Post a Comment On: Paul's Travels

Jaipur is in the province of Rajasthan, and today is our second day here. We took a very uncomfortable overnight bus to Mumbai, and then flew here yesterday. When our flight finally got here after being delayed for 3 hours (it is a 1.5hour flight) we were exhausted and went straight to sleep.

Thankfully today was a day full of happy goodness. I'm not sure what that means, but I think it's because I'm comfortably stuffed from curry - we just ate dinner at a restaurant called Saffire and they fed us until we nearly popped. We're staying at this REALLY nice place called the Sunder Palace, it is a beautiful little hotel; the room is clean, the sheets are clean, no hint of stinkyness anywhere. Also the hotel staff is really nice and very helpful. Just my 2c.

We had this idea that we would buy stuff in Jaipur, and I think we succeeded in this. Walking towards the walled 'pink city' we had to jump around auto-rickshaws and bicycle rickshaws and cows. The city is actually pink, apparently from the terracotta plaster they use here. There is a huge gate-building but the gate is quite small for the amount of traffic that goes through, and Indian driving rules don't really handle congested spaces very well - so there was this huge traffic jam as all manner of vehicles are trying to get through the gate at the same time.

Once in the pink city we're assaulted with smells of food, exhaust, and occaisionally cow and gross stinky sewer smells. Visually the city is stunning, from the pink walls, to the white tower that soars above the markets, right down to the bright colours of all the stuff people are selling. They had huge HUGE bags of chilli peppers, and sacks full of what we guessed was probably spices of some kind, but it's all just ground down and they make little mountains of it. And the textile vendors have an astounding variety of colours and textures they're selling.

We got to see some of this up close, because we decided that we needed a few things to keep us warm. I got myself a wool blanket, and we got two wool shawls. One is more of a man-shawl but I haven't worn it in public yet - although lots of the local guys wear these things.
We bought a bunch of other crap, so far I've spent about $100 on myself.

That's it for now. I'd post pictures but I'm so stuffed I can barely move. Next time. I mean it.

pw