Love is Life: Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal!!

Agra.... Wow.. This city make me feel so lost.. First of all: IT'S COLD!!

Stepping of the train was interesting. As all train stations there was a lot of hustlers at the Agra station, BUT.. Holy mother of cows, Agra must be in the top.. In the end we got a rickshaw to a hotel Stu and Pam (nice couple we met in varkala) had recommended us AND ended up staying at an other one called the India-inn with very nice personal (like many places here got), but with the doubtful intentions, I've started to sense way to much. As soon as it comes to money.. O boy...

We went to the back of the Taj Mahal, witch the bird way is 3 km from our hotel, in a rickshaw the roadway, witch is 24km through very thick traffic. This gave me time to take some photos and watch people though.

One rickshaw had what seemed to be two families covering four generations squeezed in to it. A boy washing dishes at the side of the road, half a meter away from the wheels of a buss. Angry men cursing each other when they cant get trough the impossibly narrow space in front of them.
Beggars pulling your clothes trying to get you to look at their newborn infant.

The back of Taj was nice but extremely crowded when I arrived there. I wanted to ask what was going on but didn't find anyone with good answer (I found a tremendous amount of people wanting to shake my hand and a couple of kids trying to pull my ring of while shaking it... Sigh)

Taking photos was harder than you would think... what would you do IF:
A crowd of 15 kids follows you around whereever you go.
They all want you to take a picture of them and then show them (the one in the center of the picture will scream and brag and wants you to show all his friends that he's in the middle)
They turn a deaf ear when you try to explain it would be nice to have some space and maybe take one picture that you were visible in too...

WELL.. I ended up:
Surrendering!!

Laughing!!
Taking a tremendous amount of pictures of street kids and showing them listening to their joy cries as they would recognice themselves on the screen of my camera..

The next morning we woke up WAY to early, Sometime before sunrise, to go to The Taj while it wasent overcrowded. It was hard but it worked out...

Our hotel is less than one kilometre from the entrance to The Taj jet it felt like we stayed in a crazy unplanned slum... We walked some narrow streets and then... A big entrance to the Taj Mahal area.

For 750 rps (you heard right, probably the single most expencive thing I've bought so far) we got not only entrance, we also got complimetrary whater and shoe covers... WOW.. Hrmm

But, yes, it is amazing, Big, and very muslim! NICE.. It's all made out of marble with diffrently carved stones forming patterns of flowers and arabic print. Once you see it up close it's MindBlowing (intonation on Blowing, it felt like a wind emptied my scull when I realized the amount of work pour souls had put in to this wonder), just take a closer look at the base of the Taj in the picture and you might se some people at the bottom...

I played around the Taj for a few hours feeling immensely touristy with my camera hanging around my necks. then it was time to maove on to something much more important than marble... BREAKFAST...

While eating our falsly advertised meal (though we would be paying the promised price, HA!) we met two very nice souls, Martha and Chris who's number we got, setting loose plans for dinner..

We had a very nice(..Not.. but kind of nice) tour with a bicycle rickshaw ("No sir, we Do not want to go with your rickshaw, not even for 10 rps" A small discussion with Philip, a shoulder shrug and then "OK sir, why not. We don't have anything better to do, show us around") that took us around to places they got commission at letting us look at random stores.. We unfortunately ended up buying a pashmina shale that later turned out to be made of viscose.. 400RPS.. Darn, damn, @#%$#......

The rickshaw drivers were nice and smiled a lot (No wonder, they probably made a fortune in commission on our fake shawls...) we took them for a chai (the rickshaw driver tried my beloved ray bans) before we got a Phone call from Alon telling us he was staring at our hotel. Wow, let the craziness begin.

We ended up having dinner with Marta and Cris (A super tourist expensive one where they added the tax as a plus on the menu instead of including it in the price. Alon got a scene going refusing to pay the tax we never got information about. The indians in the resturant looked SUPER UNCONFORTABLE and were quite relived when we left.

This kid was sooo happy that she got to play connect-4 with me (even tho I didn't let her win once).. She was working at this chitty rooftop resturant wich, like many other trown togeter rooftop resturants, had old plasic chairs, a table and a citchen built in a clauset with a gas stove and VERY dubious hygiene.

The next day we had bonded so much with the lovely Cris and Martha we decided to head to Jaipur together. So we all met up on the trainstation 630am. Four hours later the train's still late (First time). During this time Alon and Philip managed to get fesis on my fire staf kicking it over the track to eachother, finaly cracking it rendering it pretty useless for firespinning. O well.. They promised me compensation for the protective socs that got covered in chit and a new staff.. Right....

Indian crowds is very interesting as the seemingly appear out of nowere and in quit large numbers. This time we decided to have a connect-4 tournament at the train station, about 35 seconds in to the first game we had an ex