Jaipur - Part I - the getting there

The kids were finished their school year at the end of March, so we decided it was time to see something. So we headed west to Jaipur - about a four hour drive (it is 250km). The roads are ok.

I brought my old purse camera and Isaac discovered the self-portrait setting :)


We booked this trip thru a travel agent, so we had a different car and driver, altho it was still a Toyota Innova. This one had a DVD player, but we didn't watch any VeggieTales until the trip home.

As always, there was lots of crazy stuff to see - starting with THOUSANDS of goats and sheep. And that is literal - we tried to count (Alex keeps a little booklet of the numbers of animals she sees) but it was simply impossible.

The giant herds were everywhere, and we saw lots of shepherds and goatherds too, looking really busy, like these guys :)

Later, we saw all these monkeys on the side of the road - eating bananas and bread that one of the fruit sellers tossed them.
We also saw a garbage truck


and a truck filled with fabric, going to be shredded and re-woven into cloth.


We also saw some overloaded trucks (this is VERY common here - MOST trucks on the road are over the weight limit, have had very little maintainance, and are disasters waiting to happen). and some painted up trucks (also common).

Jaipur is called the Pink City because the wall around the city was painted pink before a visit from a king, and it has been that way since. The walls of the old city are so cool - I love the thick walls and huge ornate gates. There are many many things to see in Jaipur - it is one of the top tourist attractions in India. It was so fun to just be away from home!

Our hotel was not really deluxe, but it was clean and not too expensive :) The city was full due to the Elephant Festival and the holiday weekend for Holi. There was a fold-out couch in the room, and we got a cot, so the four kids were in their own room. We had windows overlooking an intersection, interesting to watch the traffic, the people and all the regular crazy stuff.





This mural is in the hotel. This is a neat building we saw - Albert House. I think it is a governnment building, currently being renovated, so not open to the public.
I like the arches and the stone.
We enjoyed just driving around, but we started right into the sightseeing!

The Spa at the top of the world

Christelle and I were looking into spas in case we wanted to celebrate my birthday that way :) so we went to the Galaxy Tower in Gurgaon just to see it. It has a rooftop garden area that you walk thru to get to the spa, and the views of Gurgaon are pretty good. They have a rooftop pool too, and we did get a "menu" and then we immediately knew we weren't coming HERE anytime soon! whew! So we took some photos, and looked around and left. One thing about India, even when the prices are way out of our league, just because we are foreign, they always assume we COULD afford it, so nobody turns up their nose at you when you go into the Mercedes dealership at the mall, or check out a really pricey spa!

And here is the other thing about India - you stand in a crazy expensive place and look out over a crazy poor place. This group of tent houses is at the foot of the Tower, hidden behind a tall fence. My guess is that the people living here are working on this construction project. That is often how it works - they set up temporary housing on the site, and the whole family works. I have much more to say about this with other photos of construction.



It is so hard to reconcile the extremes here - so much money in the hands of a few, and such extreme poverty in the lives of so many. On the one hand, we ate in a hotel here (with the Helac accountant) and I saw an Indian woman so clearly filthy rich she could have bought and sold us with what she had in her purse! On the other hand, everywhere you look people live under a tarp tent with no floor, cook over a fire, and carry their water in a bucket. It is hard to wrap your head around it.

Bobette's birthday

For my birthday, Alex and the Taylor twins (that's Harmony on the left and Cumorah in the middle) made me a cake! It wasn't the prettiest thing ever but I didn't have to make it so that is ok. And Randy sent me flowers! They arrived on a motorcycle (with 2 guys, of course) and they didn't live too long, but it was a nice gesture. We didn't have birthday candles, but we got some taper candles for free somewhere when we had first arrived, so we used one of those. They drip.

You may notice there is NOT a big pile of presents - that is because I did all my own gift shopping this year, and I did it early! I bought myself an oven! The apartment came with a microwave/convection combo oven but Harmony broke the door when she and Alex were baking something (OK not really her fault - it was almost broken already- she just finished it off!) and I had to wait nearly 2 MONTHS for them to repair it. They came, two at a time, often, but never with the right parts, or anything. I got VERY tired of not being able to bake

anything (and living without

a microwave is NOT good!) and Christelle bought an oven and I was jealous so I bought one too! It is really good - pretty much an oversized toaster oven, but it has pretty even heat, it has a rotisserie (and I roasted a chicken and it worked great!), when the power goes off then comes back on it starts back up (unlike the microwave which has to be reset everytime, so if you don't notice that the power was off....) and I can cook on more than one rack at a time. The bad news is that all the pizza pans and cookie sheets that I brought from home to use (very hard to find here since ovens are rare) DO NOT FIT!!! I bought the more square shape and I should have bought the more rectangular one. Didn't think about it until it was much too late. So that is sad, but otherwise I am very happy. I also bought myself a coat. A long, imported, expensive PURPLE coat!! SOOOOOO cute! No photos, since it is way past coat weather. Which is how I got a great deal and felt I could afford said coat. You will see it LOTS in the photos this fall. For now, I get to admire it in the closet. :)

The car is no longer perfect. rats!

