi train station. I’ve seen and heard some unbelievable stuff about the trains in India. To me, they’re one of the most bizarre modes or methods of transportation that I think I’ve ever seen. It’s not like taking a train in another country. Taking a train in India, which is so ingrained in the culture of the country, is something that I’ve been looking forward to and dreading at the same time. I’ve been looking forward to it to see what it’s really like, and so that I can experience this incredible part of the culture that I’ve only watched with mouth agape previously. I’ve been dreading it because it just seems overwhelming, and it’s yet another step out of my comfort zone, and I don’t know that I’ve taken this many steps out of my zone in such a short and confined amount of time, so I’m not really sure exactly how I’m going to react to that, and there’s only more to come.

Much to the surprise of most people on the bus, and this includes everyone but the guide and the driver, the train station was only about 5 minutes away from the hotel, and they just neglected to tell us that. The bus pulled up to the train station, and as we walk into the train station, there’s another smell working its way in, and I can’t place it again, and there’s no water around. As we were walking to the train station, which was about 100 meters from where they dropped us off (sorry, I had to go metric there) we walked by all the bicycle rickshaw drivers sleeping on their rickshaws. Most had blankets on them with their seat supporting their feet and the rest of their body in some odd position resting in the cab portion. It was one after another, after another on the way in. I couldn’t count how many or how many deep there were. It was unbelievable.

We walked into the train station and straight out to the track. Nobody checked our ‘ticket’, there was no security, it was quite open. It’s just the way that they do business. We waited on the train platform, and I just tried to watch everything that was happening and soak it in. Not everyone tried to do that though. Another member of our group took off his shirt and sat on the ground and started smoking a cigarette with a small group of three elder Indians who somehow were in the middle of a crowd of young Americans. I’m not sure what the purpose of taking his shirt off was, or why there was a necessity to have a smoke with these guys, but he still might have been toasted from earlier in the evening. I’m not sure, but that might be a fair guesstimate.

One of the other things they told us in preport was that the incidents of rabies in India were also sky high, and the thing about rabies is that you only get it if you are bitten or scratched by an infected mammal, and once you start to show symptoms, you’re a goner. You don’t survive rabies. It’s a bad one. And wouldn’t you know, there were one or two dogs walking around the platform and hanging around the crazy Americans.

I like to think that I’m a smart guy. Read this next part and let me know if it’s me or everybody else that’s crazy. If there’s mangy looking, possibly rabies carrying dogs walking around, they’re not something that we should draw attention to or want to keep around us, for safety reasons. Some people decided that the dog looked hungry, and it did, that’s a perfectly fine observation. So, this person, having not eaten all of their boxed lunch, decided to feed the dog – out of her hand, in the middle of our group. There are three errors with this procedure. First, feeding a dog out of your hand when it may have rabies is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen. Second, when you feed a dog, it works just like that book When You Give a Mouse a Cookie – it’s going to want a glass of milk. And wouldn’t you know, when the dog finished eating, it wanted more, and wouldn’t leave. And thirdly, like cars pulling over in Yellowstone when one person stops to point, the other dogs in the area are going to start coming over and begging for food too. If one dog that may have rabies isn’t bad and dangerous enough, three more on their way is not good for my mental health.

Thankfully, before the other dogs could come close, our train arrived on the tracks. Speaking of tracks, I wouldn’t get down on those tracks for anything in the world. Even in the dark, I could tell that there was something wrong down there, and I really wouldn’t fully understand until later in the trip, and you’ll see why then.

Our train was unlike others that I have seen in India, although not entirely different. Our ‘tickets’ gave us our seat to sit in and it was like riding on a train, except very different. The seat was almost comfortable, but then again, the day I find a truly comfortable seat will be the day that India becomes clean enough to eat off of.

Other than that, it was a relatively smooth ride into Agra. Our guides didn’t sit with us on the train, so we didn’t know if we were supposed to know when to get off, or if they would come and get us. Once we figured out that they would come and get us, which was when they actually came and told us that the stop was coming up, we relaxed. In what would be the first of many, our guides took a liking to calling us collectively as a group by yelling “Semester!” with the loudness of voice increasing with each syllable, like we had done something wrong.

In addition to odd voice inflections, another thing that India does differently is answer questions. In the rest of the world, a nod means yes, and a shake of the head means no. This also true in India, however, moving the head in a figure-8 from side to side means okay. If you’re not paying attention, this looks like a weird no, but it instead means okay. It’s tricky to pick up on at first, but you have to get used to it after a while.

