Adventures of a Wyoming Girl in India: Day 3

And we begin Day 3 of our Journey through India. I woke up this morning to my 3rd hot shower in India (oh, the luxury!) and then we had an American breakfast! Scrambled eggs and sausage and cereal! I even drank regular coffee. I know...it's crazy. I actually consumed coffee that was not a grande triple skinny caramel latte. I was desperate though, so black coffee with milk and sugar it was! And I even enjoyed it! Could I really save the $4.73 I spend on my latte everyday and make it at home? Hmmm don't want to get too crazy now. Spencer would be proud I'm sure haha. When I stayed with him in Laramie he gave me hell every morning for making him drive me to the coffee hut instead of drinking his "perfectly fine" old man black coffee. Once I start working night shifts maybe I’ll be desperate enough, or once I'm off the Fulkerson payroll and out on my own.

Well today is our 230 km, 7 hour drive from Jaipur to Agra. I'm a little sad to be leaving Jaipur already as I feel there was so much more to experience, but I should probably get used to it since each of our stays in these cities is no more than 2 nights. As I sit on our hot sticky bus (in the back seat again where the bumps in the road are the worst) I can't help but feel like were just driving through rural America. Aside from the fact that replacing houses are straw huts and there's garbage everywhere we could almost be in the middle of the Nevada desert. Oh, except people are riding camels. And there are more trees. And people shower outside in front of everyone by pouring buckets of water on themselves. And the Hindu temples every so often. Okay, maybe it’s not the same.

So our first and only excursion on the way to Agra is a palace called Fatehpur Sikri. Unfortunately for us it is 46 degrees celsius today...113 degrees Fahrenheit. Needless to say we were boiling for the next hour. Even still, it was a beautiful place. Fatehpur Sikri is the name of the city as well as the palace. Sikri is the first part and it is the older portion of the palace where the king with the 3 different wives lived. Fatehpur is the newer portion and means victory city. King Agbahr had the 3 religious wives, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu. None of the women had born him a child yet so in 1569 he came to this place and met a holy man who blessed him. The next year his Hindu wife had a son. She instantly became his favorite wife (obvi) and he decided to build a palace in commemoration of the birth of his only son. It took 12 years to build each side. Sikri was the palace side and Fatehpur was the holy place. All of the palace was built with red sandstone found locally. The Muslim wife had the smallest living quarters, but they were much more intricate than the larger quarters for the Christian wife. The Hindu wife's quarters were enormous. Let's just say her kitchen was bigger than the Muslim wife’s quarters. She had her own enormous palace with two separate quarters for summer and winter. She needed a separate kitchen because she didn't want any meat to be cooked in her kitchen. She even had her own temple with a huge statue of the God Vishnu. In the center of all the wives’ quarters the king had built a life size Parcheesi board and he would stand on a big square stool above his "game pieces" which were women whom he would order around to move from place to place and they would have to dance their way to the next spot. For a good picture Kathryn and I made our tour guide, Surendra (his name) stand on the big stool and point at us angrily while we pretended to dance on the game board. The king never played against an opponent however so he would always win. He was also 5 foot 3 and kept over 550 mistresses though so I think he had a number of self confidence issues.

The second part was the Holy Temples. We had to take off our shoes before entering and therefore nearly burned the skin off our feet walking through this place. It was dedicated to the man who blessed the king so he would have a child. The legend is anyone who comes to the main temple where that holy man is buried can make a wish by tying a string to the windows of his tomb. Upon leaving this weird important looking guy was telling us we had to leave rupees and when we didn't he yelled at us disapprovingly and hit us with his broom. But our tour guide emphasized that "wishes are free for all!" so we weren't about to be ripped off on our free wishes. The area has the largest temple entrance gate in all of Asia. After our tour we took auto rickshaws back to the bus and continued onward toward Agra.

Upon arriving at our hotel in Agra (not quite as nice as our palace holiday inn...our room has a distinct smell of yucky) half the group went to McDonalds, but I don't even eat McDonald's in the US very much so I convinced some of the girls to stay at the "Merry-Go-Round" restaurant on the roof of our hotel which ended up being a revolving restaurant. Which actually sounds much cooler than it is but it did overlook part of the city which was nice. Tomorrow we see the sun rise over the Taj Mahal at 5:30 am and we're up all day and night until our overnight train which boards at 11:30 pm. We arrive in Varanassi the day after at about 1:30 pm...it’s going to be a long day! Please pray we stay safe on the sleeper train...It looks a little sketchy to me!

Picture 1: Kelsey and I pointing to the column leading up to where the King would stand. The carvings on the column were supposed to represent all religions but the carvings representing Christianity were the smallest...and they "represented" catholic windows which technically isn't even Christianity. You can see us pointing to the christian section.