After Mumbai, we headed out to Agra.  When someone says "Agra," what comes to mind?  I mean, after
"agriculture" (that's too obvious)? The Frikkin' Taj Mahal, baby! TFTM is, in a word, abso-mind-boggling-awe-fantast-errific, embodied in white marble.  Don't ask to see my miniature marble sculpture of TFTM that I bought from some roadside tout, because we didn't.  It's extraordinarily bad luck.  Why?  I don't know.  But I'm not gonna tempt fate after apparently pissing off the gods of random travel diseases (posts about all our strange diseases will come later!). 

I think it has something to do with the following story: Shah Jhahan, the great Mughal Emperor who controlled most of the Indian subcontinent back in the 1600's, had a total crush on one of his wives.  She gave him something like 14 kids, but as you might guess, pregnancy number 14 was one more than her body could handle,
and so she died during childbirth.  This really upset the Emperor.  So he went about doing the only thing any self-respecting husband would do for his dead wife: he summoned 20,000 craftsmen and had them work
for 18 years to create a mausoleum for her body.  Yeah, the Taj Mahal is a tomb.  Didn't know that, did you?  Okay, maybe you did, Mr. Smartypants.  I didn't.  They finished the structure within about five years or so.  The rest of the time, they were inlaying precious and semi-precious stones into the marble, and carving reliefs out of the stone.  They would scratch out a hole that matched a shaped stone, and then would glue it into the marble using a
mixture of water, sugar, wax, and something else (marble powder?), which would harden into a stone-like mortar that is still holding over 350 years later.  Clever.  Irregardlessly, the whole effect is that TFTM is hands-down the most amazing building you will ever see.  The hype cannot begin to match the reality.  I think I took about 300
pictures of this monument, so hopefully I got a good one somewhere in there. 

Oh yeh, so back to the story about bad luck.  So two months after the Taj Mahal was completed, Shah Jhahan's
son overthrew him and put him in a prison cell in a tower of the neighboring Agra Fort.  So for the last eight years of Shah Jhahan's life, he only got to see his wife's tomb by looking out his prison cell window.  I'm missing a key part here, but for some related reason, it's bad luck to keep a marble sculpture of the Taj Mahal.
Wow, that was the worst explanation ever.  Sorry.

One interesting part is that the Taj Mahal is not floating all by itself in some ethereal landscape, completely detached from its earthly surroundings.  Sounds obvious, but I (Rob) never gave much thought to what its surroundings might be.  I was a bit surprised to see that it is right smack dab in the middle of a city!  I mean,
there's a huge walled garden around the thing, and there's nothing really behind it other than a river and a state park, so it makes sense that you don't see anything else in any pictures of the Taj Mahal.  But you can actually sit on a hotel rooftop and see it looming above the rest of the city.  Pretty cool.

So that's the cool part of Agra.  Now let me tell you about the not cool part.  Being home to one of the seven Wonders of the World (or however many there are these days), there are obviously a lot of tourists.  Millions each year.  From all over the world.  And if you could milk a few bucks from a few thousand, that would be a pretty
nice chunk of change, right?  Right.  So the way you do this is to have a network of people that can milk the tourists.  The hotel recommends a driver for you (slightly high price, but you pay it because you want to be safe and not have to be bothered with haggling and fighting with unknown taxi drivers that will try to drive you all over God's Green Earth), so you go with this guy and see some sights. To be complete, he takes you to a few shops that he highly recommends (and he may or may not divulge to you that he is getting paid a commission by these shop owners to bring tourists to "just take a look, no pressure to buy -- yeah right").  So after you escape from these over-priced tourist traps, you're getting super hungry, so you ask him to just drop you at a decent place to eat.  Not missing a beat, he recommends a place that is "good, inexpensive, and close to your hotel."  In reality, it's got decent food, but not cheap, and there are many ways to get lost on the 2km walk back to the hotel, so then you have to wonder if he got a commission from the restaurant, too.  At this point, you are starting to get a little peeved. 

