I studied a year and a half of art history. The first year was during my sophomore year in high school when I took Advanced Placement (AP) Art History, which is basically a class you can take to get college credit assuming you take the College Board’s AP exam, pay the stupid fees, and score at least a certain level (I surprisingly scored a 5, which is the highest score… my art history teacher didn’t think very much of me and probably would have been floored if I told her after). The second semester I did was during my first year at Wellesley, where it was a requirement to take a writing course. Because I felt a bit insulted that I was going to be forced to take a course just on writing (I already had an ego then, clearly), I figured it would be the most efficient use of my time if I took a writing course that combined a credit for some other requirement, so it was a writing course on art history in the end for me.

The academic study of intro-level, general “art history” in the U.S., if not in the western world, really stinks because the powers that be do not give a crap about Asian art. All the focus, because most of the world seems to value the accomplishments of white men, is around Western European and American art. The one surprising thing about my American art study was that it actually did cover some Mexican art (maybe because Mexico is part of North America… I have no idea what the logic there was), which was how I learned about famous Mexican artists like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Maybe it was because Rivera was commissioned to do some pieces in the U.S. Who knows?

I thought about this today because given that the Persian/Mughal empires used to control the subcontinent of India and the general sounds for centuries, Persian/Muslim architecture and art in general is so massive here, notably in Jaipur where we’re spending our next two days. I’d been exposed to this type of architecture while in Istanbul seven years ago, and I was already in love with its intricacies then. So much love and passion is apparent in these stunning mosques, forts, and archways; the level of complexity of Persian art in general is hard to rival. Their culture, like Indian culture, is so colorful and ornate, so it’s no wonder that everything from their walkways to the walls of their buildings would be so lavishly decorated. It’s as though every wall is a work of art that wants to command your attention.

The highlight of the day for me was at the Amber Fort, which sits just 11 kilometers outside of the city of Jaipur atop a hill. It is a fort and palace that is built of red and white sandstone, and is known for its blend of Rajput and Hindu style of architecture and its mixture of Hindu and Muslim ornamentation. The ornamentation is a mix of paintings, carvings, and jeweled pieces.

Sheesh Mahal or the Mirror Palace is the most beautiful part of this fort. This hallway is embellished with glass inlaid panels and multicolored ceilings; since the mirrors have a convex shape and are designed with colored foil and paint, the walls and ceilings would glitter brightly under candlelight at the time it was in use. The mirror mosaics and colored glass were called “a glittering jewel box in flickering candlelight.” Although we were there during the day, even in the regular bright daylight, the entire hall glittered endlessly no matter what angle you were looking at it or walking past it. Unfortunately, it was packed with tourists, so it was really hard to get a photo without people in it, so I resorted to just taking photos of the tops of the arches and its ceiling.

I’m just in love with the arches of this palace. I took so many pictures of them and stared at them constantly. I’m still looking at the photos I took on my phone now. The idea that someone could arbitrarily decide that this type of art is not worthy of being covered in an art history course is just so stupid and ignorant to me. The level of creativity and craftsmanship that went into structures like this rival, if not outdo, artwork that is famous in France or Italy. People in the west can be so oblivious and deluded.

Before coming to India, these are the things that people told me to be wary of:

1. Do not, under any circumstances, drink the water. Always, always drink bottled water. Watch the server, if relevant, break the seal and pour the water into your glass for you.
2. It will be dirty and smelly everywhere.
3. The cows and other animals will walk in the street with you.
4. Indian traffic = the definition of chaos.
5. Poverty will be extreme.
6. Beggars, as a result of #3 above, will be very persistent.

So, I think there’s some truth to all of the points above. The water out of the tap while brushing my teeth tastes pretty horrendous, but it’s not anything worse than what I’ve tasted in China or Mexico. The water in Oaxaca out of the tap was notably horrid to me. I’m fine with the animals walking in the street as long as they don’t attack me, and as long as the cars and autos mind them and don’t run them over (no one needs road kill anywhere). The dirt and the smells don’t bother me very much because I’ve visited other developing countries that have similar smells… though I’ll be honest and say that as racist as it sounds, Indian body odor is just… different, and that’s mainly because of the spices that are heavily in their diets. That’s just life.

