city of love

Though cute, I thought Agra was a pretty boring city, with one big exception: It's got the Taj freaking Mahal.





The Taj is the thing to see in Agra (and, you know, in the world in general), so I suppose I can forgive the city for not seeming to have a ton else to offer. The tomb of I'timād-ud-Daulah (a.k.a. the Baby Taj) was cool-looking, and was an excellent place to take a nap, and of course we were delighted by the view of the Taj from the rooftop restaurant at Hotel Shanti Lodge, but we had plenty of time to visit both of those things and the Taj itself and walk into the Hotel Oberoi for a drink* in our sweat-stained salwar kameez and still had time left over for a nice long nap. At the end of the day we all looked at each other and said we were glad we'd been to Agra, but dude, if we'd been there more than one day, what would we have even done with ourselves?








* Strolling into hotels where we were not staying and that were far outside of our price range was a bit of a theme of this trip. We did this not just in Agra, but in Dhaka and Delhi, too. It was half-awesome (look at what you can get away with if you look like you know what you're doing!) and half-disconcerting (how much of the "getting away with it" was because we were all white? probably a whole lot.).