As we exited the Agra train station, the only way to describe what was happening outside was pandemonium. The cars and tuk-tuks honking, people everywhere, busy streets, pollution filled air – it’s back to sensory overload. And again, like ants or herded cattle, we followed each other this time, because the guides stayed back to make sure that everyone made it out, towards the buses, which were about as far away as possible and amidst hordes of other buses. Ours had ‘Semester at Sea’ written on the front of our two buses. That was kind of a dead giveaway.

And once we were all on the buses, we were off to the Taj Mahal. Again, we thought we’d be driving forever, but it was about fifteen minutes away. For security and congestion purposes, the buses have to park about a ten minute walk away from the entrance. We consider this to be no big deal, until we learn what’s on the walk over. To properly describe this, I need to define the term ‘hawkers.’ Hawkers are people that rush up to you to sell you stuff and do not leave you alone. They will stop at nothing to sell their stuff, and they’re everywhere. They never come in small numbers either, there’s none or too many to count. We’ve encountered people selling stuff to us in the past, but this was an over the top introduction to India.

It was so overwhelming, that your social skills to tell these people to leave you alone fail miserably. And as a result, you don’t know what to do. I found that saying no, avoiding eye contact, and not stopping are the best ways, but they will follow you even if you ignore them. That was the biggest culture shock of the trip so far. It’s something so foreign that it doesn’t make sense to us. And when we say no, they’ll try to lower the price and give us more, but no just doesn’t seem to always register. I’ve never been any place like that where no is ignored so blatantly. It’s actually bizarre to watch, and was very taxing to be a part of and walk through.

I was talking to a couple other people that we would have a competition of who would be the first person to spot the Taj Mahal. There would be no prize, and the bragging rights would be minimal, but it seemed like a good thing to do at the time. As we were coming over the crest of a small hill, just above the tree line, the Taj Mahal comes into view, and, as one of the world’s greatest, treasured, storied, most recognizable images comes into view, I say, “Oh, there it is.” I like the understatement and simplicity of that.

For some reason, I had assumed the grounds of the Taj Mahal to be somewhat bigger than they were, but not so. And something else I wanted to see was if the Taj really was in the middle of a nicer area of Agra, or if it was just in the middle of it all, and it really is just in the middle of it all. It’s just there, as if almost by accident, but I know that that came first, and everything around it followed subsequently. Within the last forty some-odd years, the Taj Mahal wasn’t nearly the tourist attraction that it was. It had graffiti all over it and was falling apart. It took the Indian government a while to realize the potential moneymaker they had on their hands, and spent a lot of money fixing the place up to be the spectacle that it is today.

The entrance to the grounds is shaped like an ‘L’ and when you walk in, you’re perpendicular to the Taj Mahal, and it isn’t until you go around the bend that you can see it through a large stone archway. And from there, you’ve got one of the best views of the Taj Mahal. Everything you’ve ever heard about how impressive and spendictacular the Taj Mahal is is absolutely and definitively true.

As we walked around the grounds of the Taj Mahal there is, as should be expected, an amount of security. They’re all Indian, and they yell at people all the time. The trick of it all is that I was never sure when I was being yelled at. I don’t think I did anything that would require a reprimand. We did go into the mosque that’s adjacent to the Taj Mahal and I think we were yelled at for going in there, but I think that was the only one where I did something I wasn’t supposed to. The signage wasn’t always the best.

It’s one of the most surreal experiences to be at the Taj Mahal. It’s difficult to put into words. They say it’s the most photographed thing on the planet. I’m not going to argue with that, it deserves every photo. While we were walking the grounds, there were two things that I realized as I was walking. The first was that I’ve never seen photos of the inside, and the second is that I’ve never seen a photo of the back of the Taj Mahal, and I made sure to at the very least see both of those.

Like most other places in India, you can’t walk on your shoes inside the Taj Mahal, so you have to wear these goofy shoe covers, but it’s better than taking off your shoes. The inside of the Taj Mahal is actually a bit of what you would expect it to be. It’s all white marble, and a little on the dark side because light only comes in through a small number of windows and doorways, and it’s a tomb. The outside of the Taj Mahal is an octagon, and so is the inside. There’s a high ceiling and in the center of the room is a carved marble gate that’s tricky to see through. In the center is the wife of this guy who built the place, and then he’s buried, off-center, to the left.

Something I never knew about the Taj Mahal is that there is an incredible amount of jewel and gemstone inlay. And it all fits perfectly. That’s the impressive part. The marble is carved immaculately and all the gemstones fit perfectly. They had guides, that would give you a tour, and then you’d have to pay them afterwards, but they would shine a flashlight into the gems and they would glow amazingly. It’s very, very pretty, and it’s kind of a small space, so there’s really not a whole lot to see in there, so you really can’t spend a lot of time there.

