January 7, 2010
This day ends with Zack sprawled in a ditch and covered in poop, surrounded by our group (didn't mean to rhyme...lol) with the girls all trying to hand Zack alcohol wipes (intended to help him clean himself but functionally not doing much except making the girls feel like they were helping) and the guys all trying to keep locals from pouring water that was SURE to have some sort of disease in it over Zack to "clean" him as he tried to collect himself and comprehend what had just happened.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Don't worry, we'll get back to that scene. But first...
Remember that conversation I said we had in traffic yesterday? It was after we FINALLY got a rickshaw and were headed to dinner. At this certain light we must have sat there for 5-10 minutes. Grayson was sitting up front with the driver and Andy, Zack and I were in the back. Grayson kept looking over to his right-turns out there were some girls in the van next to us that kept taking pictures of him and then turning around the camera so he could see the pictures. He returned the favor and then struck up a conversation with them. Turns out they were a cricket team from Goa (south India) that had come across the country to play in a tournament and won! We congratulated them on their victory and by that time traffic was clearing up so we went on our way. We didn't think much of it until the next morning when we were flipping through the paper and found this:
That girl in the picture? One of the girls in the van! Turns out this team had just made history by being the first girls team to beat a boys team in an official tournament. Pretty awesome and quite the crazy coincidence that we just happened to be stuck in traffic next to them.
We spent the morning driving from Delhi to Agra. (By the end of the day I had read all 350 pages of Planet India [one of the assigned books for the class] :it was a pretty quick read haha) This was just slightly terrifying because it was super foggy on the road and you couldn't see anything other than the car right in front of you. While that by itself wasn't too bad, our driver kept passing the cars in front of us. This was a two-lane highway, so that involved us swooping out into the oncoming lane and accelerating past the cars in our lane. There were some very close calls...
But we made it safely to our first stop for the day: Akbar the Great's tomb.
It took forever to get this picture because people kept walking in front of me-just slightly frustrating haha.
The pathway up to the tomb itself. The groove down the center used to have water flowing through it.
Like all of the rest of these monuments, this one was almost unbelievable (in scale, in detail, in beauty, etc.)
Inside had some of the best-preserved painting/decoration that we saw on the trip. The colors STILL just pop off the wall.
This became routine-shoes on, shoes off. shoes on, shoes off. I know it was mostly because we were going to so many holy and sacred sites, but it sure seemed like you couldn't take more than three steps without having to take your shoes off! haha
The colors plus the architectures were just too amazing here for me to not take a picture.
We headed to the Taj Mahal next. However, we had quite the wait ahead of us. What we didn't realize was that representatives from the Commonwealth Games (kinda like the olympics but limited to countries that used to be part of the British Empire like the UK, Australia, India, etc.) were at the Taj and had it shut down to us "normal" tourists. We were going to be in Agra
for one more day, but it was Thursday and the Taj is closed on Fridays. So we waited for them to leave. It was pretty boring...until the camels started fighting, that is.
Yeah, so there were camels there that were either fighting or mating. I'm still not quite sure...I took a video of a portion of it:
Pretty intense. Finally they let us in and we headed towards the Taj.
Our first view of it. It was getting towards sunset and there was fog blanketing the city, but that did nothing to take away from the building's beauty.
This is literally the perfect building. Just magnificent. And you can see it in pictures every day of your life and STILL be blown away by visiting it in person. It does not disappoint.
You can see the top of the mosque to the side of the Taj poking up in the background-there's one on either side.
So here's where we return to the story at the beginning of this post. We were walking back to the bus after seeing the Taj and it's pretty dark outside. Like, pitch black. There's some lighting on the street, but it's really not doing too much to help. So we are walking back and there's a fork in the road. Zack, who is walking towards the front of our group, starts to walk one way but Norbert calls out to him and tells him to go back the other way. Zack laughs and smiles, saying something along the lines of, "I'm that guy who will just walk anywhere unless someone tells me I'm going the wrong way!"
He continues: "Did any of you guys play that computer game Lemmings? I'm like one of those little lemmings-I'll just keep walking and you have to put things in front of me or else I'll---"
And then Zack disappeared. Instantly.
Those of you who have met Zack will know that this is NOT an easy thing to happen-Zack is a big person who is not even remotely close to lose in a crowd, yet here he was pulling a Batman or Nightcrawler on us and vanishing into thin air.
We found Zack at the bottom of a 4 or 5 foot deep open sewer ditch. Luckily it was almost empty...but not quite. Zack's pants and shoes were covered with poop. Praise God he didn't break anything. He had to sit there for five minutes or so though and just collect himself before we could continue to the bus.
At the time this was a very serious and somber turn of events. However, later we were able to look back and laugh about it. I mean, come on. First of all, he falls into a ditch of poop. That's pretty funny right there. Add to that the fact that he was literally talking about how he was like a character from Lemmings that would just walk straight and fall if there wasn't any outside intervention and it's just classic :).
We stayed at a hotel that night: I took some pictures of what definitely felt like a bit of luxury after the dorms at JNU.
Tomorrow: another Red Fort! touts, touts, and more touts! Parcheesi! finishing my second book in two days! And tons of time at the train station!
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