After the Taj Mahal, we visited Agra Fort. This is very similar to Red Fort in Delhi. It was where all of the Mughal emperors lived and ruled from. I will describe it with pictures and captions:
Here is the entrance to one part of the fort. If you look closely, you can see many different integrated art forms: There is primarily Muslim architecture, but also Hindu and European flavors such as the pillars. If you look closely, you can even see the Stars of David. All of this was meant to represent tolerance for other beliefs, as was held by Emperor Akbar.
There were many gardens inside the fort. As you can see, different parts of it were built with different stone. The exterior is made of red brick, while many of the interior buildings are of white marble. Each of the princesses and queens had their own living quarters, the sizes of which would depend on which were the favorites of the king. Princesses Raushanara and Jahanara had their own rooms and I'm looking for a picture of them.
If you've seen the movie Jodhaa-Akbar, you might recognize this place. Here is where the emperor sat for meetings with the public. Since they weren't allowed to film in here, the movie set was built to resemble this.
It was in one of these rooms that Emperor Shah Jahan (builder of the Taj) was put under house arrest for the last ten years of his life by his son Aurangzeb. He did however get to have a window which faced the Taj Mahal. Luckily for him, the smog in those days wasn't as bad and he could actually see the thing.
We stayed in Agra for the night after visiting that handicrafts shop I was telling you about earlier. The next day, we got up bright and early to visit Fatehpur Sikri, which was about an hour drive from Agra. This place is really incredible to see. It's where Akbar lived for four years but had to abandon it since it was too difficult to get enough water. Therefore, it's relatively unused. The whole thing was built from red sandstone. The first place we visited was Sikri, where Akbar and his wives actually stayed during that time.
I belive the Jodhaa-Akbar set also emulated this place a little bit. Here are some white tourists outside one of the bedrooms (I don't know whose) in Sikri. Speaking of which, Jodhaa (Akbar's wife), had a huge living complex all to herself since she bore him a son, Jahangir. It was built with Hindu architecture since she was Hindu herself.
Here we stand in the courtyard of Sikri. It's difficult to see, but there is a huge playing board carved into the floor beneath us where the king and others would play dice with live people. In the distance are the living quarters of Akbar.
Me.
And this, happens to be the royal bedroom of Akbar-the-Great himself. The entire room was decorated with precious jewels that reflect the light and make it look all pretty. He slept on that raised platform, with a mattress, I hope, since it's made of stone.
This is Fatehpur, a few hundred yards from Sikri. Everything is really really big. I believe this is where stuff happened. Like ruling, courts, etc. Fatehpur is also where you will run into HUNDREDS of little boys trying to sell you things. See all those people in the distance? It's them.
So, we left Agra and Fatehpur behind soon after and returned to Delhi that day. We also saw Brindavan on the way but left quickly because it smelled bad. We wanted to visit Jaipur after that but we would have had to take a tour bus instead of a car and the tour buses weren't running due to heavy fog =(. So instead of that, we stayed in Delhi the next day, did a bit of shopping, visited some temples and memorials, and packed up our stuff for our evening flight to Chennai.
EDIT: I completely forgot to mention that we also visited the Akshardham Temple, which is this modern temple dedicated to SwamiNarayan. I forgot about it because I don't have any pictures of it, since cameras weren't allowed there. Every surface of the temple is carved in extremely fine detail...it was incredibly beautiful. Go there if you ever visit Delhi.
In case you were wondering, this is what Delhi smog looks like:
Please ignore my brother in the beginning. He was reciting lines from the Simpsons Movie which he has seen about 40 times.
