First stop of the day: the typical tourist
thing for India! Taj Mahal. (See post for Day 2 about Hindu/Muslim architecturalrelations)
We are repeatedly amazed/baffled by the
Indian attitude toward foreigners (see ..oh every other post we've written..ok,
not quite. Here and here especially) There's the attitude that is mostly to be
expected—salesmen and tour guides come up to us and want to sell us things. We
tell them (often repeatedly) ‘No. No, thank you.’ (They then often reply with “Looking
is free”…thanks, but no thanks.)
But there is another aspect that's
just..sad. It reminds us too much of the British Empire. Foreigners often get
special treatment.
For example, we get a separate ticket counter.
(So the tour guides’ offer to let us skip the lines..well, we get to do that
anyway, by virtue of our melanin levels. We don't need to pay them 400-600 rupees
for that.)
A small equalizer is that foreigners pay 25
to 75 times that which Indians pay. Yes, you read that correctly. For example,
they paid 10 rupees and we paid 250 rupees for the Red Fort.
However, this small counterpoint is offset
drastically by the Taj having separate lines for general tickets and 'high
value' tickets. You can guess which line we were in. It wasn't the one
that wrapped halfway around the entire Taj.
This mentality was further
underscored when a man came up to us with his son and said his son would like a
photograph with such a 'respectable guest'.
We happily obliged but goodness! We'd rather
not be called 'respectable' (--what will they think of us? Does that mean we'll
have to be responsible and grown-up? I hope not! :P :) ((Some tongue-in-cheek
to relieve the sadness...)) Although, to be fair, this evidently didn't bother
us enough to join the general line...so sadly we seem to have some
latent imperialist attitudes as well :( Although there is the possibility that we would have been shooed out of that line
into the other, we didn’t test it. We just followed the ‘high value’ signs…)
There were also these different (general and
high value) lines for ladies and gents to enter the complex at all. There we
went through security much more quickly. However, here they were very thorough
and thought that F might be able to do something crazy with his flashlight,
hi-lighter and post-it notes. Yes, I know that the iconic Taj is also popular
with anti-India groups...but what is he going to do with post-its? Stick them
everywhere? Oooh! Scary. Ah well :) That meant that F had to trek quite a ways
to put his bag of contraband in a locker and then go through security again.
Once in the complex we were somewhat
underwhelmed.
That probably happens with most such iconic buildings. (I'm sure places—like the Grand Canyon—can only be
truly appreciated if there..but buildings often seem to be smaller than you
imagined them from the professional-perfect-angle-nobody-there-photographs...)
We almost preferred the almost-as-large side gates that had red and white
contrasted designs as opposed to the purely white Taj.
Here again we had some encounters with brave
children and youth wanting to get their picture taken with us.
This time we
managed to get a few in return :)
And, typical us, we went for a few photos
off the beaten path. Here's a macro shot of some wall carvings.
Here are some
cows.
Here is a monkey.
And, who are we kidding, here are a lot of
monkeys. (Stay tuned for more at the Red Fort! Photograph ALL the monkeys!)
Inside the actual Taj Mahal you weren't
supposed to take photographs. Did that stop us rule-loving-Germans? Yes. Did
that stop many Indians. No. (Although I found it too dark in there to get a
decent photo anyway. It was just loud and dark. Although the stone inlay work was impressive.)
 |
| Here's the main gate to the Taj complex. And here's looking at it, while looking away from the Taj :) Nice to have a different perspective, eh? |
No comments:
Post a Comment