One wonder down, seven more to go.

Twenty dollars! Twenty American Dollars? That's the admission price to the Taj Mahal. I know, doesn't seem like a lot of money, but when you've been living on 5 dollars a day and consider 7 dollars a day a real splurge, 20 bucks seems like a whole lot just to go and see someone's tomb. And what do the locals pay? 10 rupees (something in the realm of a quarter). The expensive price is just for the foreigners, which might be an ongoing theme in India. Sometimes, when exercising the limited Hindi we have learned we are granted the "Indian price" for things, which turns out is about half of the "foreigner price." Oh well, this is what we get for the advantages we've had all of our lives through a simple luck of birthplace and the fact that most tourists simply get by on English. We are rather ashamed to admit, that while most Indian kids that aren't even as tall as my hip know a passable amount of English, the first words in Hindi we learned were "hello," "how much?" and "go away."

Never the less, we suck it up double time, get up before dawn, lay down the cold hard cash and wait in front of the Taj for the sun to rise. As it turns out, the cost to our beauty sleep and wallets was very worth it. Sitting in a group of most white people as the sun shyly decided that it will come up today too. The smog prevents what might be a truly spectacular sunrise, but the Taj slowly fades from a shadow in the predawn blue-blackness to a pristine white against the clear sky.

We took pictures, lots of pictures. For a day we were the tourists of our dreams. When actually walking on the monument, you are made to where little white booties over your shoes, lest the dirt and grime of your feet scar the polished marble underneath them. It was amazing though. We were marveling (yep, marveling at something non-gastronomic- unusual for us) at how they took the most impossible structural form, the circle, and built it anyway. The front of the monument is covered in floral inlay, so perfect in its permanence. The inside of building is the tomb itself, and is a great, though inappropriate place, for the echo game.

A little background. The Taj Mahal is India's proud monument to love. A Mughal Emperor built it to house the corpse of his favorite wife. Really, it's just a gratuitous gravestone from a love story without manogomy, an interesting proposition to consider. The wife was his favorite for this reason: she gave him 14 children and died giving birth to the last of them. 14, can you imagine! No wonder she was his favorite. After construction of the Taj, his son imprisoned him for the rest of his life, the country was in poverty and the emperor spent all of their funds on a monument to love, maybe not the most fiscally responsible thing to do. He died in the prison cell, where his window faced his masterpiece, to be buried by his daughter.

I later found out, in a really random conversation with an old bearded man on the bank of the Ganges that the Mughal who had it built was actually quite the tyrant. After his monument was finished, he invited all of the artists to a feast, supposedly to reward their great work, only to chop off all of their hands so nothing equal to the Taj could ever be constructed. Apparently Americans are not the only historians to leave out the dirty details, as all of the literature we found on the Taj neglected this fact. Then again, the bearded man might have been making it up, considering this topic came somewhere between his discussion of being a medicine man and his insistence that I should write poems only about love.