April 10, 2014:

Now we are finally at Jaipur, India after a very long 7 hour drive from Delhi.  Jaipur is much smaller in size than Calgary but there are still 4.5 million people living there.  We went for supper with a family and there was a family of 8 living in a tiny two bedroom apartment with a kitchen and a squatter toilet (hole in the ground). 

Our driver took us a famous theatre and we watched a Bollywood movie for the first time yesterday!!!!  It was well done but it was a horror film and we had to leave after about 12 minutes of it because I don't like horror movies.  This one started with Bollywood singing and dancing and then suddenly it was like Paranormal Activity mixed up with Woman in Black and the Grudge. She gets all possessed and then she takes out eyeballs and stabs and kills people .  It was quite...interesting.

 

The next day we saw the Amber Palace which was built in 1592.  The Muslim king of Jaipur lived there and built a 9 km wall surrounding the palace to protect himself and his Hindu queen from invaders and her relatives.  The wall was supposedly designed to imitate the great Wall of China.  It was pretty cool.

 

The next day we drove over to Agra, India.  Agra is a very dirty city but home to one of the most beautiful sites in the world, the Taj Mahal.  The Taj was built by a king for his wife after she died giving birth to their 14th child. She was only 39 years old.  When she was dying, she asked the king to build her a magnificent tomb and for her to be buried there.  So the king was an obedient husband and he built the Taj Mahal for his wife using the public's money (~$40 million).  It took 20,000 workers and 1000 elephants 17 years to build.  Everything is symmetrical in the Taj Mahal except for the king's tomb beside his wife's, because he forgot he had to die too, so his tomb is to the side and smaller.

The inlay of semi-precious stones throughout the tomb is unbelievable.  The builders used tricks to fool the eye (angled inlay to make it look like corners that do not exist).  The four corner towers are not vertical, but built 2 degrees outwards, so in an earthquake they will not fall onto the tomb.  And there was an agreement between the king and builders that they would not work for anyone but him after they finished the temple (it is not true that he cut their hands off).

There are not only cows all over, but a number of camels as well.  We were driving past a caravan of camels in Jaipur and Dad thinks he got the best camel shot ever taken from a moving vehicle.  You decide.  See below.