Day 16

Today we headed out to Fatehpur Sikrit, the abandoned city. To get there, it's about an hour's drive through Agra, and then the countryside. Our tour guide was Yogesh, but he said to call him Yogi. He was the Indian Jay Leno. He spent most of the drive facing us and telling us about India. He said it was tiring, but it was better than facing forward and having to watch the traffic. He wasn't kidding. Sometimes watching the oncoming traffic was literally that. Oncoming. He said in some countries you drive on the right, in some you drive on the left, but in India it's optional. And that certainly seemed to be the case. I heard another guide said you need three things to drive in India: Good brakes, a good horn, and good luck. Yogi said if you see a car without a dent, it's either brand new or just out of the body shop. A new car will usually go about a week until it gets a dent. He said if you want to open a business in India, open a body shop. You'll never suffer from lack of work. All of the commerce in India seems to take place out on the street. Open air markets, barbers working right out on the sidewalk, kiosks selling drugs (over the counter), shoes, and just about anything else you could imagine. People were everywhere. There's just nothing like it in the US. Even in a big city, the crush of people doesn't cover the same huge area that this does. If you want alone time, you have to go far from the city.

Yogi explained to us that the city we were going to was built by Akbar to honor a priest that blessed him. It took five years to build. There's no complicated architecture like at the Taj Mahal. Just pretty basic post and beam construction. It was inhabited for about twelve years, and then it was just abandoned. It doesn't seem to have fallen into disrepair like Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu. The stones were pretty much intact. There were guys there that would dive into a pool of fetid green water and wanted money for the show. They did the diving, but we didn't pay for it. It seems like everyone in India has their hand out. I was taking pictures of the cockscomb flowers, and the guy tending them wanted some money for the picture. I wouldn't go for that, so he tried to sell me some seeds. I told him I had no intention of trying to grow them, I just wanted the picture. Jan waved at a little boy from the bus and next thing we knew, he was bringing his goat across the street. We assumed he was going to ask for money to have pictures made with he and the goat. Hopefully he didn't intend to sell us the goat. It's getting so we can't even be friendly here because it's interpreted as an overture to some kind of business transaction.

The drive back to the hotel from Fatehpur Sikrit was pretty much the same as the drive out. There were several hair-raising incidents that Yogi stayed blissfully ignorant of by facing the other way. Horns seem to be honking constantly on the Indian roads. It seems like they would lose their effectiveness and people would just ignore them after a while. That doesn't stop people from using them liberally, though.

Back at the hotel, we went to check out the hotel shops. They had a small store called "Sunshine Alley" that had little papier mache boxes that were hand painted. Most were very pretty and they were very reasonably priced, so we bought several. We were running late for our afternoon trip, so we had them sent up to the room.

The afternoon excursion was a trip to Kohinoor Jewelry. They have sold jewels to the maharajahs for centuries, according to their sales pitch. They also deal in tapestries that have jewels sewn into them. They have quite a few on display in the main hall, but they have a museum with ten or so that are just amazing. There was a master of three dimensional embroidery techniques named Shams that created some tapestries that were incredibly beautiful. We got a tour by the owner (Mr. Kohinoor, I guess) and he said they were offered 2.8 million dollars for one of them, but they turned it down. After the museum tour, we went upstairs to the jewelry showroom to look at some of the special pieces they have. They allowed some of the women to try on an eleven carat emerald ring that was cut from a forty-four carat stone that had belonged to the wife of a maharajah. These pieces weren't for sale, but Jan managed to find two very nice stones that were. A beautiful blue topaz and an amethyst. She also got a cross. The salesman gave her a special price for getting all three pieces. That made her very happy. The only thing better than buying some beautiful jewelry is getting a few dollars knocked off the asking price. When she was finished at the jewelry store, we went over to the marble artisans shop. This is where they make tables, boxes, and other items out of marble. They inlay gemstones using the same techniques used by the artisans that built the Taj Mahal. The fact that they probably don't pay the artists hardly anything doesn't make the end result cheap. Some of the little boxes went for over a thousand dollars. They'd take seven hundred, though. They also sold clothes and jewelry at this same place, but the jewelry wasn't of the same quality as Kohinoor. We ended up walking out of the marble place empty handed.

When we returned to the hotel, we went back to Sunshine Alley. The man was unwrapping a new shipment of the boxes, and several were by an artist named "Suffering Moses" from Kashmir. His work was particularly beautiful, but more expensive than the others. I had to have one of his boxes, though, and Jan found a couple of others that she couldn't live without so we walked out with several more. On our way to the lecture, we passed the hotel jewelry store. Jan found a smaller blue topaz with a star shaped window in it that she thought her niece would like as a graduation gift. I don't think she's reading this, so don't tell her so it'll be a surprise. We were having dinner in the hotel's continental restaurant, but they would let you order off of the Indian restaurant menu, so we did that. I got a prawn curry that was good. Jan got chicken curry, but said it was too hot.