Taj Mahal!

This weekend I went to Agra, the city that has the Taj Mahal. Agra itself is small and not very nice. It was a 4 and a half to 5 hour drive from Delhi on a very bumpy road. The trip is not for anyone who gets easily car sick. I defiantly recommend taking a car over taking a train, but it is still a rough five hours.

The beauty of the Taj Mahal is indescribable. Although it is pretty in the pictures, even they can't do it justice. It is one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and I feel very lucky to have seen it in person. I would even say that everything I have been through was worth it for the opportunity to see the Taj Mahal with my own eyes.

The Taj is made of white marble from a city near Jaipur. It is the hardest marble in the world. It took 22 years to build the Taj Mahal. The workers cut the marble by sawing through it using a wire and had to lift all the blocks of marble by hand. What makes the Taj truly beautiful is the floral design on it. Paint will not stay on marble, so to add the flower design the floral design was first carved into the marble and then gemstones from around the world were glued to the marble. This is called marble inlay.

Marble is translucent so in the moonlight they say the Taj Mahal looks like a block of ice. If you ever go to the Taj Mahal plan your trip to coincide with a full moon. The Taj Mahal closes at sunset, but on nights of a full moon they open it back up at night. I did not get to see it by moonlight (no full moon) but I imagine it is breathtaking.

I spent a couple hours just admiring the Taj Mahal at sunset, but as I was walking away to leave when I turned back around it still looked more beautiful then I remembered.

The Taj also has a really nice love story attached to it. The king who built the Taj Mahal loved his wife dearly and they were never apart. She died while giving birth after 20 years of marriage and the king was utterly depressed. He did not want to work anymore so he divided up his kingdom to his children and spent the next 22 years having the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his wife.

The craftsmen who built the Taj Mahal have kept the marble inlay process a closely guarded secret. Today there are shops in Agra of the descendants of these craftsmen where you can purchase items made of the same type of marble used in the Taj Mahal with the gemstone inlay floral design. You can buy anything from a small box to large table tops that take months of work to complete.

If you are wealthy and would like to furnish your home with beautiful things of amazing quality, you should come to India. You can get many handmade items of really good quality at good prices if you know where to shop and how to bargain.