INDIA, AGRA: THE ITIMAD-UD-DAULAH OR "BABY TAJ"

 December 27, 2024

Between the Agra Fort and our next destination, we passed a few interesting things on the street, including this man on horse back (left) who I think is Shivaji I, a 17th century Indidan ruler. The guy in the right peering in our van window is a bit scary, don't you think?

I think that is a mechanic's shop on the left with it's very own domed verandah. It's hard to believe that the "Hotel Alleviate" (right) could offer anything better.

This little roadside stand selling water and cigarettes had a sign that said "Try unmatched quality." It also had monkeys on the roof.

We saw more monkeys on a roof and in a tree when we got to our destination the Itimad-ud-Daulah, locally known as the "Baby Taj."

INDIA, VARANASI: WEAVING FACTORY, MORE CITY WALKING, AND THE GHATS AT NIGHT

 December 25, 2024

India is famous for its textiles, particularly its silk, and Varanasi is known as one of the chief and best producers of silk in India. If we had known that, we may have purchased fewer woven items from the looms in Kaziranga/Assam! (Okay, maybe not.)

With our permission, our guide took us to one of the weaving ateliers in Varanasi. It was located in what looked like a large, beautiful home.

We walked into a large room full of a dozen or more looms, some in use and some not.

The host who guided us through the workshop showed us some samples of their most exquisite work. Look at all the colors and the intricate detail!

The crude back of the same piece makes the front seem even more remarkable. This is not embroidery--it is weaving with warp and weft.

INDIA, "OLD" DELHI: JAMA MASJID (MOSQUE)

 December 23, 2024

Just a note about the weather in Delhi. The temperatures were generally quite pleasant, with highs in the 60s and low 70s, but the air quality was horrific. These are screen shots from my phone from the evening of December 22 and the morning of December 23 showing an AQI of 428 and 420, respectively.

For context, the airnow.gov website has this enlightening chart: 

YIKES.  If you wondered why my photos all look a bit fuzzy, it's not my phone camera; it's the air. Delhi often has the worst air pollution of anywhere in the world.

We got picked up at our hotel after an early breakfast (which was fantastic, of course) for the day's adventures. On our way to our first destination, we passed the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the official residence of the President of the Republic of India, who right now happens to be a woman. It's the building on the left below. Constructed from 1912-1929 during the period of British rule, it has 200,000 square feet and 340 rooms. The building on the right in the photo below looks like a stadium of some kind, but it was British Parliament House between 1927-1947, after which it housed the Indian Parliament until 2023. It is where the Constitution of India was created. It was recently replaced by a newer building.

Our first destination on this smoggy and also drizzly morning was in Old Delhi--the Jama Masjid ("Congregational Mosque"), one of the largest Sunni mosques in India and still actively used today.

After climbing a lot of stairs, we emtered through one of three gates. 

INDIA, DELHI: QUTB MINAR COMPLEX AND FUN TIMES IN THE IMPERIAL HOTEL

 December 22, 2025

I admit that I am obsessed with the traffic in India. Here's yet another post beginning with traffic footage. This one shows us trying to cross the street on foot. DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS ON YOUR OWN. You should be with a guide who can, well, guide you across.

 

Pay attention to the signage, which is often good for a laugh or at least a smile.

And watch out for the traffic cops. Some don't look so friendly. And the trees have eyes (eyeglasses?)!

Our next stop was the Qutb Minar Complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I'm not sure how to pronounce it, but it sounds like a disease.

INDIA, DELHI: HUMAYUN'S TOMB

 December 22, 2024

After church we got on the road for a city tour of New Delhi. I can't say this enough, but the traffic is CRAZY in the city. There is no respect for lanes, and there is lots of honking. Tourists should not drive.

Our first stop was Humayun's Tomb, built for the Mughal emperor Mirza Nasir al-Din Muhammad (aka "Humayun," and I have no idea how the names relate to each other) by his first wife and chief consort, Empress Bega Begum and with the patronage of Humayun's son, the great Emperor Akbar, in the 1570s. The Empress was so devastated by her husband's death that she dedicated the remainder of her life to the construction of the most magnificent mausoleum up to that time in the Empire. It was the first monumental Islamic mausoleum in India as well as the first garden tomb, and it greatly influenced that design of the Taj Mahal 80 years later.

The tomb and surrounding property was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993, which enabled it to undergo extensive restoration. It didn't take long for us to discover what an excellent guide we had. His name was Sajeet, and Bob found him online. I wish I had more info to share because he was one of the best guides we have ever had. 

The tomb complex has an impressive 67-acre footprint and includes over 100 tombs in addition to Humayan's Tomb, as well as several ponds and  gardens.

It was pretty busy the day we were there.

TUNISIA, DAY 3: TUNIS - THE BARDO MUSEUM

 March 22, 2024

On our way to our next destination, we passed by the Tunisian Parliament building.  Its style really seems to fit what we had seen of the country. I love it.

Somewhere near there we picked up our guide Feker's cousin (on the right next to Stan, below):

There are multiple gates to the old town/medina of Tunis still standing, and this is one of them: the Bab Saadoun gate, first constructed as one arch in 1350 and reconstructed in 1881 with three arches to better handle the traffic. The wall it was once part of is gone, but the gate remains as the central feature of a modern roundabout.

Wikipedia has a picture of what it looked like with one arch in 1880:

. . . and another photo from 1940 showing what it looked like when the wall was still there.

TUNISIA, DAY 2 CONT.: KAIROUAN - MAUSOLEAM SIDI ABID AL-GHARIANI, ZAWIYA OF SIDI SAHIB, THE EL JEM AMPHITHEATER, COUNTRY ROADS, THE MEDINA, AND A PARTY AT OUR HOTEL

March 21, 2024

As we walked deeper into the old town section of Kairouan, we came to the Mausoleum of Sidi Abid Al-Ghariani.