It’s not just the beggars who have been persistent here, and more persistent than anywhere else I’ve visited, but even the auto/tuk-tuk drivers have been very determined to get our business. At the same time, though, they’ve actually been quite friendly and helpful. They will drive alongside us as we’re walking on the side of the road, strike up conversation with us by asking where we are from, note that Chris has an Indian face, question where we are going and how we are going to go there. Some have even parked their autos and simply walked along side us for blocks, chatting us up. They really do not want to take “no” for an answer here. They’re not even being rude or mean about it; they’re mixing friendliness with insistence on our taking their business. They give us funny looks when we say we want to walk (why would you want to walk in India?!), and they’ve even told us when we’re walking toward the wrong entrance and tell us how to get to the right entrance for tourists.

Chris and I both believe that the best way to see a city is by foot. You will always see and notice a lot more walking around a city or town than driving through it; it’s just a fact. You can see and interact with people, smell the scents and hear the sounds of daily life. You notice more nuanced things, whether it’s how people interact with each other, signs, or little nooks and crannies on side streets. I’m sad when I hear about people who visit places like China and India and want some protected experience within some car being chauffeured from site to site because in that case, you’ve basically lost half if not more of the joys of traveling to a new unfamiliar place. You don’t get a real sense of the city’s energy and vibe that way; it just becomes a method to tick off sites to see off your list and bring that home so that you can tell your friends your bucket list items have been superficially knocked off and done, yet you haven’t really learned much of the culture of that place at all.

In these interactions with the auto drivers, even though their ultimate motive is, of course, to get our business, they’re genuinely there just to make a living for themselves and their families, and they’re doing it in a way that is not only honest, but kind and friendly. If at the end of the day, they get nothing from us, they still would have treated us with the kindness of strangers that we as tourists and citizens of the world rely on. And that gives me faith in humanity.

After a day exploring New Delhi, we dedicated today to a day trip to Agra to visit the much-anticipated Taj Mahal, the “baby” Taj that the Taj Mahal was modeled after, and the Agra Fort. Since the “high speed” Gatimaan Express train that takes only about an hour and half had now been in operation for a few years, we decided to use that to get to Agra to then meet our driver and guide at the Agra train station.

Our guide, Tushaar, recounted the famous story (and potential myth since it has various iterations) of the Taj Mahal. An emperor of the Mughal Empire in the mid-1600s, Shah Jahan, had three wives, two of whom he wed for political reasons, and one of whom he wed out of love, which was very revolutionary at the time. This favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, was a Persian princess who was extremely intelligent and beautiful, and oftentimes consulted him in major decisions he made. She even accompanied him in battles that he fought. She bore him over a dozen children, and unfortunately, died during giving birth to their fourteenth child. They often times talked about what he would do if she were to die, and he eventually told her while she was alive that he would have a great palace built to bury her, where he’d eventually join her. This eventually became a reality. The emperor was devastated that the love of his life had died so tragically and abruptly, so he followed through on his promise and commissioned to have built what would eventually be known as the Taj Mahal, or in Arabic, “the crown palace,” to be the mausoleum to house the remains of his favorite beloved wife.

Rumor has it that it took over 22 years and the labor of over 20,000 men to build this lavish palace, designed in shades of white, beige, grey, and purple marble, and inlaid with jewels on the interior and the exterior, both local (such as the shiny brown Star of India), and foreign (cousins of emeralds and rubies). The technique used to inlay the semi-precious gemstones is unique to the city of Agra, requiring hand-chiseling of the marble to them insert the unique shape of each unique, custom shaped gemstone. And because the emperor did not want the technique to be copied, since he wanted just one unique palace to be the memory of his beloved wife, he chopped the thumbs off of each of the 20,000 workers to ensure they’d never flee and build something similar elsewhere (other iterations of this story claim that he blinded each of them and performed other variations of torture, but this is what our guide told us). The estimated cost, in today’s dollars, for what it took to build this embodiment of undying love and marital devotion, is about $830 million USD. I wonder if that amount discounts the cheap or even free slave labor that Shah Jahan probably used to get this masterpiece done.

