I will always remember this day because it marks my encounter with the greatest accomplishment in human history, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Oh yeah, and the Taj Mahal wasn’t bad neither.
Since we couldn’t all get to computers and fill out online brackets and I didn’t feel like messing with paper ones, I thought it would be a good idea to scrap the traditional tourney pool and just have a silent auction (thanks to Holly for the idea) where you bid on teams and then win money based on their progress throughout the tournament. It was a lot of fun passing around the bid sheets on the bus and seeing who was bidding on what. Chris Shiflett and Jack Brock went back and forth on Louisville, Beth made a late run at Duke, and Kevin was nice enough to put a quarter on Penn. Every team was bought (I had to take up all the 16 seeds at a nickel apiece), and the most expensive team was Illinois at $6 (thanks to Jack).
I really like the auction format. A lot of people, myself included, have proposed novel ways of scoring a tourney pools that are supposed to reward picking upsets. The problem is that you can pick the three most unexpected Sweet 16 teams, but if you don’t know who’s playing in the Final Four you’re still getting your ten bucks eaten up. That’s me in the pool—I’ll have a nice idea about an 11 or 12 seed that earns me what exactly, a point? So I lose by 29 points instead of 30. The auction, on the other hand, allows you to profit from good little ideas. You can just buy up a team that you think is undervalued, and you can profit from as small an investment as you want. Next year I’ll figure out a way to sell overvalued teams short, and the system will be perfect.
Agra has a whole bunch of nothing apart from the Taj Mahal, which is kind of like saying Niagra Falls isn’t so great except for all that water. It’s amazing the lengths they go to to protect the Taj. Every Friday it’s closed so that they can clean it, and they clean every inch of it, including the very top. Automobiles are not allowed within a certain radius of the Taj Mahal, and factories are not allowed within a much larger radius.
On the bus on the way in Desiree was whistling “Within You Without You,” which cracked me up.
When we arrived on the premises we were greeted by probably the biggest group of vendors we’ve ever seen anywhere. Getting off the bus near a tourist attraction is always an adventure, so it makes sense that the mother of all tourist attractions would have the mother of all sales hordes. This group I really enjoyed, though, because they had mastered the art of the Maybe Later.
When you invariably said no to these people carrying all kinds of trinkets, they would come back with, “Maybe later?” and if you said, “Okay, maybe later” they would say, “I remember you.” It sounds like maybe a reasonable conversation to have, but when all hundred salesmen are trained to say exactly the same thing, it ends up sounding hilarious.
The price of a ticket to the Taj Mahal is 750 rupees for foreigners and 20 rupees for Indians. The first thing we saw when we got inside the gates was a giant, dark red building, and you could see the Taj Mahal peeking over its walls. As you are walking through the red building you can see the Taj in the distance, and it really does look amazing. The thing I didn’t get in the pictures I’ve seen was just how pristine it looks—it has darker buildings all around it, and it’s very bright. We took a group picture in front of it, but we didn’t get the McCombs banner because they wouldn’t let us bring it in.
We had to either go in barefoot or wear foot coverings to go inside, and most of us opted for the foot coverings. They were just pieces of cloth that tied over your shoes, and they allowed you to slide on the marble of the Taj Mahal. The inside of the Taj Mahal was very ornate, but it was not quite as pristine as the outside, and Kiran was put off by the smell. There was a replica of the actual tomb of Shah Jihan’s wife, which we were able to see, but we weren’t able to go down to where the actual tomb was because a woman had suffocated to death recently. Most of us decided to stay until sunset, so we burned some time by visiting the mosque next door and hanging out on the grass. Our guides saw some French tourists and started making fun of them, saying, “Ooh la la,” which cracked me up.
I sat for the sunset in front of the Taj, which was not an ideal place, but it was still pretty darn good. We took turns guessing the nationalities of tourists who walked by. At one point Kevin ripped Americans for being the only tourists that wear shorts at a Muslim holy place, but it turns out that his determination that they were Americans was based on the fact that they were wearing shorts. Apparently he’s as good at circular logic as regular logic.
I didn’t think watching the Taj Mahal change colors during the sunset was magnificent as much as it was just really peaceful. We got to sit and just admire it, and it provided great scenery for relaxing and people watching. It was really great, though.
One of the funniest things about being at the Taj Mahal was seeing the little children being dragged around by their parents. Kevin and I have memories of Niagra Falls and Graceland, respectively, as the things that are in your town that you have to go to when guests come in. It’s funny to think that for some little Indian kid that place is the Taj Mahal. We did our impressions of the children: “Why do we have to go to the Taj Mahal again?”
The food of the day was chicken tikka pizza, once again from Pizza Hut, where we had dinner. There was probably something at our lunch buffet that was better, but all I can remember right now was the fried chicken, which was very pink on the inside.
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