Delhi's Red Fort

Last weekend a friend and I headed into old Delhi to explore a bit. Our goal was the Red Fort (built in 1648), a name which clearly comes from the red walls that stretch 1.5 miles around nearly 125 acres of land. After a reminder that I should always carry my foreign registration card (the difference between a 10 rupee entry fee and 250 rupees) we streamed into the fort along with the crowds of Indians. I do appreciate that the tourism and heritage groups in India have kept the entry fees so reasonable priced that the locals can also enjoy the preserved heritage (even if it does make for larger crowds). We had to walk by a sandbagged guard (ummm...really, he'd just open fire?) and go through the woman's line to get patted down and our bags looked at, but then the peacefulness of the open architecture started to soak in. We spotted the Diwan-i-Aam, a pavilion where the emperor used to hold his public audiences, and figured that we should head in the direction. Most of the Indians were trying to capture a photo of the raised platform with ornate inlay where the emperor would have sat; I of course, was more interested in the arches holding up the pavilion. From there we wandered around the grounds, generally heading to less populated areas as we could see them, but making sure we looked at everything on the grounds: the private apartments of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan topped by the scales of justice and with exquisite inlay (and more arches of course!), several side pavilions in white marble which screamed of tranquility, the Burj-i-Shamali a marble pavilion with a water chute which enabled residents to raise water from the Yamuna River below, the Moti Masjid, the Hayat Bakhsh Bagh which is a pleasure palace in the middle of a [dry] pool, and of course the out of place block barracks the British erected after the 1857 uprising. One lesson I did arrive at while wandering around and admiring the grounds and walls was that as I like taking pictures of people when I travel I can't really complain when others take pictures of me as we walk around. A lesson I'm sure I'm going to struggle to accept, but must if I'm not willing to give up the pictures I enjoy capturing the most.

For those of you who didn't realize it, the colored words in my posts are links which will take you to appropriate photos....