Very, very bad blogger am I, letting all this time slip away with no entries.

After making friends with Vicky the rickshaw driver in Jaipur, Jillian and I headed to Agra.

Agra is a horrible city. I feel bad writing that since it must be someone’s home, but, from a traveler’s perspective, there is just not much to recommend it. It’s not very small and it’s not very large. It’s not very interesting looking and there isn’t much to do, other than to visit the Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal itself, however, is incredible. Built as a gesture of love from a man (who was in a position to take a lot of money from the government) to his first wife, it is basically a large temple. It houses the bodies of the man who built it, his first wife and a couple of his other wives, though his other wives are buried closer to the entrance in parts of the Taj that aren’t as attractive as the part you always see in pictures.

The Taj Mahal costs about Rs. 30 ($.75 USD) or so for Indian nationals to visit, and Rs. 750 for foreigners. Ouch! That’s $18.75 USD. Pretty hard on a backpacking budget. But it is beautiful. They say the white marble glows different colors throughout the day, depending on how the sunlight changes. We were there for a couple of hours before sunset, but didn’t really get to see that effect, because the sun was covered by many clouds.

The Taj Mahal is made of marble and has details made from semi-precious stone throughout it. It took 17 years to build. The man who had it built had it started while the wife he was building it for was still alive, which seems a little creepy to me, but maybe I’m missing the point.

As an Indian friend wrote to me, “Youll must have been really amazed by the taj mahal that what most people come to India to see. you knw there is a saying ‘If you come to India you have to viagra(via-agra), to see the biggest erection of a male to the female.’ “

So that is one way of looking at it. India seems to be in love with plays on words. (On the roads everywhere is written – ‘Speed thrills but kills.’) It seems that the poetry of it is more important than the actual communication. Which I kind of like. Art in everyday life makes things just a little bit nicer.

One interesting thing about the Taj Mahal was that Jillian and I were instant celebrities. On a fairly regular basis in whatever town we are in in India, people will occasionally snap a photograph of us, but the Taj was ridiculous. I would say about 20 different individuals and / or groups of people came over to take our picture within the space of about an hour and a half.

At first it was funny and entertaining and, I’ll admit, I felt a little special. People were putting babies in our laps like we were politicians and using their cell phone cameras to capture the moment. Men, women, children, entire families. We made it a bit of a game and would engage in a bit of banter with our ‘fans.’ Then one guy came over, dragging about 3 Indian girls behind him. They stayed back a ways while he took about 5 pictures. He said to us, “You’re so beautiful. You’re so beautiful. I don’t like Indian women,” which just really pissed me off, for many reasons.

One frustrating thing about India is the preoccupation with being pale. There is a sense here that being dark is bad. They sell skin bleaching creams everywhere, and all the people in ads and most of the celebrities are very fair skinned – many to the point of looking basically European. Here, pale = attractive, which just makes me sad. Most Indian people are not at all pale and I hate to think that they are all looking at ads and Indian celebrities and comparing themselves to those images, thinking they are inadequate. I, for one, am captivated by dark black-brown eyes in particular, and the variation of natural coloring of human beings in general. I’ve seen so many breathtakingly beautiful dark-skinned men, women and children on the street in India. They should be in the ads, but they never are.

As a very pale person myself, I’m always wishing I weren’t. I’m tanning on the beach here and, at home, I used to use sunless tanning lotion. I guess it’s kind of the same thing as an Indian person using a bleaching cream, and maybe I should learn to love my skin the way it is naturally before I go telling other people they should love their skin the way it is naturally, but it just seems worse to want to go from dark to light, what with being trained to feel guilt over white people’s habit of colonizing and exploiting people who are usually darker skinned than they are.

In any case, I was annoyed that this man was dismissing all of the women in his country, just like that, especially since he had 3 of them just a few feet away, and I thought that, if he was going to say it to me, he should be prepared to say it in front of them. So I called them over and said, “You know what this man just said to us?”

Turns out they were his sisters. I hope he got in trouble for that little comment.

Anyway, eventually, all the photography began to get invasive. The guy with the sisters wanted to take video and started getting a little too excited while he gushed over us and we had to stop being as friendly, and actually had to physically move away from the crowds.

I still don’t understand this preoccupation with Jillian and I in particular, though – it’s the Taj Mahal. It’s a huge tourist destination. There were white first-worlders everywhere, but none of them was getting the attention we were.

I’m still working on getting pictures up. It’s been a challenge in India, because the internet is just not reliable and just not fast, so uploading pictures can prove to be nearly impossible.

More shortly!