Then you walk in the door to your hotel and the manager accuses you of backing out of your agreement to use his driver, since his driver was waiting for you all afternoon, and where were you, and basically a lot of un-hospitality
ensues.  I still don't know who the heck drove us around that day, but apparently he wasn't the one the hotel owner was trying to get us to use.  I think he was upset that we got snatched up by someone else's tourist-milking network.  And if you happen to be a hotel owner in Agra, one strategy you might use to retain the money you've charged your customer is to just tell the guest that "of course there's no hot water, the weather is hot and no hotels have hot water right now," and try to downplay all the other room deficiencies (sticky sheets, foam pads instead of mattresses, a bathroom that is so small that you have to sit on the toilet sideways, and a completely, hopelessly broken TV).  After all, there is literally an endless supply of tourists coming into town, so there is really no incentive to try to make every one of them happy.  The incentive is only to get the money as quickly as possible and move on to the next one.  So that's Agra in a
nutshell.  Rough place. 

But on our last day there, we had a nice uplifting experience.  Dinner at a friendly restaurant, followed by a
ridiculously honest shopkeeper that gave Rob back his 40 Rupees despite Rob's insistence that it belonged to the shopkeeper (Rob got confused), and then this little kid that lured us into his internet cafe only to proclaim that since we were from "Obamaland," (side note: once we tell people we're from the US, about 80% of the time they exclaim, "America!  Obamaland!") our internet surfing was free of charge.  So Rob played Connect Four with
him and his brothers while Amy caught up on some internet business stuff.  And then we had an autorickshaw driver that was actually appreciative of the tip we gave him for taking us to the train station.  So that's another part of Agra, I suppose.  Lots of honest people mixed in with the ones trying to claw their way to the top. We'll put a blog post about that mentality a little later. 

At this point in our trip, I think we are a lot more understanding of the situation some of these people find themselves in, and it's hard to blame them for trying to make a few bucks off of your stupidity.  So yeah, Agra is a rough town, but it's so totally worth it that it shouldn't even come into the conversation when you are deciding which cities in India to visit.  Just go.  But be mentally prepared to lose a few extra bucks along the way and don't take it too personally.

We're going to back track a little, well...a lot, and do a few posts in a row.  So, our last blog was about our yoga course.  Yoga rocks.  It's been challenging to practice while traveling, but every day is a new day and if we don't have time one day, we'll just try our best the next day! 

After the yoga course, we spent a few more days in Mumbai with our friend Anshul, Roxanne (his wife), and their family.  They are amazing people and we had such a good time with them!  We celebrated Ganesha Chathurthi, visited the Gandhi museum, and nursed Rob back to health (he got a nasty cold/flu after staying in the yoga course dorms!).  First, we wanted to talk about Ganesha Chathurthi.  It was an incredible, once in a lifetime, sort of experience. 

So, Ganesha Chathurthi ("cha-TUR-tee" -- there is no "th" sound like in the English word "the" in the Hindi language.  The "h" just means you aspirate after the "t".  Yay, now you can pronounce all those Hindi words!). 
Biggest party in Mumbai, and we got to catch it!  What is this celebration all about, you ask?  From what we could
understand, Ganesh (or Ganesha) (the elephant-headed Hindu god) is really popular in Mumbai/Bombay.  There are rumored to be somewhere around 33 million Hindu gods, but Ganesh is probably in the top five in terms of popularity, and he is easily the most recognizable one for Westerners.  But he's super popular in Mumbai.  Our wonderful host family let us participate in some of their twice-daily rituals called "aarthi," which is where they gather the family together and sing prayer songs, ring bells, burn incense, and offer gifts to their god, in this case Ganesh. 

(But don't get too wrapped up with this part about praying to "a god" rather than "God."  We're struggling to understand Hinduism, but from what we have gathered so far, they don't draw a distinct line between "God" and "gods."  Don't try to understand it from a Christian perspective.  It doesn't work here!)

Okay, back to the celebration.  Ganesha Chaturthi is the celebration of Ganesha's birthday.  Each family or community goes and buys a Ganesh idol made out of clay (dry, but not fired to make it hard), which gets painted and adorned with all kinds of decorations.  The family or community does the aarthi ritual twice a day for several days, and it varies from maybe 3 or 4 days to 10 days.  At the end, they take the idol in a procession from the temple (a temporary temple created specifically for the occasion) to the oceanfront.  There, they do one last aarthi, and then take the idol and immerse it in the ocean.  Since it is made of clay, it just dissolves away.  You're supposed to pick up a bit of sand from the sea floor where you immersed the idol, to keep until the next Ganesha Chaturthi. 

