First Day in Udaipur

Sarah and I will double up on blogging right now since we have so much to catch up on.

After leaving Goa, we had a few days in transit, going through Pune, Ahmedebad, resting at Mt Abu for a short while and eventually arriving in Udaipur, Rajasthan two days ago.

We arrived around 2 in the afternoon after a long bus ride through some scenic desert terrain. Our hotel is a cute place in the old city directly outside of the City Palace walls; you can literally touch the wall from the back yard of the hotel and we saw the roof of our room when we visited the palace the next day.

Down a small, hilly street from us is what would be a lake if there was any water. The lake, as you may have seen in Octopussy, has a beautiful and very expensive restaurant in the center, the Taj Lake Palace. Because the monsoon hasn't hit this area yet, and because of recent droughts (global warming) there is only a few drops of water in this lake which are used to shuttle visitors to the Taj restaurant. The rest of the lake is empty and occupied by cows and kids playing Cricket.

We walked around the empty lake for a short while before hearing some drumming at a temple. We were invited in to join 5 men inside a small, roadside Shiva temple. Since it was Monday, and Monday is Shiva's day, they were sitting in the temple singing and chanting his praise. We joined them for some tea and listened to them sing for a while. It was a nice break from the outside world where the majority of the people who talk to us are only after our money. They surprisingly declined the few rupees we offered them.

After this temple party broke up, we headed across the lake for some more wandering, which is our favorite activity to do in India. We heard some fireworks, and a young man told us that people are celebrating someone's birthday (though I don't remember who, he was apparently a very rich and important man that lived sometime ago). We watched a scooter rally drive by while we joined this friendly guy for our second chai of the day. This man, Shiam, had a story that seemed too good to be true that he explained to us over tea.

He owns a spice shop and an art gallery down the street from each other. His art gallery is dedicated to preserving the traditional miniature painting style of Udaipur. He teaches free painting workshops, and sells his own and other artists highly-detailed miniature paintings. Almost all of the money from the sales go to the artists directly, except for a small portion which goes to feed children in impoverished areas. He also teaches cooking classes with his sister. We signed up for some cooking classes for the next night.

Leaving Shiam's gallery looking for somewhere to eat dinner, we found the finishing point of the scooter rally that we saw earlier. In celebration of this important guy's birthday, they were putting on an extravagant, and somewhat reckless fire show for a crowd of a few hundred. There were fire spitters, fire dancers, and some sword and weapon shows accompanied by some low and loud fireworks. They performed some amazing things with disregard for their own and the audience's safety. We were starving and found a rooftop restaurant where we could see the entire thing from above (though the fireworks were exploding that much closer to our heads) .

This rally was in front of the Jagdish temple which is a very old, white marble temple known for a statue of Shiva with a large diamond in his chin. The drummer from the other temple had mentioned he was playing later at this temple, so we decided to stop in and say hi. We said hello to our drummer friend, paid our respect to Shiva, and I offended some ladies with my powerful foot odor.

Walking back to the hotel, we were stopped by some guys hanging out by a well. One asked if we remembered him from earlier; it took us a second, but Sarah remembered he asked us in french if we wanted a tour of the city palace when we were there. Since Rajasthan is popular with European tourists, many people speak French, English, Spanish, and Italian pretty well. And they often assume that Sarah and I are French for some reason. We ended up chatting with these guys who seem to be the city jokesters and making plans for coffee the next day before going back to our hotel.

It's a good day for us in India when we meet so many friendly people who just want to enjoy our company and not our money (as if we have very much).