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This morning we visited the Amber Palace on the outskirts of Jaipur. It is another amazing and beautiful palace built up in the mountains. The palace is huge and it is surrounded by an even larger fort with a retaining wall that makes you think of the Great Wall of China. Inside the palace is an area called the Palace of Mirrors. Every inch of the walls and ceiling are decorated with both large and small pieces of mirror. To get to this palace we rode elephants up the roadway! I have never seen so many elephants in one place. My mother wanted to take one home. I don’t think it will fit in our luggage. Oh yes, and we also had to buy another piece of luggage today. Because the things we have purchased don’t fit in what we brought! In our defense, we packed for an 18 day trip in carry on suitcases. I will definitely post many many elephant pictures!
We have been serenaded by musicians and entertained by dancers many nights during dinner. Tonight we will be watching dancers while we eat again. Today
I bought a pair of Indian style pants called Salwar. My father took some photos. I will have to see if I can get one for you. Tomorrow we head to Pushkar Camel Fair. I am the most excited about this. It is one of the places I picked to see out the book “1000 places to see before you die†Fun book to read! I may wait until Jodhpur to update again. I think the days at Pushkar will be very long. I am so excited! Hope you are all enjoying the photos. I did finally figure out that you can write comments to me. They just don’t appear on the blog. But any comments or questions you have I will gladly try to answer. I have no idea why the pictures all show up at the top of the post and I can’t seem to get them in any order. Sorry!
Oh, and the street merchants were the most persistant at the Amber palace than anywhere else we have been. You could hardly walk forward they surrounded you so. I had one guy trying so hard to get me to buy another stringed instrument, very crude and inexpensive. He just would not leave me alone. They don’t let them in the palace walls, but when we came out, he found me and began pestering me again. My dad took video of him playing it and pestering me. I actually did end up buying it. But then I had a mob of hawkers following me all the way down the road. It was pretty funny. My dad took a lot of photos. So I decided to turn the tables on them. I was drinking a diet coke I had just bought (yes Diet Coke!) so I started offering to sell it to them and used all of the same tactics they use on us. I told them this was the first diet coke I had sold all day, and that for them it would be a special price. It cost 50 rupees, So I started offering it at 100 rupees, some just looked at me confused, some said, “but it is 50 rupees at the shops, so then I would say for you, a special price, only 70 rupees, since it is just a few days after Diwali, I will sell it to you for 70 rupees. A few of them understood what I was doing and laughed and laughed. Our guide was laughing his head off. So we all ended up having fun with it.
Namaste, look for camels next!
Nurse Kristen
