All You Ever Wanted

I am sitting curled up in my little sleeper bus compartment with Emily. We just argued with the bus wallahs about extra "luggage charges." I am not one to want my luggage stolen, but I lifted half of the luggage myself, and dont buy into that crap.

Chotou showed us a great day. We met him yesterday when we were dragging our huge luggage from the train station. We blew him off for a good ten minutes, but he was persistent and we gave in, eventually letting him drive us to the tourist office. While Emily went inside and called a guest house, Chotou and I talked about tons. His family, how he drove Michelle around for a month in Jaipur (she was a writer for lonely planet), past girlfriends, and it ended with me explaining the holocaust (he spoke breifly about how hitler stole the swatstika, a hindu symbol). We tried to explore that night, but found it next to impossible on our own, and ended up pouring sweat in our hotel room eating pizza (bad) and watching Blood Diamond (good).

This morning Chotou was waiting outside our hotel room. We hired him to show us around all day, and went to a lassi wallah to get the best lassis and samosas in the city. I hate yogurt, but the saffron lassi I had, served in a ceramic, unglazed glass, loaded with sugar and bursting with flavor, was the best beverage I have ever had. Chotou and his driver Ishmael then took us to the Maharaja Gaitor Crematorium, whiched overlooked all of Jaipur.

The huge mosuleums of the Rajputs of the area were astounding, inlaid with carvings from indian mythology and history; the pouring rain had no effect on dampening the mood of this magical place. And the rajput history is interesting as well; apparrently one king, over 7 feet tall and 4 feet broad at the shoulders, was "too big" (wink wink) to have children. Another had 114 children in total from multiple wives, but all died from cholera or malaria, the oldest living to the age of 14.

Next we were taken to a textile factory emporium, where we were seated on comfortable couches and served piping-hot chai. The "owner" started to take bedspreads nad lay them out in front of us. It started at 100 rs, then proceeded a few hundred higher and higher, no pressure to buy of course. All of a sudden, we are looking at multi thousand rupee pure silk, hand sown bedspreads. While the factory emporiums are much cheaper than a street wallah, at some point you're being ripped. Eventually we left, but not before spending a couple thousand rupees on bedspreads; at least we'll sleep like rajput kings (or so we were told).

A few samosas and cups of chai later, we found ourselves in the maharaja's observatory; one raja was very interested in astronomy and had a huge playpark of astronomical toys built for his pleasure. Climbing huge staircases and peering down ino red hemispherical wells made of sandstone, it felt like visiting a 300 year old skatepark. We had no idea what each instrument calculatedm, so we snuck up to a tourgroup to hear the description; we were confumbled upon discovering everyone was french, or at least speaking it.

It was a festival day for some reason; a huge royal parade was going on. Huge painted elephants paraded the street, with their riders elegantly and brightly dressed. Women in beautiful dresses danced in the streets, and indian marching bands paraded in uniform. The two hour affair was the coolest parade I have ever seen. After wandering around the town center for a while, we stumbled upon an indian outdoor concert; one of the most bizaare things I have ever seen, it was amazingly similar to a free outdoor concert back home. Hopping back in the rickshaw, we went and got some beers before dinner.

Now I have to say indian beer is terrible; kingfisher- the main brand- isn't bad, but because of poor water supplies glycerin is added to all the beer batches. However, we found the one stand that sells an indian black stout beer. While probably considered watery and weak in comparison to other stouts, this one tasted like liquid gold.

Anyway, we pull over outside a resturant and are talking to Chotou and Ishmael when a couple of guys our age, slickly dressed, approach our rickshaw. Only a few moments earlier, Chotou had tought me some hindi slang, and these unwelcome guests received my first hindi presumptions about their mothers and sisters. More shocked that I spoke hindi than being insulted, we stared talking (mostly because they wanted to hit on emily). These guys were well educated, and we spoke english, hindi, spanish, and italian for about an hour.

We grabbed some excellent dhaba dinner, wolfing down orders of egg cury, mattar paneer, and chappati, along with plenty of sliced raw onions and tomatoes, with a few green peppers. Chotou and Ishmael drove us to the bus, and we said goodbye to our awesome helpful rickshaw wallahs, promising to call them if we are ever in Jaipur again; we still haven't met their families.