Friday, July 25, 2014

A temple and a tomb.

Our last few weekends have seen us venturing out of Delhi to experience other parts of India, but amidst the adventures and misadventures, we’ve still managed to keep crossing things off the Delhi to-do list. The weekend before our trip to Agra, we managed to see two major sites in one day: the Lotus Temple and Humayun’s Tomb.

The Lotus Temple, completed in 1986, is a house of worship for the Baha’i faith and serves as the Mother Temple for the Indian subcontinent. The structure of the temple is clearly inspired by the lotus flower and features 27 petals surrounded by nine pools. We were told that the interior is nothing to write home about. It was, indeed, relatively plain, but air conditioned. In my book, that makes anything worth seeing when the monsoon is two weeks late.

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Our next stop was Humayun’s Tomb. This is the burial site of the Mughal Emperor Humayun, commissioned by his first wife and designed by a Persian architect. Today it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and tourists are advised to make a stop here before venturing to the Taj Mahal. Presumably to wet your palette for extravagant gravesites.

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Tomb and temple. Done check done.

Happy Friday.

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