Outside, now that I know where to look for the gemstones, the structure becomes even more impressive. They say that the best time to view the Taj Mahal is during sunrise and sunset, and I could never figure out why. It’s because when the sun’s rays are low, all the gems reflect and shine at the same time, so it looks like the Taj Mahal is sparkling. During the day however, you’ve got to stand at a certain spot to find the reflection, and a guide has to show you where, and you have to pay a small fee for that, but it’s worth it because it’s something else that’s very impressive to see.

Then we went around to the back. Would you believe that the back looks an awful lot like the front? It does. It’s just missing the larger doorway, and sunlight. At least in the morning it doesn’t seem like that side gets any sun. I wouldn’t say that it’s a disappointment, nothing at the Taj Mahal disappoints, but I was hoping to discover something that nobody else has. I guess there’s a reason why I’ve never seen photos of the back, and that’s because people already have photos of the front.

We weren’t given a whole two hours at the Taj Mahal so, we had to move, and when we kept looking at our watches to see when we would have to leave, we were disappointed. I didn’t want to leave. There’s nothing to do there, but I could have spent the rest of the day there, just walking around and looking at the Taj Mahal. I’d have to bring my own lunch to do that, but if there’s a next time, I’ll be prepared for it. It was just one stop on our long itinerary, and it was one stop that I was sad to leave, because for a moment, you forget where you are in the world. It feels like you’re taken somewhere else and nothing matters, but we had to move on, and leave the Taj Mahal behind us.

Of course, leaving the Taj Mahal meant one thing – we had to walk back through the row of hawkers, who had quadrupled in number since we walked through earlier. Like the dogs at the train station, they told their friends that the Americans were coming through. It was a mob of people rushing us, and it wouldn’t have been as bad if people didn’t try to buy stuff, because that means that any of us might want to buy something. I actually forced myself between a few girls in our group and the hawker that was harassing her and not leaving her alone. In the US, I’m not scary looking, but in foreign countries, I can actually pass for someone threatening looking, so I was able to fend them off like the Ninja Turtles fending off the foot soldiers. Walking by those hawkers is still one of the most insane experiences that I’ve had on this whole voyage.

After we made it back to the buses, followed by a number of hawkers down the street to the bus, we drove a few minutes away to the expansive complex that is the Agra Fort. This is built out of what looked like red sandstone, so it stood in great contrast with the Taj Mahal, which was still visible only about a mile away. The fort has a bizarre and storied history about sons locking up fathers in one room until his death, and the fort is full of back passageways that take you to completely different places. They gave us a half hour here, which was enough to walk around and take photos of, then walk out. It’s an old Mughal palace, so if you’d like to know more about it, you know what to do.

It was a nice stop, but I would have rather been at the Taj Mahal for another half hour if I had the option between the two. After the fort, we went to a random hotel for lunch. It was alright, I had my bottled soda for lunch, as I have so far in most countries because I figure that it’s the safest way to go. I think I’m going to make it through five days in India, but I’ve got a feeling that as the week goes on that I’m going to get sick of Indian food. It’s just so different from the food back home, and what we’ve been eating along the way.

In Mauritius, I ate at an Indian restaurant, and dinner was a bowl of mush. I think they confused our dinner with pigs’ but that’s another story. I’ve yet to see anything remotely resembling that meal anywhere in India. I’ve yet to hear of that kind of meal in India. I have no idea what they gave us in Mauritius. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s a trick they play in tourists to get rid of the food that they know the locals won’t eat, and so the tourists think it’s something special like a delicacy.

After lunch, we began our long drive to Jaipur, otherwise known as the Pink City. The drive is supposed to be something like 150 miles. I drive 265 miles two and from school and it takes about four and a half hours on average. Let’s keep this reference figure in mind as we move on.

Along the way, we made a pit stop at Fatehpur Sikri. This is an old palace of the Mughals as well, I believe, and what I found most interesting was the giant Parcheesi board that was tiled in the middle of the grounds. I don’t know if this was where they came up with the game, but it would be fun if it was. And if it wasn’t, I don’t want you to ruin my dream and tell me otherwise, that I wasn’t at the location of the world’s first Parcheesi board. Let me have my moment.

Fatehpur Sikri’s architecture is very interesting because it was composed of something like three different religions along the way, so the influences are all over the place. It’s in the middle of nowhere, and I’m not exactly sure how it was a stop along the way, but it was a fun stop for reasons that I can’t explain. And our guides led us around and told us stuff about it, calling us along the entire time by a volume increasing, “Semester!” I got annoyed at the boring talks so I, as usual, wandered away from the group at times to see what was around the nearby corners and to take photos. They kept yelling at me that I wasn’t paying attention or following along, but that’s their loss.

