Someone Made a Lifesize Replica of my Puzz-3D Puzzle

The Taj Mahal totally photobombed my shot in front of this awesome pool

Many years ago, I built a Puzz-3D puzzle of the Taj Mahal. It had 1,077 pieces. Today I went to a building that looks just like it, but that someone decided to make out of a whole lot more than 1,077 pieces. Also, it's like... at least three times as bigger.

I caught a train this morning at 6am to Agra. Brutal. The owner of my hostel told me that it wouldn't be a problem to find an auto at that time of morning because there aren't a lot of people who are using autos that early. I was skeptical so I left a little early and it's a good thing because it took me about 20 minutes and a half-mile walk to find one. Also there were numerous stray dogs viciously barking at me as if I was creeping in on their home turf. Get outta here, dogs. You don't own this street.

Whoa, that's a big building

I had planned on hiring a driver and a guide for the day so when I was immediately deluged by people when I got off the train at 8am, I wasn't as taken aback as normal. I found a guy that spoke decent English who took me out to a booth to pre-pay for a car for half the day. It turns out, this guy wasn't going to be my guide or my driver, but luckily the guy who hopped in my car and proclaimed himself to be my guide did actually speak decent English. His name was SK and he actually ended up taking me to a lot more places than I had originally intended, which meant I actually got to see a lot more of Agra than I would have on my own.

View of the... South? gate from the Taj Mahal

Our first stop was the Taj Mahal. It's hard to describe how stunning the building is, but it really is a truly magnificent work of art. It's made out of 5 kajillion tons of marble and used advanced alien technology to achieve perfect symmetry on four sides even though it was built in the 1600s. It's certainly the most impressive man-made structure I've seen in India and the second most impressive I've seen in the world (the first being the church La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain).

We got to wear this sweet shoe covers, yea!

The Taj has a pretty interesting story behind it. (Disclaimer: This is the story my guide told me, so I haven't independently verified the claims made through the rest of this story.) The Mughul king Shah Jahan had three wives. The first two were arranged marriages but his marriage to his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal was a love marriage. Of course, this didn't stop him from keeping a rather sizable harem (it's good to be king, I guess). She had like... 14 of his kids and died while popping out the last one. On her deathbed she requested, among other things, that he build a monument for their love (the other things were that 1) he didn't get remarried and 2) that he take care of their kids). The monument took 20,000 workers 22 years to build. Yikes.

In case you were wondering, the inside of the Taj Mahal is just a big room with a tomb for Mumtaz Mahal in the center and for Shah Jahan on the side of hers.

As was all the rage for Muslims who built big buildings in India back in the day, there's also a mosque on one side of the Taj. This one is regularly used and I was able to offer some prayers while I was there. It's been a pretty cool and unexpected element of my trip to be able to say prayers is so many iconic mosques.

Obligatory tourist photo of me holding the Taj Mahal

My tour guide was awesome in taking photos for me and knowing where all of the best spots were. A handful of them came out pretty nicely. The one big drawback to this guy was he was kind of creepy and got increasingly creepier throughout the day. Which is kind of unfortunate, but not really one of those things you can prescreen for at the train station. That's all I'm going to say about that.

Crazy marble stuff all done by hand

After the Taj Mahal, my guide took me around to a bunch of local artisan shops to show me some of the work that he claims is only done in Agra. At each place I went to, there was a proprietor who first showed me about how their craft was done (all of them were done by hand, regardless of the craft). This was inevitably followed by a lengthy hard-sell to buy their goods, which was unfruitful for them, but learning about all this stuff was pretty cool for me. First we went to a shop that makes incredibly intricate marble works.

If you mess with this dude's rug he will cut you

Then we went to a rug shop where I saw a dude hand-weaving a rug. I had NO idea how long a hand-woven rug takes to make (literally months of non-stop work) but they are beautiful when they're finished. There's a part of me that's like "cool, there's definitely something special about rug that's made by a guy who spent nine months of his life going this" and then another part of me is like "there are machines that can do this in literally less than a day, this man is wasting his life and also his rug is going to get sold for like... $1,000." Handmade crafts as a whole, for the most part, I've always been kind of skeptical of. Yes, from an artistic perspective, they're a worthwhile endeavor. From a functional perspective, I've heard countless times about the quality of handcrafted work but... can't you get even better, more precise quality from a machine at a fraction of the time and cost? After the rug place, we went to another place that does fine needlepoint work with metallic threads.

Around noon, my guide took me to a restaurant where there was a dude, Jackie, with a tabla drum singing songs in Hindi. He was really talented but I didn't recognize anything he played. After a few songs, he asked me if I knew any Bollywood songs so I asked him if he knew my favorite one "Tujhe Dehkha To Yeh Janna Sanam" and he did! He then did a few other songs from that genre/era of music that I definitely recognized. He definitely turned what was an otherwise average meal of chicken korma into a really memorable experience.

My creeper tour guide at the Red Fort

After lunch my guide took me to one more artisan shop that sold jewelry and showed me this black stone that creates this four-point star in the light. Which you can only get in Agra. Except I'm pretty sure you can get it lots of other places around the world because I'm pretty sure I've seen it before. My guide finally took me to the other place I wanted to see in Agra, the Agra Fort (sometimes also called the Red Fort, though there's also a Red Fort in Delhi, so... that's confusing).

Obligatory tourist photo from the
Red Fort of me holding the Taj Mahal

This jewel was apparently in some 007 movie.
They claimed it's a real stone. Which they
just leave out for people to touch with no
security. Yup. Totally real.

The Red Fort was pretty awesome. It's big (not as big as the one in Delhi, but more awesomeness per square foot). The Red Fort was used as a palace for a bunch of years. You can also see the Taj Mahal across the river from the Red Fort. Fun fact: Shah Jahan's son took over power from his father and imprisoned Shah Jahan inside of the Red Fort for eight years; luckily, he could still see the monument he built to his wife from his placial prison.

After the Red Fort we went to even more shops, which at this point was getting tiresome, before finally dropping me off at the train station. I'm taking another overnight train to my next destination: Amritsar. At least this time, I'm not a total train noob. Minus the creepiness factor of my guide, Agra on the whole was a lot more awesome than I was expecting.