Jezza’s Blog

Okay, I started writing this yesterday, but crappy IE decided to crack the shits and reload the page minus my additions. So I’ll start again (this time I’m writing in notepad)

I think Shika was up to Jaipur. We reached after 12am on the 5th. We were all so exhausted from the car ride from Agra, that I’d thought we’d sleep forever, but somehow we managed to get out of bed the next morning. Rishika’s grandma’s sister lives in Jaipur, so we stayed at her house, which we were all relieved about, cos hotels are really dodgy in india, unless you want to spend like $500 per night. So on the 6th, Shika’s aunt drove us around to see some of the sites in the city. Jaipur is remarkably different from Delhi and Agra. It’s much greener and cleaner, and the houses are in a decent condition. (From the outside, all buildings in Delhi look like they have been abandoned for at least 20 years). We also did a bit of shopping in the old part of the city. As you can imagine, it’s quite different from shopping in aus. So far it seems like the first price shop people give is at least 2.5 times more than they are willing to sell it for. It’s a real pain in the arse, cos anytime you are interested in looking for something, you have to argue with the guy for 20 minutes before giving you the a proper price. In saying that, things a ridiculously cheap, even if you don’t bother bargining. For example, there were these fantastic egg rolls in delhi, we couldn’t get enough of them. They were sort of like fried egg rotis with red onions and chilli sauce and they were only 10 rupees (30 cents) And we went to McDonanlds and they had burgers for 25 rupees (80 cents). The burger names were fantastic, my favourite was the equivelent of the Big Mac, but cos they cant have beef it was the “Chicken McMaharaja Mac”, and there was also the “McTikka Wrap” (This was like the salads plus menu.)

Hmm, where was I up to? It was weird staying with Shika’s extended family cos they all spoke Bengali, and so far I only know how to count to 10 and say a few words (like sticky, hot, sweet, idiot, shit, stupid, big, small…). Most of the time I have some vague idea of what they are talking about, but none of the details. I’m really crappy with languages as well, so unfortunatly I don’t think I’ll ever be able to learn properly.

So the next day in Jaipur, we when on the Rajasthan Tourist Bus. It took us to the million forts in and around Jaipur, and some other landmarks. The ones I liked the best were Jantar Mantar, which is the biggest sundial in the World, I think it was like 40 meters high (could be less) and has an accuracy to 2 seconds. They also had other funky sun things which showed where the sun was in the sky, relative to constellations.

We went to lots of forts and palaces, but the best was Nargarh, which is on the top of a mountain which is surrounded by the city. The palace housed the maharajah and his 9 wives, each had their own apartment, and At the top of the palace, you could see every part of the city, it was one of the best views I’ve ever seen (sorry, cant upload the photos yet, taking photos is a pain here by the way, cos each place you have to pay more for taking photos. One of the places cost 200 rupees (thats like 20 egg rolls!!), so some of the time I just used my pentax as a spy camera, on rishikas insistance).

Unfortunatly, I’m taking too long to write stuff, so I’ll finish another day (I’m already about 5 days behind).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 11:29 pm and is filed under India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.