breathtaking!

It's just breathtaking!
The Taj Mahal is a must see!  Add this one to your bucket list's, my friends!

Taj Mahal (east side view)

I’ve never been somewhere with so many tourists!  And all around you people are gasping and saying, “ wow, it’s even more beautiful in real life.”  Everyone is shocked by how in awe they are with something that they wondered would feel ordinary up close.  It’s just huge!  I took some photos at a distance so that you can see the scale of the people walking on it like tiny ants.  

I wasn’t feeling so great on our way to the Taj and after we left it hit.  And by it I mean my nasty traveler’s sick that haunts me everywhere I go.  Seriously my body hates leaving home!  Or it may also have been the “Indian Breakfast” that N bought us from a sketchy street vendour.  The tastiness it always so tempting!  So I’m still not feeling awesome but pushing through. 

We check out our first bizarre today.  All the tourists have this fantastic flowing Indian style pants.  I have never seen anyone Indian wearing them but they’re really great!  I did not find them in the bizarre but it was an exciting, though hectic experience.    It’s sort of just random little booths set up along a busy street with no obvious division between shopper and traffic and cattle.  I got suckered into buying some fantastic leather shoes.  The salesmen said I was very beautiful, what could I do!  I had to buy!  Haha the shoes were very beautiful too so it was a win-win for us both.  The rickshaw took us to the wrong side of the city because he did not understand us when we told him our hotel name.  Which meant a very long hot ride in very bad traffic.  It’s much hotter in Agra than it has been anywhere else.  Neither of us was really feeling fantastic by the time we got out of the fumy heat.  On a random note though I do really  love being in the streets because the traffic here has a life of its own. I don’t know how it runs so smoothly and so chaotically at the same time!  My favorite are the motorcycles with a family of five all squashed onto them.  I love watching the women in their sari’s elegantly perched on the back of these crazy bikes.  The bright fabric cheerfully fluttering in the wind as the zoom past. 

We are off, now, to catch a train to Sawai Madhopur where we go Ranthambore National Park.  Unfortunately we will arrive there at 1am.  Hopefully I can sleep on the train. 

I am super excited to, hopefully, see our first tigers!