Like many works of art and architectural masterpieces, the Taj Mahal is so much more in person than it is in photographs or textbooks. In photos, it looks very bright white, but in person, if you look closely at the minarets, the domes, and the walls, the marble ranges in color from white to beige to grey to even subtle shades of purple. And if our guide never pointed out the gem inlays and the method used to create this type of art, I probably would never have thought much of it and would think it was mass created. The technique employed to inlay the gems is so painstaking and takes years of studying and practice to get correct. After we walked through the grounds of the Taj, our guide took us to one of the family-owned businesses that still uses this same technique to make crafts such as framed marble inlays, tables, jewelry boxes, and table tops. I tried to chip away at the marble myself for a few minutes, but the workers got worried that I was ruining their work, so they immediately took the pointed instrument away from me. The method is called parchin kari (literally meaning “inlay” or “driven-in work”), a decorative art that uses cut and fitted, highly polished colored stones to create images. The stones are glued one by one, and stability is achieved by grooving the undersides of the stones so that they interlocked like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s hard to imagine anyone back in the U.S. being this devoted to a craft to learn a technique as intense and difficult as this one. You truly have to love this to do this.

The Taj is so grand and awe-inspiring, and it’s a romantic, sweet thought to think that a man was inspired to have this built in honor of his wife. Although, I do think at the same time it may have been even more romantic if he chose to have it built as a place to live with his wife while she were still alive, especially given that she bore him so many children. The other thought I have is that although he may have done this out of “love,” a lot of sweat, toil, and literal blood went into this, given that 20,000 men worked day in and out to have this built (and even got blinded or had their fingers chopped off after – what a reward!), and if we factored in real wage living costs into this, $830 million USD may actually be just a fraction of what this palace is truly worth. That is a chilling thought. People’s livelihoods changed all because of a crazy emperor’s obsession over the death of his wife, so everyone else has to “pay” for her death.

I don’t usually say I have favorites, but since I’ve been wanting to see this building since high school when I studied art history (and of course, because the U.S. is racist, and Advanced Placement Art History completely skips over all of Asia in favor of Western European and American art, I had to read about the Taj Mahal and Persian art in general on my own), I can honestly say that this really blew me away and is one of my all-time favorite buildings I’ve ever seen, next to Falling Water, the Frank Lloyd Wright home in Pennsylvania, and the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California. It inspires me to want to see even more Persian art… how can I get there?

We awoke to our first full day in India together this morning, here in New Delhi, where the humidity today was at 85 percent, and the temperature, depending on the time of day, was anywhere between 85 to 92 degrees Fahrenheit. I’ve never been a fan of humidity and dislike it when people rave about how good it is for one’s skin; I don’t care how good it is for my skin if I am stifling for air to breathe and get through the day. Who cares if you have great skin if you can’t breathe and die?

I can’t say more things about how intense and overwhelming the traffic has been. We took advantage of Uber in the city and also did quite a bit of walking, which apparently is not “normal” here for people who are not of lower classes. Upper class people get driven; lower class people walk. Since we’re foreigners who are visiting this country on holiday, by default, we are “upper class.” “Autos” or motorized tuk-tuks kept stopping to ask us if we wanted a ride, and when we said no and that we wanted to walk, they gave us befuddled stares and said we didn’t need to walk if we could get a ride. There are dotted white lines along the roads to indicate different lanes to drive in, as well as a double white line in the center of the ride to denote traffic going in opposite directions, but none of that mattered since there was absolutely no semblance of any order whatsoever. The dotted lines sometimes didn’t exist, and they didn’t really need to since no one really saw them or paid them any attention. A road was simply a road to drive a vehicle or walk on. Our own Uber and auto drivers would drive across the double-white line into oncoming traffic to then make turns. Autos along the road would almost drive into each other before swerving at the last minute to avoid each other. The autos, which at best could fit three passengers plus the driver, would stuff in as many as six or even people into the backseat. And we haven’t even gotten into the fact that it wasn’t even just auto and cars along the road; there were also pedestrians walking in all directions, with and against the traffic, plus cows and the occasional goat. We even saw chickens coming from who knows where and walking into the streets. Somehow and quite luckily, I didn’t see one chicken fatality.

