India - Delhi and Agra

I spent a fortnight in India in January - the reason I have waited so long to blog about it is not due to some traumatic experience in an ashram but because my photos are so poor that until now I couldn't bring myself to illustrate a post with them.

I was told that everyone in Delhi would try to con me, and at the airport I was glad to be able to ignore the advice I received from a passing taxi driver that the underground railway was shut due to fog.  In town I found a rickshaw driver who suggested I call my hotel to get directions.  He let me use his phone, and was even kind enough to key in the number himself when I read it out.  The hotel explained that they were terribly sorry but all the roads around had been closed due to the huge religious festival in town that weekend.  The driver suggested he take me to the Official Tourist Office of India so that they could find me a hotel.  He took me to a building which in hindsight may not have been the Official Tourist Office of India, although they did have a poster of the Taj Mahal.  The man there invited me to speak on the phone to a few hotels, which were all full and which I now realise were being voiced by someone in the next door office.  The only thing for it was to go to Agra for the night, and by happy chance this fellow owned a travel company that could sell me a trip there for a very reasonable price!  And so it was that I got to see the Taj Mahal and returned to Delhi in time for my flight to Udaipur a satisfied customer of this intricate and impressive scam.

This might be the worst photo ever taken at the Taj Mahal

The dream tourist site for a Brit.  No idea what the queue was for.

I don't think this photo is bad

Magnificent view of Taj Mahal from Agra Fort

None of this sign makes sense to me, but nonetheless I would like a wazoo tank installed in my flat.

The Turkish Bath

A visit to a Turkish bath on a Sunday evening is just the thing, although probably best avoided if you have a problem with public nudity, either yours or that of the very fat Turkish man sitting opposite you.

The bath house in the Antakya market can't have changed at all for the last 100 years, apart from the electronic massage chair just inside the entrance.  It is open to both men and ladies, only at different times, and I believe the opening hours for ladies are a little restricted.

You are given a loincloth, and first you hang around lying on marble slabs in a very hot room.  Then a man attacks you with a brillo pad and removes about a pound of skin from your body.  His friend then washes you all over with some sort of carbolic soap – this is a little disconcerting as they begin by covering your face with soap so you can’t open your eyes and then suddenly whip off your loin cloth or hurl hot water at your chest or give you a good thump on the stomach with a wet sponge.

The end result is that you are so clean that surely there is no need to wash for at least another week.

The outside of the bath house - you really don't want to see any photos from inside.

A weekend in Antakya

The excellent Hatay Archaeology Museum supposedly has the second largest collection of Roman mosaics in the world.  I don't know where the largest is, but the one in Hatay has quite enough for one day thank you.  The museum had one guard with a pistol and one with a huge truncheon swinging from her belt; if you can think of anything harder to steal than a ten foot square mosaic then I'd like to hear of it but perhaps they have a problem with delinquent youths drawing moustaches on the Roman gods.

Not bad eh?

Some of the mosaics have bits missing, so you have to complete them yourself.  I'm pretty sure this is right.

I'm not sure the museum guards have been doing their job

We watched the Istanbul derby of Besiktas v Galatasaray in a bar, where the atmosphere was predictably raucous.  The game had to be abandoned after hundreds of Besiktas fans stormed the pitch and hurled plastic chairs at tear-gas spraying riot police; nobody in the bar seemed to think it was anything out of the ordinary.  In England they turn the camera away from such incidents, but in Turkey the commentator perks up and describes the incident with a practised eye - "nice back-handed baton use  there" and so on.

Turkey is in fact a curiously violent place, as you will realise if you saw the photo last week of the Turkish MP with a bloody nose after some fairly robust political debating.  Last week on my way to work we got stuck behind a road rage incident where the two drivers were out of their cars and squaring up to each other.  Suddenly a man who I am certain had nothing to do with the incident rushed up with a knife drawn, at which point five other bystanders leapt on him.  All rather jolly.

No weekend here is complete without an ascent of the town hill, which affords some good views and will be blogged about as soon as I run out of more interesting material.

Antakya from the hill.  The alien spaceship that has landed top centre is Prime Mall, second swishest mall in Antakya.