Jaipur

The pacing of these blog posts is hard to pull off when I have so much to do everyday but I want to keep you guys updated anyway, so here goes.

In the past three days we have had an overwhelming amount of awesome stuff we've been able to mark off of our bucket lists. The biggest one being the Taj Mahal, and I guess the point of this post will be to try and convey the feeling(s) I had standing there in front of one of the proclaimed "wonders of the world."

So the first thing to know about the Taj is that in India it is actually pronounced the Taj Mehell - we look like US rednecks when we pronounce it Taj Mah Hall. The building was built by Shah Jahan in 1653 for his wife. Think of the Taj Mahal as an Egyptian pyramid - its primary purpose was a burial site. The Taj Mahal has both Hindu and Muslim symbolism built into the structure in both design and artwork that is embedded into the marble on the inside of the structure.

When I first saw the Taj I actually got a chill - I never get chills, and my thought process at the time was that the Taj is a timeless artifact. Millions have visited it since 300 years before my birth and will continue to visit it centuries after I am no longer here. I'm not religious by any means but there was a religiosity in reverence for what I was seeing and experiencing in my mind at that moment, and I couldn't move.

The thoughts that permeated along with timelessness were that of awe of construction processes of the era. The magnitude of such a project in comparison with how things are handled now isn’t even worth comparing. We live in an age of metal materials that will decay and fade away in the blink of an eye, but for the earth to swallow the Taj Mahal it will take thousands of years of slow erosion and even then the marble slabs would hold fast for possibly a million or so years.

Incredible. Mind-rocked.