Our friend Anshul is kind of big about hygiene, so it was pretty funny to watch him carry out his family duty of immersing the Ganesh in the dirty dirty water of Chowpatty Beach in Mumbai!  He had to dunk his head all the way under water (several times) in order to get the sand for the next year!  We had to leave Mumbai the next day, so I didn't get to see if he came down with any waterborne diseases, but I haven't heard anything.  Hope you are okay, Ansul! 

This whole Ganesha Chaturthi is celebrated all over the city, though.  Actually, I think it's all over the country, and maybe the world, but it's certainly a very big deal in Mumbai.  And people observe Ganesha Chaturthi with varying degrees of religious decorum and sobriety.  Whereas the one we saw was a private affair with just a few people, there are also people that parade their Ganesh idols through the streets and have entire drum and horn squads blaring music late into the night while people dance and drink and douse themselves with orange powder.  There are traffic police that have to help move traffic around these processions in some of the busier parts of town.  There are small idols and temples on one corner, and giant idols (over 10 feet) with elaborate temples across the street.  It's quite a scene.  Hopefully, that gives you some idea of the celebration.  Wikipedia can probably give you a more accurate academic description, but those were our impressions. We were lucky to see it, and doubly so to be able to participate!

Now for a few more pics from our last days in Mumbai:

We took at train from Goa to Mumbai and were greeted by a friend of a friend, named Anshul.  We hit it off immediately and he has taken wonderful care of us!  We are so happy to have crossed paths with him and his family.  He runs a hotel called Hotel Kum Kum in the southern area of the city.  We spent several days resting up, getting organizing, and hanging with our new friends.  Anshul’s father went to school with Rob’s dad back in the day!

Mumbai is where we made arrangements to take a 7-day yoga course at a place called The Yoga Institute.  It is the oldest yoga institute in the world!  We were very excited for this retreat, although we weren't quite sure what to expect.  Were we going to be doing yoga poses all day?  What if it's too difficult for us? 

Unfortunately, we had a bit of an issue with the yoga course at first, and we almost couldn’t attend.  We called a few days before to confirm; they had me listed, but not Rob.  Many phone calls and emails later, we got permission for him to attend, but accommodation at the facility was not guaranteed.  We had decided that if he couldn’t stay, Amy would go to the class while Rob did some traveling on his own.  Fortunately, when we arrived at the camp, everything was good to go!  Note: always reconfirm ahead of time!

All our talk about nice weather got us very optimistic, so we were a bit surprised to find SO much rain in Mumbai.  Rain, rain, and more rain.  Heavy rain, all day, everyday!  We’ve never seen so much in our lives!  This rain caused quite a few problems our first day of yoga camp because most of the teachers were not able to reach the school.  There were four volunteers running the program who were doing their best to figure out what to do with us.  We had about 24 people in our class.  It was a bit chaotic and we weren’t sure if this camp was going to really work out or not.  Imagine us being herded from room to room, given bouncy balls and various toys, and told to make games out of them.  This is yoga?  But, we took our first yoga lesson to heart, "cultivate a positive mind," and hoped for the best.  Day 2 was back on schedule and we were in for an amazing week! 

Where do we begin to describe our experience?  We learned that yoga is much more than just poses and physical exercise (poses are called asanas).  This is definitely an important part, but it's just a part, of the whole yoga lifestyle.  We learned that's what yoga is - a way a life, a way of bringing balance to your mind and body.  It's amazing how much time and energy we spend caring for our bodies, the external part of us.  We clean it, try to keep it healthy by exercising and eating the right food, dress it in nice clothes, etc., but what we learned at yoga camp was that even more important, is the health of our mind, our internal self.  An unhealthy mind can cause many problems in life with our self happiness and acceptance, our relationships with others, our view of the world, and even the health of our physical body.

Yoga has been around for thousands of years and yogis have developed a system to help us create a healthy mind.  This was the bulk of our time at yoga camp: learning about how the mind works and how a small change in perspective can have a huge impact on your happiness.  We had various classes throughout the day taught by different instructors (all of whom were incredible teachers) and had about three hours of asana practice (split between morning and evening sessions).