After we left Fatehpur Sikri, it was back on the bus and off to Jaipur. As I said earlier, India doesn’t use their horn to annoy the person in front of you, they use it whenever they entire a vehicle’s blindspot. And, as luck would have it, cars are always passing one another on the streets of India, so the horn gets quite a lot of use. When thirty or forty college students spend a lot of time on a bus, invariably we all try to fall asleep. We would have been able to with a decent success rate, but between the other cars on the road and our bus, which seemed to have an unusually and unnecessarily loud horn, we didn’t have any luck at all.

I was sitting up in the front with my friend Shantel and it was difficult to look out of the front window at times. Most of the time we were on paved roads, but, as this was the main roadway connecting the bustling cities of Agra and Jaipur, it gets used frequently and there were quite a number of road construction projects, so at times the roads were too bumpy to be able to read a book on board. We would be shaking and vibrating that much. At times it was bone jarring and was incredibly uncomfortable and anyone who was tired enough, or good enough, to fall asleep amidst all the honking, was rudely woken up with the jarring vibrations. These were not vibrations Brian Wilson would have called ‘good.’

But because I was sitting in the front row of seats, I had a clear view of the roadway in front of us. In the United States we have lines on the road that tell us when it is a good time to pass a vehicle, and when it is not a good time to pass a vehicle, and it indicated by a solid line. There are no lines on an Indian road for the most part. Most of our roadways that we were on were single lanes in each direction, so when there was a slow poke in front of us, action apparently had to be taken quickly.

Our bus would get behind a slow car/truck/horse-drawn carriage/whatever and honk, and then floor it around the vehicle. It almost seemed like our driver didn’t like to check for oncoming traffic in the other lane because we pulled out into oncoming traffic and then pulled back quickly. And there would be no annoyed honking, or a honking of warning or caution for that matter, because that’s not what the horns are used for. If an accident’s about to happen, you don’t honk your horn to avoid it, you just hope for the best, I guess. But we would be playing this game of chicken the entire afternoon. I timed a ten minute section of roadway, and we passed cars twelve times. That’s an average of more than one vehicle every minute, and we were driving for hours! I’ll tell you how long we were driving for in a little bit.

Speaking of trucks, some of these trucks were what I would call ‘overloaded.’ When the cargo the truck is carry is sticking out a few feet on both sides as well as the front and back, and is larger than the actual truck itself, I question the sanity of the driver, and the loaders for that matter. I can imagine the conversation where the driver asks if they should put another bundle on, and the response of the other guy is something like, “Sure, why not?”

There were some points where I actually wanted to stop watching out of the front window because it was so frightening. It’s not like I could sit and read or try to fall asleep, because the bus was shaking too much. And this is how everyone in India drives. We were passing, and being passed at what I would call an alarming rate. There were some passes that we weren’t going to make, and nearly had collisions, and one of two things happens. Either the driver of the bus slows down and goes all the way back behind the slower vehicle, or the more common response, the driver of the bus speeds up and the oncoming vehicle slows down and gets out of the way. I guess whichever is bigger generally is what gives way, but I’ve never seen a game of chicken like that in my entire life, and I’m not exactly sure I want to see one like that ever again, because let me tell you, that was something else.

We made one half hour pit stop along the way at, what else, a gift shop, before continuing on our way. And it was a really shaky and expensive gift shop, too. They clearly get a commission from that place. But let’s put the remainder of this drive into perspective. It was a 150 mile drive that we left for at 1pm. We stopped for a half hour at both Fatehpur Sikri and the pricey middle of nowhere gift shop. So that’s an hour of stops. We don’t pull into the hotel in Jaipur until 8:45pm. I don’t know what took so long! It’s not like we were poking along at a slow pace either, we were booking it along. I know we weren’t going slow because of all the cars we passed and left in our dust.

After we waited in the lobby for an eternity to find some kind of instruction, or perhaps a room key, we gave up and walked over to a buffet dinner. I picked out all the food I recognized, and needless to say, I finished off my dinner with a Balance Bar that I brought with me. The Hotel Mansingh was where we would be spending the next two nights, so I was hoping the menu would change between tonight and tomorrow.

As I was on my way up to bed, one of the girls pulled me over and said that they wanted more people to watch a puppet show that was set up outside. They said they were about to start, so I obliged. I guess they wanted more people to see their show, because we didn’t get going for another ten minutes. And it was the most anticlimactic puppet show I have ever seen. First of all, they were marionettes suspended from above, and they walked back and forth on the ground. Four different puppets walked six feet back and forth. I said, “Thank you, India,” and went to bed. We’ve had a long day, and tomorrow’s only going to be longer.

Next time on the blog: The rest of India and Star Wars Day