Although New Delhi is the capital of India, it felt far less like a government city today and more like an enlarged rural area. The roads are paved, but if they weren’t, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it given how overwhelming and chaotic the traffic flow was. The crowds, the humidity, the frenzied traffic and total disorder: this is actually kind of how I imagined India to be. Although I will say that contrary to what others have warned me about (because it seems that everyone has an opinion on India and its lack of cleanliness), it’s nowhere as dirty as people have told me it was; I’ve seen similar if not worse levels of filth and trash in places like Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Brazil, and even parts of South Africa where the slums are.

After a seven hour flight to London, a four-hour layover at Heathrow, and another nine hours from London to New Delhi, all I wanted was to just teleport to India and get this trip started. Luckily for us (and especially Chris because he’s an Uber addict), Uber is readily available in pretty much every major city in India, so we “ordered” an Uber to pick us up from the airport late tonight to take us to our hotel. As we rushed through security and had our e-visas cleared quickly, I took a deep breath and realized… wow, the New Delhi international airport is redolent of cardamom and rose water. Yep, that’s it. Now, I know for sure that I am truly in India. All these beautiful spices and flowers are going to surround me for the next ten days (as well as the smell of sewage and garbage and fragrances of human and cow and dog and goat pee and poo, but.. we’ll get into that later).

Unfortunately, although English is technically a national language of India… well, guess what: not everyone knows how to speak it. So we experienced massive communication issues trying to tell our driver where exactly we were, and Chris couldn’t understand him, so we waited over an hour for this guy to show up when he ended up cancelling. We eventually did get another Uber who took us on a smooth ride to our hotel… in the midst of an endless sea of “autos” (really, motorized tuk-tuks), scooters, and lanes that have dividing lines but really are not real lanes because no one is following anything, even the double white dividers in the middle of the road. I’ve seen some really orderless traffic in China and in the middle of Vietnam, but New Delhi truly takes the cake for the level of insanity and complete chaos.

I must have really terrible luck when it comes to fire drills with customers because when I remember the times when really bad events have happened at work, they always tend to be around the time when I am about to leave for vacation or when I am actually on vacation but am still incessantly checking e-mail (which means that the person backing me up has to deal with the drama, which is not great). It happened today again while I was in transit to JFK with Chris and his parents. We got stuck in ridiculous rush-hour traffic (which… I guess starts at 2pm now on a Wednesday during summer time?!), so it took almost two hours to get from the Upper West Side to JFK. As we were stuck in traffic with my phone in my backpack, which happens to be in the trunk, and my computer is obviously packed away, I could feel my Wesoo buzzing on my wrist because my customer is not only calling but texting me, and she never does this unless it’s an emergency. As soon as we got through security and go to the lounge, I had to make three different calls while also Slack messaging four different people to get the problem resolved.  My head hurt. And I downed the glass of red wine that Chris got me in two gulps. I had just enough down time to resolve everything before I could pack everything away and get ready to board our flight.

Please don’t let anything bad happen at work while I am out. The last thing I need is a pile of crap waiting for me when I get back.

I set my alarm for 6:30am in hopes of watching the sun rise over the East Coast in Miami this morning, but was disappointed when instead, I was awoken by the sound of thunder and rain on my hotel windows about half an hour before. I looked outside and saw dark grey clouds and realized that my desires for a gorgeous early morning sun and sky would not be satiated this trip. It was the first time I’d been to Miami and seen this type of miserable weather.

