Notes from Rajasthan

We're down to our last week (and a bit) in India, but we're going to try to cram three cities in between now and the 16th. We're heading to Delhi on a night train tomorrow evening, and then we're going to attempt day trips to Chandigarh and Agra from there. I say "attempt", because the train system here is usually on time to within a tolerance of plus or minus four hours. We're hoping for the best.

Udaipur was one of the more enjoyable cities we've been to so far, probably because we spent most of our time relaxing and taking music and art lessons instead of frantically sightseeing. The sights in India have been interesting, but they're usually packed to the gills and pretty expensive. Well, expensive by India standards, anyways. Like 4 or 5 dollars. Going to India early in our trip probably wasn't the best idea; we're now going to spend the rest of the trip in a state of outrage every time dinner costs more than $0.75. What do you mean you can't get a palatial hotel room made of hand-carved sandstone for $10 in Moscow? Unacceptable!

Anyways, the art and music lessons were awesome. I spent 6 days learning the sitar with Bablu, who ran a music shop down the street from our hotel. The sitar is one of the coolest sounding instruments ever, but playing it is like running your fingers along razor wire for an hour. I had some monster blisters for the first few days, and now I have a callous so thick I've lost all tactile feedback from the tip of my left index finger. But most importantly, I learned that riff from Norwegian Wood. Here's me and Bablu with some tablas (I also bought some tablas and took one quick lesson on them... I suck at tablas).


Walking around with a giant sitar case (which I've yet to figure out how to get back to Canada, incidentally) garners a lot of attention from people, including the receptionist at our hotel, who insisted that I unpack it so he could get a picture of himself looking all badass and playing the sitar like a guitar to use on Orkut, which is like Facebook, but popular here.


Our art lessons were pretty cool too. We sat on tiny chairs and painted elephants covered in jewelry, which was really cool, except when my legs fell completely and painfully asleep.


We also went to the City Palace in Udaipur (our one token bit of sightseeing there), which was a cool building with some neat artifacts in it. The one bit that was kind of mystifying was the portrait gallery, featuring paintings with all the refined technique and quality you would expect from a class of grade school art students who spent most of their painting time thinking of which games they were going to play at recess.


Also at the City Palace: a whole bunch of people who stopped to look at a monitor showing pictures of various parts of the palace, and taking pictures of the pictures. You are IN THE PALACE. You can take pictures of the ACTUAL THINGS. Maybe it was a really nice monitor or something, I didn't look. And yes, I'm aware that I took a picture of a guy taking a picture of a picture, to make fun of taking pictures of pictures.


One night we went out to grab a bottle of Indian wine (proposed slogan: "It's drinkable!"), and found this gem, which is just about my favourite liquor brand of all time.



Now we're in Jodhpur, which is dominated by a HUGE 500 year old fort right smack dab in the middle of the city. We've been here for 5 days, and even hiked up to the fort and wandered around it for a few hours yesterday, but somehow we've managed to completely forget to take any pictures of it. We did take some pictures of Jodhpur from the fort though. It's a neat looking city from above. Most of the houses in the old part of town (within the crumbling city walls) are painted blue, and the streets are about 18 inches wide and laid out like someone threw a bowl of spaghetti at a map, which makes navigation interesting.


That's all for now. We'll post our final India wrap-up and some impressions on Delhi and the Taj Mahal sometime between now and our flight to Beijing on the 16th.