Well, it finally happened, as we knew it would. Ajay got in an accident. He had just dropped me at home and was on the way to get Randy, so he was alone in the car. That means we aren't really sure what happened or whose fault it was, but both cars lost their driver-side mirrors. (Yes, that would imply that a large disaster was narrowly averted :) The accident occured just outside the neighbourhood, so he called me and I went out there, but things are different here -

you don't call the cops (at least, we don't - foreigners like to stay off the police radar) so fault gets decided by the people involved and the guy at fault pays for repairs, or no fault is decided and your own insurance pays for your own car. Or you don't fix it at all and you drive around looking like you have rolled it over a time or two. That seems to be the option most people choose - you should see some of the cars on the road! Anyway, we feel lucky that the car has gone unscathed this long!

Damdama Lake (or, more appropriately, Damdama Puddle)

The guidebooks mention a tourist recreation area just south of Gurgaon called Damdama Lake. Since we live at the south end of Gurgaon, we thought this fabulous early March weather (about 80 degrees - NICE!) would be a good time to go check it out. It was not really what we expected (things so seldom are). It took awhile to get there, since you wind thru fields, and villages, past chicken farms and fuel facilities, and the road is not that great. But we saw many interesting things on the way, of course. The next blog will cover all that. For now, take a look at this stunning "tourist" area!
We arrived and parked by the hotel (it is the brick building in the photos) and then walked out to the lake. Lake is almost a stretch right now! It was so low that it was more along the lines of a marsh. We went thru a fence to walk to the edge of the water, and as we walked we heard bells tinkling. They were around the necks of the cows that apparently roam freely here in the "tourist" area. Then we watched the pigs trot over and wallow in the mud along the shore. Off in the distance we saw these women carrying their loads on their heads. (As an aside - I LOVE to see this - I am amazed at the size of the loads - and how do they get them up there?! Is it heavy? What exactly is it, where are they taking it, what is it for and what is it worth? And are those pretty outfits really their work clothes?? These are my questions - inquiring minds want to know!) So, you know, pigs, cows, mud, labourers, typical tourist trap stuff. NOT! But I think this is for tourists, not foreigners. There is a difference. We sat on the grass to eat lunch in the shade, and luckily Sam had brought her magnifying glass so she could start something on fire. ....yeah. That's my kid. Then Randy tried too! They got smoke, but no fire.
After a nice lunch beside the carousel and ferris wheel (did I forget to mention them??

They are operated by human power, and there was NO WAY you could have gotten me in that thing! I have seen how they maintain their stuff, and I know safety is NOT Job 1 in India!) we rented a paddle boat for a half hour (cost - 96 rupees - 16 rupees per person). Of course, eveyone is gung-ho to peddle until they discover it is kinda hard with 6 people in the boat! And really, the fun job is to steer! The boat needed some WD40 in a bad way, but it was still pretty fun. I didn't get to steer, but I didn't have to peddle either!

We saw lots of interesting birds, and closer up than we got at the bird sactuary. We also saw this cow up to his neck in the water. Cool.

After the boat, Miranda wanted to ride the (very bored) camel but we didn't have 20 rupees change, so she didn't.
It was a nice break from the city, even if it was HOT and not very nice.

The road to Damdama

The road to Damdama Lake is paved with good intentions. No, wait, that is a different road. Hahaha. It just seems the same. Hahaha. Perhaps you would find that funnier if you lived in India. Anyway, the road is narrow, windy, potholed, and scenic. By that I mean it goes thru many little villages and settlements with lots of stuff to look at. The kids complain they are bored in the car, but Randy and I just don't get it - there is ALWAYS something to look at. Usually something crazy or bizarre. When we first turned off the main road (Sohna Road, that goes right by the apartments) we saw this "settlement" for lack of a better word. It has a brick wall around it, and it is a tent village. So many people live like this. It is so primitive. More on that on another blog.

Anyway, off the main road we went. The weird thing is that there are not so many differences between in-town and out-of-town here - there are animals, tractors, goatherds, all the country stuff right in the city. What you notice is less people when you get a bit farther out. The terrain got a bit rugged, and we started to see camels. Lots of camels. And cow manure. Lots of

cow manure. Now, I should give some instruction here, and before anybody freaks out, remember that the pioneers crossing the plains of America did this too, altho in a modified way, and 150 years ago, but still, they did it! Many many people here cook over fires, fires fueled by cow patties. So far, so good. The difference is, the people here don't just pick up the buffalo chips as they lay. The manure is picked up and hauled to a place (we affectionately call it a poo patty factory) where it is mixed with (I believe) more straw, then shaped by hand into uniform patties and set out to dry. I assume that someone somewhere is selling these, altho not in places that I shop. I am not intimately acquainted with this process, but we can see the hand prints in the patties. When they are dry, they are stacked into a hut shape, then more manure is spread on the outside (to protect them from weather, I presume) and it is decorated with designs.

Wild, eh? This area we were driving thru was poo patty factory heaven - everywhere we looked. Famous quote of the day - Alex says "wow, this place is filled with camels and cow poo".

I appreciate the dichotomy of this photo- nice elegant house, cow pies drying in the foreground.

This photo I took because it shows the laundry, out on a barbed wire fence. This is very commom but seems like a bad plan - how do you get them off without ripping them to shreds??

Randy and I both often comment how interesting it is to just drive around out in the country. It reminds us, again, that we are not in Kansas anymore, Toto!