You are a Happy Tourist.

"There are three types of tourists who come to India. Happy tourists, hippie tourists and hungry tourists . . . I think you are a happy tourist."

Thus spoke Munna, my auto driver this weekend. I felt hungry and smelled as bad as a hippie, but I'll defer to his experience.

I was in Agra this weekend, home to the Taj Mahal and other delights with my new friend Aude. I've decided to slowly infiltrate the French Delhi caucus. But I digress. She's been here about 5 months and still doesn't feel that the experience of living here is capable of adequate description. I'm inclined to agree, which make me feel less bad about never updating. It also doesn't help that I was sick for over a week and work late.

I have a bad memory, so I write things down in my notebook so I can remember to write about them. Here are some things I've thought or seen or noticed:

Indian English is . . . different. Most people I run with are fluent, like a second mother tongue, but it's still . . . something other than native speakers. For starters, there's a surprising amount of 1930s British diction. Men call other men 'my dear' and speak of 'fellows' and 'fine chaps'. If it were colder and in Russia sometimes I could swear that I woke up in Murder on the Orient Express.

But that's not all. They drop articles (definite, indefinite, don't matter none), ask for your 'good name', and attach 'maximum' to any part of speech to make it a superlative. It's too fluent to be cute in the way that a great Spanish or Italian accent is, but too quaint to be native. I'm into it.

Actually, I'm too tired, so I'm posting pictures instead. An album of the old facebook-max 60 pictures is here.

For the truly lazy, here are the highlights of the highlights:

one of the rare things that's still impressive even after you've seen 1,000,000 pictures of it

symmetry!

oh, you know, just looking at the taj mahal from the harem in the red fort

moar symmetry pls

then we went to a traditional carpet factory, where they use zero automation.

turns out not all of agra is as pretty as the taj. when i asked if this was a market, the driver just said, "No. Muslims." later he told us to be careful because the area had "many Pakistanis" in it. tolerance! yeah!

after agra, we drove about an hour away to fatehpur sikri, home of emperor akbar, grandfather of shah jehan (who had the taj built) and subject of a pretty epic bollywood movie. now also the home of a devious sufi, who swindled me out of $50 at a shrine. we saw this gigantic gate, which is supposedly the tallest in the world. the black things up top are bees nests. brandon, you would not have been pleased.