Jaipur – The Pink City

Day 9 – Palaces and Pashminas in Jaipur (Part 1)
We stayed two nights in Jaipur, allowing me to do a little laundry in my hotel room.  Yes, I brought clothesline and clothes pins, since I had only 7-8 days worth of clothes for 5 weeks worth of travel. Because of the fantastic air conditioning in my room, my clothes dried in a single day despite the clinging humidity of the town. Not bad for a city boy.
So, of the handful of cities that I've visited in India so far, Jaipur came the closest to my original idea of what India would be like.  It has a busy city element, temples and palaces to see, street markets and bazaars with lots of haggling, snake charmers, contortionists, street food, new-looking western malls and mobile phone shops. 
Let's see if I can make sense of the myriad photos I took in this amazing Indian city.

First, we drove through town on our tour bus. (Yes, it had caught up with us from Kaurali, fully repaired and fully air conditioned!) Our local guide explained how the Maharaja of Jaipur (Sawai Ram Singh) had the whole town painted pink to celebrate the visit of Prince Alert in 1853.  He was a great city planners, hiring architects and planners to reorganize the town in New Jaipur. They laid out out the city so that vendors had uniform spaces to sell their wares in a square kilometer of uniform streets and stalls; uniformity and organization, what a concept.  (Watch out Irvine Company, Mr. Singh is way ahead of you.)  In the first two photos here, you see the 5 story facade of the Palace of the Winds, built around 1760. I stopped to take a picture of the snake charmers sitting on the opposite side of the street. Of course, they expect a donation.  I happily gave them 10 rupees for the picture.


Next, we drove up to the Amber Fort, with its mirrored rooms and amazing views of the surrounding area. Along the way, we stopped to take a few pictures and along came a man with a baby elephant. I posed and gave the man a generous donation, figuring it must be quite expensive to feed the growing creature. We left our bus behind and moved to jeeps to make the climb to the top. Once at the top, our local guide took us through the many chambers and explained the architecture of the fort and palace.  Due to its location, higher ground and narrow passages to ascend the heights, the Amber Fort was never overtaken by an enemy force.


We stopped to take a few photos with our tour leader Baru. In the background, you can see the mirrored frescos of one of the open air audience plazas. These mirrors were imported from Italy, and enabled the light of just a lamp or candle to be increased by thousands of reflections.
 
There were also a number of locals who were posing for cameras.  Of course, once you took their photo, they'd discreetly rub their fingers together – the universal sign for, "Okay, now some money."
  
Notice the picture below that shows the pink walls contrasted with a yellow structure.  The Maharaja's own residence was the only structure allowed not to be painted pink.
 

Coming out of the fort, I heard this ominous music. Coming around the bend, I saw this snake charmer and his assistant performing for tips. I dropped a tip on his blanket and turned on the video recorder. The music was just as worthwhile as the experience of seeing a snake charmer in India. Check out this little video I uploaded to YouTube:



Because of the sheer load of photos, I decided to break up the blog posts for Day 9. Later in the day, we visited an astronomy park, had a rainy lunch, saw carpets made, and ventured into the bazaar.