Amy's favorite class was Karma Yoga.  This class focused on selfless acts and finding happiness in your tasks.  The  number one lesson here was: Do your duty, and leave the rest to a larger force.  Do your duty.  This brought up many questions: What is your duty?  How do you know what your duty is?  How do you accept your duty while still wanting to progress?  It's wonderful when a simple idea can make you think so hard!  The instructor also spoke a lot about faith.  This is a challenging subject for both of us, since we are not religious people.  Having faith in a larger force, having faith that there is a reason for everything, is not something we can accept easily.  This is one reason why this course was so wonderful.  It made us think, and think deeply, which enables you to truly learn about yourself.  No one can give you the answers, you have to discover them yourself. 

Rob's favorite was the Bhava class, which was the class that linked the yogic philosophy of mind to the physical exercises of yoga.  They explained how each asana, when performed with the right frame of mind, can lead to changes in the mind and in the personality of the yoga student.  They talked about Bhavas, or mental attitudes, that are intentionally cultivated when you practice the asanas.  Rob was fascinated by the concept that you could combine meditation with physical training in order to intentionally create a more balanced, peaceful mind.

We both also found the Pranayama class very fascinating.  This was one that could be simply described as "learning to breathe," but as with all the other classes, it was much more than a mechanical technique.  The founder of The Yoga Institute simplified nine breathing techniques for laypersons to learn in order to master their breath.  Interestingly, they discovered thousands of years ago what medical science has only recently confirmed, which is that the breath is intimately linked with mental activity.  Control over your breath provides control over your mind.  If your breath is short and rapid, so are your thoughts.  If your breathing is slow and deep, you will find the same pattern in your brain waves.  At the beginning of the seven day camp, they had us sit in a meditative posture and just count the number of breaths we took in a single minute.  They did this again at the end, and the results were pretty impressive.  Almost everyone reduced the number of breaths they took in a minute by 30% - 60%.  A few examples were people who went from 40 to 18, 25 to 12, and 10 down to 7.  If you have asthma, it would definitely be worth your while to find someone who can teach you yogic breathing as a way to control the symptoms - they have had some pretty good success with treating asthma patients at the Institute.  (Sorry, we aren't qualified to teach any of this stuff yet!)

We really enjoyed the course and hope to continue incorporating yoga in our lives!

Ah, back to blogging!  We had all intentions of staying on top of things, but we quickly discovered that it's sometimes a challenge to find the time and good internet connection while traveling! We added more pictures to our previous post on Mysore/Bangalore and here's where we left off:

After we left Bangalore, we headed down south.  We spent three days in Kochi and two days in Goa.  We had pretty good luck with the weather considering that it is monsoon season.  Kochi was beautiful and relaxing.  If you ever go to India, definitely put Kerala state on your list of places to see, and Kochi as your base city.  We took a boat ride through lush jungle river areas and got to see some interesting industry in the area.  They bring up clam shells from a giant lake in the area where the river meets the Arabian Sea, and these are processed into Calcium hydroxide for chemical companies.  We also witnessed a man collecting Toddy (they pronounce it "Toad-ee"), which is an alcoholic juice that drips directly from a cut coconut tree flower.  It somehow ferments inside the plant, and you can tap it somewhat like a maple tree.  Rob was totally amazed by this and was determined to drink some, but his enthusiasm waned after our hotel manager told us that most of the Toddy shops closed down after several people went to the hospital from poisoning! 

We also saw some people illegally harvesting sand from the river bottom and sifting it out on the shore.  Apparently, sand is extremely expensive to import into the area and is widely used for construction and conditioning farm soil.  In addition to the backwater boat ride, we had our first Ayurvedic massages and met some nice travelers at the hotel.  We also saw some very cool cultural performances of theater and martial arts.  See below for pics!  We thought about staying longer, but had non-refundable train tickets to Goa, so we had to head out.

Our first overnight Indian train ride was definitely much comfier than we expected.  We met a couple from Italy/Switzerland and had a fun time chatting for most of the ride.  We arrived in Goa and the weather took a downturn - more heat and more rain.  It was nice enough for most of the day, so we could tour around town.  We spent a day in Old Goa and learned that it was under Portuguese rule until 1961.  Yes, 1961!  There are amazing cathedrals all over the city, and the town has a Portuguese style of architecture.  We actually met some men on the train ride from Goa to Mumbai that were dual Portuguese/Indian citizens, since they became official Indian citizens in 1961.  Goa has become a popular tourist destination for Europeans and Russians looking for a beach party in India.  Very interesting!