The last two weeks in Miami, according to my customers in the area, have been dreary, grey, muggy, and needless to say, unpleasant. Miami residents are so used to clear blue skies and the sun that when periods like this descend over their palm tree-lined city, they start getting depressed. And hurricane season is nearing us in a couple months in August, where they’ve all advised me to stay far, far away and to postpone any work visits until after the last month of summer has ended.

It’s funny to think that no matter where you go in this country, there’s some natural phenomenon that everyone loves to hate on who is not local: in Florida, there are hurricanes; in New York and the northeast in general, there are snow storms; in California, we have earthquakes. But the locals just think it’s another part of their lives and are unphased by them. It’s their reality. It’s like accepting that you will wake up every morning and sleep each night. Earthquakes don’t scare me as someone native to California, and snow storms are just another day in the life in New York City, especially since I don’t have to shovel or salt anything.

Unfortunately, we had to depart Mexico City midday yesterday, and on our route back, we stopped over in Dallas. After going through Global Entry and clearing U.S. Customs, we re-entered domestic airport security to board our flight back to LaGuardia. For whatever reason, my big bag of chilies and other edibles I’d purchased in Mexico set off the security machine, and my backpack had to get inspected.

Of the edible delights I’d purchased in Oaxaca and Mexico City, I got dried chilies of the ancho rojo variety, which are dried poblanos known to be sweet and meaty, with a medium spice profile; morita, which are short, fat, smoked and dried jalapenos that are spicy, toasty, and roasty in flavor; pasilla, which are chocolate-colored, slender, and add richness without heat; and guajillo, which are a vibrant red hue with moderate heat, and slightly acidic in flavor. Of these, I’d used ancho and guajillo before, but the other two were new to me. They’re popularly used in moles, sauces, and various types of Mexican salsas. I also purchased three types of Mexican chocolate and some extremely fragrant and fresh dried oregano. The dried chilies’ fragrance was rich and unmistakable; they scented up all the clothes in my backpack, for better or for worse. As soon as the security agent unzipped my backpack, her eyes widened immediately, and she smiled and asked if these were dried chilies. I told her they were, and she asked where I was coming from. I told her, and she laughed. “Of course, these are from Mexico. This is potent stuff! The smell is so, so strong!”

I was so proud of my purchases. If I’d carried more than just my backpack and work carry-on, I definitely would have purchased more dried chilies, but alas, I had to exercise self-control in an effort to be a light packer. Chris made fun of me and likened me to an old grandma carrying a raw chicken across state lines. I’m just being an avid, international cook.

Yesterday, we wandered through Mexico City and spent some time in Centro Historico, the central historical district of the capital city. There is a large open plaza there that includes the famous Metropolitan Cathedral, a historic Baroque-style Catholic church that was built in the 1600s. We arrived right at the time of the main Sunday church service, and the cathedral was packed with hundreds of worshippers, all reciting, singing, and following along with the sermon. The songs portion was just beginning, and thus the organ music was being played.

For someone who is not particularly religious at all, I have always loved exploring churches during our travels, and I get the most excited when I visit and I hear organ music. The organ is one of those musical instruments that we never seem to get to enjoy unless we’re in a church and in the very fortunate music hall. It’s got this chilling, thrilling, haunting, reverberating sound that for me, no other instrument is quite able to replicate. I used to joke that the only benefit of getting married in a church is to be able to listen to organ music while walking down the aisle. I wandered through the throngs of worshippers and reveled in the organ music against the singing voices of the crowds. They were all pretty in tune from what I could hear, which was even more impressive.

And then I realized that in the middle of my audio enjoyment, I was probably offending almost every single person in the church given that I was wearing a sleeveless top and short shorts, thus exposing parts of my body that in Catholic churches, they look down on. I was getting some double takes from a few of the fully covered women singing.

That was just great. Well, it was hot outside, and I’m an unknowing tourist, right?