Day 14

Today was a day for Jaipur sightseeing. First up was the City Palace; instead of being just an old building (it seems like we've seen a lot of those), it was more like a set of museums housed in an old building. Most interesting to me was the arms museum, which displayed all sorts of swords, knives, daggers, armor, pistols, and other weaponry from a period of a couple hundred years. The displays were very "Indian". For example, one display case showed a "Night Polo Ball" (supposedly so that women could play polo under the cover of darkness) sitting right next to some vicious-looking swords.

Right across from the palace was another unique piece of Indian architecture, an astronomical observatory built in the early 1700s that looks like it could have been a modern-art sculpture park erected in 1970. There were a whole lot of instruments, most based on the common idea of a big ramp that casts a shadow on a curved and marked strip of marble. The largest ramp is nearly 100 feet high (it tells time to an accuracy of 2 seconds) and most of the structures are climbable so it's almost like a playground too.

At that point Gloria wasn't feeling too well, so she headed back to the hotel in the car with Robin and Manju. We said we'd walk to the Hawa Mahal and meet Robin and Manju in front when they came back. After after walking to and seeing the Hawa Mahal and waiting for about 15 minutes, Swati saw the car, but it wasn't coming back, it was still just leaving and headed towards the hotel! So there are some times when even Indian traffic hits total gridlock, at least if you're driving an SUV. It seems like every place we go has some sort of traffic law curiosity. Delhi has seatbelt requirements, and Jaipur apparently has helmet requirements for 2-wheelers. So after seeing almost no one wearing helmets, it's fun to see all sorts of people wearing a lot of goofy-looking things on their heads.

We ended up meeting somewhere else instead for some shopping. Everything in Jaipur is painted pink, and all the shops have uniform signs and numbers, which, according to one of the guidebooks, was a result of an upgrade of the city for Bill Clinton's arrival there in 2000. It will be interesting to see what they do to the Taj Mahal when Bush shows up there soon. Maybe hide it.

For the evening's entertainment we went outside of Jaipur to what was essentially a theme park, where the theme was a traditinal Rajasthani village. If it was in the U.S., it would have been completely commercialized, sterilized, Disneyfied, and really cheesy, but since this is India, where it's impossible to sterilize anything, it was actually really cool. There were camel rides, elephant rides, bullock-cart rides, human-powered ferris-wheels, dancers, magicians, puppeteers, archery, and a traditional dinner served to us. Everything was really dark and there were no safety precautions, so it was easy to convince yourself that you were actually in a traditional village. A good way to spend our last night together as a group, although sadly Gloria and Robin missed it.