This building was built as a madrasa (school for studying the Quran) in the 14th century by a Kairawani scholar known as Al-Jadidi. After he died while on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1384 AD, his disciple Sidi Abid Al-Ghariani carried on his work. When Sidi Abid died in 1402 AD, he was buried here, and ever since the school has borne his name. 

It is a spectacular example of the local architectural style.

Check out this amazing craftsmanship:

I think this must be the tomb, but we were not allowed to go into the room itself and this photo was taken from the door.

TUNISIA, DAY 2: KAIROUAN - AGHLABID BASINS AND THE GREAT MOSQUE

 March 21, 2014

After a non-descript buffet breakfast in the hotel, our guide Feker picked us up at our hotel. This is the courtyard in front of our hotel, accessed by a wonderful stone gate.

A sign on the gate says a whole bunch of stuff in Arabic, and Porte de France, 13/03/1912 in French.

The gate marks the separation between the old medina and the new city.

From our room's balcony, which overlooked the square, I had seen a man strewing seed in the plaza. There were plenty of pigeons there scavenging for leftovers about half an hour later.

When Feker arrived, of course he took twenty or so photos.

AZERBAIJAN: BIBI-HEYBAT MOSQUE, JUMA MOSQUE OF SHAMAKHI, JUMA MOSQUE OF BAKU

Azerbaijan is almost completely Muslim (99.2%, according to the Pew Research Center), with two-thirds belonging to the Shia branch and one-third belonging to the Sunni branch of Islam. However, while there is a Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom, few locals are "religious" because of the Soviet prohibition of religious practice during the seventy-one years Azerbaijan was part of the USSR. In other words, most of them have lived their entire lives without religion and appear to be fine to have it continue that way.

Still, Islam is a significant part of their ethnic/national identity, and slowly, slowly, young people are being drawn back.

We visited two important mosques built since Azerbaijan became an independent nation in 1991: the Bibi-Heybat Mosque in Baku and the Juma (or Friday) Mosque of Shamakhi. We also visited a third mosque that was remodeled at the end of the 19th century, the Juma Mosque of Baku.

1. Bibi-Heybat Mosque

Although this mosque was built in the 1990s following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is a recreation of a 13th-century mosque by the same name that was blown up in 1934 by the Bolsheviks as part of their anti-religion campaign. It is the first Stalin-destroyed mosque to have been rebuilt in the post Soviet era.

It sits on one of the major highways of Baku alongside the Caspian Sea:

View from across the highway

View from the courtyard on the Caspian Sea side

KAMASHI, UZBEKISTAN, PART 2: A MOUNTAIN DRIVE TO THE KATTA LANGAR MOSQUE

The great philosopher Minnie Pearl (okay, so she wasn't a philosopher, but comedians tend to know more about life than a lot of people) once said, "Take the back roads instead of the highways."  I wonder why she said that? Had she been to Uzbekistan?

Because that's just what we did. If this isn't a back road, I don't know what is.

After we'd been entertained and fed at a home in what was already a remote village, we went out to the street to see a line-up of a couple dozen cars. Our tour company had arranged for private vehicles driven by their owners, residents of the village, to haul us up the mountain. They must have connected with every car owner for miles around to find transportation for all of us. (The tour company owner, who was on the trip with us, made a point of telling us that they'd worked on these travel plans well into the previous night, and that this side trip was unique to Fun for Less Tours and not something other tours did.) Four of us hopped into a five-passenger sedan being driven by a local man who spoke zero English. We put on our seat belts (where available) and headed up the road. Our friends were in other similar vehicles.

It was an exercise in trust, let me tell you.

We climbed steadily up hill on what was sometimes a paved road and at other times was just a road. The locals have their reasons for choosing alternate means of transportation:

It's not like we were in the middle of nowhere. Of course not.

The scenery was so stark. There was little vegetation, and yet there were homes and other structures along the road most of the time.

MARRAKECH, MOROCCO: LUNCH AT CHEZ LAMINE AND THE CALL TO PRAYER IN JEMAA EL-FNA

As noted in a prior post, Jemaa el-Fna is the largest city square in all of Africa. For the most part, it's a wild and crazy place--which I'll cover in a future post--but while our experiences there were wild and crazy, they were also thought-provoking and educational. Two contrasting experiences in particular illustrate this: our lunch at Chez Lamine and our experience with the Muslim call to prayer.

Our guide Abdul somehow picked up on our interest in food and our willingness to try new things. Maybe it's because we were so entranced by the olives and nuts and dates we purchased from vendors in the souks. Maybe it's because we were so fascinated by butcher shop windows. Maybe it's that we looked so well fed. 

Or MAYBE it was because Bob was pestering him about taking us somewhere authentic, not a TOURIST place. "Where do YOU like to eat?" Bob asked Abdul. 

Well, I can now tell you what authentic dish Abdul likes to eat: sheep's head roasted in a pit, served up fresh at Chez Lamine Hadj Mustapha. It may be crazy to us Americans, but it isn't wild. It's domestic.

Chez Lamine sounds innocuous enough, and the menu, if one doesn't look too closely, seems acceptable. I recognized the picture of a tangia, an urn-shaped Moroccan cooking pot that we saw everywhere. The restaurant itself was not large--maybe six or seven small paper-covered tables that could be moved around to make bigger tables--and there was nothing fancy about it. There also wasn't anything too obvious that screamed out, "WARNING! WARNING!" (unless you speak enough French to translate Tete de Mouton, which means "Head of Sheep"). 

Their outside decor, on the other hand, was not so enticing (although Bob would disagree). What is that sticking out of the tangia on the right?

If you thought it was an upside down sheep head, you were correct. You did guess that, right?