Agra is an adventure!
After eating breakfast and freshening up, we headed out at 1000 to see the Taj Mahal. It is so much more than I expected! Monuments, for me at least, tend to be a bit of a let down. You get to see the wonderful building/monument/whatever, take your tacky tourist picture in front of it, and then when you proceed up to the actual monument there isn't much to see. I feel culturally ignorant saying this, because there is a beautiful love story of a king who so loved his wife that he built her this exquisite complex and when she passed away (during child birth I think? Of her 14th child omg) he build the Taj as a tomb. So I didn't realize there's a whole complex aside from the taj so we saw that and it was pretty cool. Then we learned about how the builder (the king who's name I don't remember) had left his fortune to his eldest son but his third son was a greedy mofo and killed off his 2 eldest brothers and locked his dad away in their house so that he became ruler (why not kill your dad off too?). So after we had lunch we headed out to Agra Fort to see where he was locked up and where he whole family lived. The immensity of this structure is insane! But when you're royal and have 14 kids I guess you need a lot of space. It's pretty cool to have seen one of the 7 wonders of the world, except apparently there are many different lists of these 7 so there's actually way more (I think this undermines the title but whatever it's still super cool).
It started to rain on us at Agra Fort luckily right when we were finishing up so we headed for the buses. It was still pretty early so they took us to this shop that makes things out of marble, the Clinton's visited once - there were pictures of the event everywhere. It was grossly expensive and I have no use for a table or an elephant crafted of marble so I didn't buy anything and just looked around. They also craft steel things and had a marble/steel model of the Taj Mahal - I think they said the 2nd largest in the world. Oh! We also went past a world renowned hospital for leperosy and learned that the first mental hospital in Asia was here in Agra after that jerk son locked his dad up and claimed he was "crazy" -- the people were just trying to help the king out.
Since the marble store was way out of any of our budgets (were students hello) we convinced our guides to take us to a more souvineer-y shop where we can get things to bring home for people. I didn't get much in the shop but did haggle with the street merchants loitering outside. We got some nice trinkety things but not the things I'm looking for that people want me to bring them home, so a few of us made plans to head back to the Taj Mahal area later (couldn't be more than a mile from our hotel) because here was a bizarre with exactly the things we wanted but we didn't have time to shop before. We had an hour before dinner and we thought that was the perfect time to do it, but the people in charge of the PCT said absolutely not they have no idea what this area is like at night and there were no tuktuks to drive us and we absolutely were not walking so we had to stay. Oh well, there are worse things that could happen, and they say our next city, Jaipur, is the city of shopping so we can just wait. There was a hookah place in the hotel, but with only 45 minutes until dinner we would be rushed and not enjoy it or just not finish it, so we said we'd wait till after dinner. There was a bar in the hotel so we were like hey what the heck why not, so me and Camille went inside. I don't really like beer that much (basically at all) but a 40oz Budweiser was like half the price of a tiny little mixed drink so I said YOLO and went for it. Approximately 2 seconds later, a bunch of people from Canada and Australia walked in, so we joined them and just hung out until dinner. Well, I basically out myself into a food coma from dinner (our meals at the hotel were so good, my fave so far) and proceeded to promptly fall asleep in Camille's room waiting for my roommates to be done with dinner. Oh yeah my roommates are really cool by the way, Melissa from Quebec and Emanuela from Slovenia.
Anyway, I woke up in Camille's room with a pounding headache and promptly headed to my room to take a shower and fall asleep to hopefully sleep it off. After how much sweating we did today, I'm sure I'm just dehydrated. You'd think 3-4 L of water a day is plenty but not here.
Tomorrow we venture to Jaipur, I'm excited to move on to City #3! Namaste!