Day 30, February 7

The gates opened around seven in the morning, just as promised. We entered the still almost deserted Taj — it was amazing. You stand on the platform and in front of you the Taj seems to be hanging in the air, like a magical mirage.
Ever since childhood I had dreamed of seeing the Taj Mahal, thanks to a poster that hung on the wall at my grandmother’s house. It seemed to me something completely unreal, as if it were a structure from another world; the building in the photograph was so graceful and unique. That is exactly what it was like that morning. Well, except that I had imagined it to be bigger than it actually was…
Surprisingly, this time, when another small dream came true, I felt very happy. Everything that morning seemed somehow completely unreal… Both the pre-dawn haze and that extraordinary snow-white building. It felt as if all of this were happening in a dream, not in reality.

We were the first ones to enter the Taj Mahal; people had somehow dispersed across the grounds, and it was hard to tell whether they were waiting for sunrise outside or just wandering around. As soon as we stepped over the threshold, an enterprising guard with a flashlight in his hand came up to us and started telling us about the Taj Mahal. It was clear right away that he would ask for money in the end, but he was chattering so fast that there was no way to interrupt him. Still, he showed us how magnificent the translucent white marble of the Taj Mahal is — the flashlight beam really passed through it. And the stones inlaid into the marble glowed beautifully too — an amazing piece of work. When the Indian directed the beam of light at a stone, it lit up like a tiny bulb in a beautiful bright orange color. I had never seen anything like that in my life — stones inlaid into marble… I can’t even imagine how much time it would take to make something like that, especially on such a scale. No wonder the Taj Mahal took so long to build.
Then the Indian sang something to demonstrate how good the acoustics are in the Taj — the acoustics really are excellent. We didn’t give him any money out of principle, but we were grateful that he showed us the hidden beauty. In fact, the Taj has a lot of unfinished details if you look at it soberly… Inside it is dark and all the beauty is barely visible… You can only guess at the beauty of the stones (and if it weren’t for the Indian, we wouldn’t have appreciated it fully) — why not add some kind of decorative lighting?.. A rhetorical question…

By the way, it seems that bringing your own flashlights into the Taj is prohibited. The guard rummaged through our entire backpack in search of a flashlight… And you also can’t bring in food, and that’s basically right — I can only imagine what a pigsty the Indians would make there…

We sat there and simply enjoyed the view… we came up with a formula for how best to contemplate any sight or landmark — you need to look at it in such a way that you can later draw it in as much detail as possible…

Before heading to the office where we had bought our ticket yesterday, we stopped again at Joney’s Place for breakfast, with lassi and an omelet, and also ordered cheese toasties — everything was delicious. Only the mango lassi turned out to be much worse than the banana one.

And so we made it to the office, and that’s where the adventures began. The ticket seller put us in the tuk-tuk of some friend of his, charging 100 rupees for him to take us to the bus departure point. We agreed, thinking — maybe it’s far, who knows… On the way we stopped for 5 minutes at our hotel to pick up our backpacks. The bus departure point turned out to be very close — well, okay… Then it turned out that the bus we had planned to take (at 11 a.m.) had supposedly been canceled, and now we were forced to go on the 12:30 bus.. The new tickets they issued us had no seats, which was very alarming. The Indian ticket seller ignored all our arguments that nobody does it this way and that we needed seats, saying not to worry, nobody would be standing…
We sat and waited for the bus; it was an hour and a half late.. It would all have been less scary if we hadn’t needed to pick up our backpack from the storage room today by 8 p.m., because tomorrow morning we’re flying to Kathmandu… We climbed into the battered bus (which, according to the description, was of course super comfortable).
About 4 hours later everyone got off the bus — it turned out we had arrived. This was not Delhi at all, but some strange outskirts. To all our questions the driver just shrugged and shook his head — yes, yes, madam, we’ve arrived…
This was supposedly almost Delhi. Nobody really knew how to get to the city center. What happened to all the Indians who had been traveling with us also remained a mystery.

With great difficulty we found out that there was no direct bus to central Delhi — we got on some bus on the recommendation of an older man at the stop. After getting a little closer to the city, at a fork in the road the bus driver dropped us off, saying we were no longer going the same way. The place was quite suspicious — some deserted stop. At the stop there were two Indians, and when we asked how to get to central Delhi they shrugged and said tuk-tuk. They didn’t seem to recognize the word bus at all. A tuk-tuk pulled up, and after bargaining he agreed to take us to Main Bazaar for 100 rupees. He agreed with such a sour face, as if we were robbing him in broad daylight. What was funny was that this tuk-tuk driver had his meter on, according to which he was supposed to charge us 50 rupees! Oh, these Indians… Around 6 p.m. we were at the storage room, picked up our backpack, and went to the hotel. The hotel was located in one of the little back alleys in the Main Bazaar area — there are plenty of such tiny identical streets there, so we wandered around a bit, but thanks to the help of the locals we finally found our hotel, which turned out to be very decent with excellent hot water.

It’s amazing how we experienced Main Bazaar the second time after having spent 30 days in India… we later shared our impressions and they turned out to be the same.. The first time Main Bazaar seemed like some kind of chaos, I described it on one of our first days.. it felt like some sort of cesspool of stench, dirt, and noise… Now I was walking and thinking, strange, maybe back then we were walking at some different time, Main Bazaar couldn’t have changed so much… Most likely our perception had changed. Now it seemed like a cheerful, colorful street, with crowds of tourists and vendors…

After checking into the hotel, we happily went for a walk around Main Bazaar. Even at night life was buzzing here, and walking around was not scary at all. We had dinner in one of the cafés, ate chicken curry — we really didn’t feel like eating meat, but it seemed like we should….
And so this long day came to an end; it was hard to believe that in the morning we had been sitting there and enjoying the view of the Taj Mahal.. It seemed to dissolve into my dream again.