..SouthAsiaRocks..

The other weekend we went out looking for Agrasen ki Baoli (Agrasen's Well).  We like to see and discover new things in our city - it's so fun!  :)  We knew about this place.  We had seen pictures of it, heard about it and knew it wasn't too far from our house, so when we had a little bit of time one Saturday we decided to find it :) We found the road leading up to it and saw some people just hanging out at the end of the road :)  It looked like they were having fun :) Then we found it!  This well is an old step well.  There are no historical records to show who built it, but it is said that it was built by King Agrasen.   It was said to have been rebuilt and fixed up again in the 14th century but since there aren't any historical records, so it is unknown as to how old it actually is.    We walked in and there it was! You can see the sky scrapers in the background!  It is so crazy to be in the middle of our big c...

Here's more of the oldest city of the Capital. This part is much newer than some of the other parts I talked about in the last post. In the picture below is the Jamali Kamali Mosque and Tomb. The mosque was built much later - in 1528 in honor of a sufi saint. It's crazy that I never knew this existed until this past week! I live in such a cool city!!! As we started to walk towards it, a man told us it was locked up. We were a little sad until he said he had the key and would let us in :) We were so glad he did! When he first let us in, this was the first thing I saw... do you see that big be hive?? Crazy! They use white marble, black marble and sandstone in this mosque. It looks really neat! There were a lot of interesting designs and window areas in this mosque. The outside wall was really neat too. This is the inside of the mosque. I love all the old blue tile. It's so neat! It's over 500 years old! crazy! This is inside the tomb of Jamali Kamali. Some of ...

When my parents were in town we saw some fun "old stuff" :) I love learning about the history of our city. It's such a cool city! It is said that there were 7 old cities of the Capital city. We went to the first city on this day. It's REALLY old! The original fort wall was built in AD 731!!! Crazy hunh? It was expanded later in the 11th century... so, needless to say, it's OLD!! It was so cool to go to because it wasn't like most of the other ruins here that are out in the open and the sun, these were in the jungle (that's what they call it here). It felt like we were in the movie Tomb Raider.... Here's one of the really old mosques. It's so cool! I'm not sure how old this part is, but they wouldn't have built it with a tree right in the front, so it's at least older than that tree... :) I'm going to try to find out more info on it :) It's cool because throughout all of the old city ruins people still live their li...

We've been exploring a lot lately with my sis here. I haven't had many opportunities to go out and take pics and do things like this lately b/c I was super pregnant, so it's been fun :) We went to a temple near our house yesterday and it had some really interesting things to take pictures of - like these bells! This guy below is a pundit (Hindu priest) and he ties red strings on people's wrists. The strings are supposed to protect you among a few other things. We went to a fun Minar that's in our city too. It's famous and really old! For those of you that watch the TV show "Fringe", they mentioned this iron pillar (below) in an episode a couple of weeks ago. It's a really old Iron Pillar that's made of 98% pure iron and was said to have been built between 375 & 413!! It's said to be one of the world's foremost metallurgical curiosities (whatever that means :)). The language that's on it is a language that isn't used a...

My sister is here! She got in the day before yesterday. Yesterday we hung out... She tried to learn how to make Poori (sp?) bread.... she wasn't very successful at it :) haha! We took Aashini to school and then went and picked her up after school. It was the first time I had been to her school since having Diya, so we brought sweets for everyone :) After Aashini's nap, we went to a fort that I love! You can read about the fort here ! This shepherd guy had his donkeys walking around inside of the fort. He had their ankles tied together, it was kinda funny :) This fort is so cool looking! It's "wintertime" so it's super hazy and foggy looking some days! There were a lot more monkeys there than the last time we were there! There were tons of them! (You can see a couple of them in the shadows in this picture). So those are the pics from yesterday... but no pics from today - my sister is sick :(

The other day Adam and I were looking at Google Maps trying to find a specific place when we saw something kind of strange on the map. You can see it in the bottom right of this picture - it looks like a strange checkerboard... At first I thought it was a mistake on Google maps (an area where they couldn't take a picture of or something) but then we found out it was a place called Khirki Masjid (Window Mosque). It's really close to the hospital, so we thought we'd check it out after an appointment the other day. You have to park on the main road area and walk through the Khirki Village to get to it. Tucked deep into this village is the mosque. Walking up to the gate we saw buffalo, dogs, cats, birds and heard a Peacock (although it was REALLY close by, we couldn't find it)... This mosque is really unique and is really old. It was built between 1351-1354. It was built during the Tughlaq Dynasty by Khan-i-Jahan Maqbul Tilangani , who was the Prime Minister at the time. ...