Mustaches, Mirrors, and Forts 3.11-3.13

So I flew to Jaipur from the Udaipur conference and met my friend Chris and Haider there. We stayed at this charming little old Rajasthani house. Very cute and the staff were very helpful...except for the one restaurant server. He looked like he was 17 maybe. I think half the stuff on the menu, they didn't have. So when Chris ordered a fresh, lime soda (which is a pretty basic item), the server didn't look up from his pad and just said a short, stoic 'no.' This happened many times.

One night we went to a restaurant recommended called the Copper Chimney. Seriously this place couldn't get any more Caucasian.

But Jaipur was fun - there's a lot to see there! But these Rajasthanis, they sure liked to build forts. They were historically kind of warrior-like and the whole state was broken up into little kingdoms basically. And they are still into these huge, crazy mustaches. You seem them in their old paintings, but still today many many men there wear them. And the mirrors...I have concluded that the Rajasthanis were the precursor to the bedazzler. Maybe it's because they needed mirrors around to check how their mustach was looking, I don't know. But they decorated architecture with mirrors, clothes with mirrors...

We went to this really crazy, interesting park that looks bizarre but was used as an observatory to tell the time and astrology and everything. There are these huge staircases and globe-shaped pits. It all looks very interesting and very weird. It's amazing how they figured out that these things would tell time so accurately.

We had some interesting guides, too. In these old temples and stuff, they have some crazy carvings and the guides like to point out which carvings were all one big piece of stone carved out. Well, this one guide, I think maybe that was the only english he knew. Because every single thing he pointed to... was 'all one piece' But the way he said it, you could tell he was really proud of this fact, with such a straight face and look of awe. It got pretty ridiculous by the end, because that was literally the only comment this guide could make. As we were walking out of the gate, after we tipped him, he didn't let us leave until he pointed out that a stone on the gate, was also 'all one piece'

On the first day we hired this autowala to take us somewhere and then he really wanted us to hire him for the entire next day. We were a bit skeptical b/c Jaipur is pretty touristy, and we didn't want to be ripped off. He waited outside our hotel in the morning though, but we had four people and it was just too many for his auto comfortably. He looked so crestfallen that I felt pretty bad.

We called him up the next day though, and he was actually a really good guy. He made sure we didn't go shopping at the shops near the major monuments because they are more expensive for tourists. He walked us across the street and stopped the traffic. He took us to a government emporium to shop, and while maybe he had some deal with the owner, this type of shop is usually a better deal. And Chris got to pose with the beauty-mous manaquin in a turban, so what could be better, right?

And how did this guy in India get ahold of one of the Christmas sweatshirts Mom made us and we were excited to wear on free-dress day at Catholic school???