Thursday
Oct 6, 2005 - day 7 - Jaipur - Kathy: 168 photos, Bob: 157 photos
I am writing this in haste because once again, it is late
and I’m tired. We have to get up early
tomorrow, so I don’t want to stay up half the night writing like last night.
Today we were still in Jaipur. We started off with a city tour that began
with a photo op at the Palace of the Winds.
Across the street, we saw
snake charmers with real cobras, and that was fun.
It was very hot.
Next, we went to the Jantar Mantar Observatory where we
took lots of photos. This was like a
modern sculpture garden, but the sculptures can tell you the exact time of day,
the day of the year,
which astronomy signs are at
which location, etc.
It also has the world’s
largest sundial.
Kathy and I climbed to the top of the sundial and
surveyed the rest of the sculptures below.
Next, we went to the
where the current descendant
of the king of Rajasthan lives. They had
fancy decorations, like the largest silver urns in the world.
They had three small museums
there, including a museum of things relating to the past kings. For example, one of the kings was a
photography buff, so they had some of his photos. One loved to do paper cutting, so they had
some of his cutouts. The second museum
was a textile museum with examples of the king’s clothes. The third was a museum of small arms; weapons,
shields, and more. That was the most
impressive of the three.
Next, we went for a walk down the street, visiting the
local shops. This was not a tourist
place, this was where the real people shopped, and it was very
interesting. They had many shops,
specializing in everything from spices to photocopy machines to foods.
Next, we took a rickshaw back to our bus. The bus took us to another “factory”. This was a textile factory where they make
beautiful wool rugs. What I didn’t
realize is that after a wool carpet is made, there is a fuzzy nap on the
underside, and they use a torch to burn all the fuzzy stuff off.
Having already bought a silk
rug, we were not interested in buying one.
They also did old-fashion textile ink-stamping.
It was interesting to see
them print designs onto fabric with such precision, speed and accuracy, all done
by hand.
Kathy
is into stamping, making wonderful Christmas and birthday cards, so she was
fascinated. She even talked them into
stamping onto her shirt.
When the guy was done, there
was an elephant decoration on her back and a big grin on her face.
Bored, we went to another
building where we looked at scarves. I
told them I was looking for a simple but warm scarf for my mother. They dug out a nice simple brown scarf and spread
it before us. I said that it was nice
and asked them how much it cost. They
said five hundred dollars! Again, this
is a case where I wouldn’t have even paid fifty dollars, so their prices were
more than twenty times more expensive than expected. Maybe the next “factory” they show us I’ll
just sit outside the door and listen to my minidisc music player. I was thinking that maybe I should offer to
sell my camera for only five hundred thousand rupees. Do these crazy people really think that I
have a money-printing press in my basement or something?
For dinner, some of us (including me and Kathy) paid
extra to go to a special dinner and cultural show. It was a wonderful evening. First, they gave cooking lessons
where they showed us all the
spices
and how to make certain
Indian food dishes. Next, they showed us
how to work a real Tandoori oven,
and Kathy did a piece
herself! After that, there were some
dancing girls
and a dancing boy who was
able to balance five pots on top of a glass that was on his head, all while
maintaining a fancy dance.
The boy looked gay, and it
made me wonder how homosexuality is viewed in
Dinner was great, and then we had a small puppet show.
Afterward, they showed us how the Turbans are tied. First, they unraveled it fully: ten meters
(more than 30 feet) of cloth that was about a half-meter (one and a half feet)
wide. Then the man coiled it a little and wrapped it around his head. The first layer was pushed up higher on his
head and the second layer was coiled around his head like the first. Those two layers were pushed up on his head
higher, and a third layer was added where the others were, and this went on
until the whole thing was wrapped up on his head. Then they put the turban on me and took a
photo!
After that, we went to a small turban museum where we saw
the different shapes and colors of many different turbans. There was also a small bookshop where I
bought a book on Hinduism.
I’d like to write more, but I better get to bed.