Silk, Sun, and Sleepless Nights

Last Thursday night, Paula, Reema and I hopped on a bus headed for Udaipur. After some confusion about where the bus actually stopped, that is. We ended up at the edge of the city limits running towards a gas station with a dog chasing us as we hurried to catch the bus. We caught the right bus, though, and began our adventure driving through the spot-lit suburb of Gurgaon, past all the glitzy hotels, construction sites, and Air Force complex.

Thirteen hours later, we arrived in Udaipur. The night on the bus was interesting. We had sleeper seats, which meant we were in little boxes with cushioned floors above the rows of seats. Each compartment had a television hooked up to a DVD player in the front of the bus, so we were entertained by the Hindi version of the film Memento. It was terrible cinema. I fell asleep halfway through it. Sleep, however, is not part of the package on these buses, as I discovered in the middle of the night when there were heated arguments occurring below me, one of the bus crew shouting out the stops quite loudly (fast and in Hindi), and the driver careening around bends and flying over potholes like he thought he was driving the Batmobile.

Our bus, though it left Delhi on time (ish), pulled into Udaipur an hour and a half behind schedule. This meant that I was awake for the last two hours of the ride, though the sun hadn't risen when my alarm went off. That turned out to work in my favor; I saw the most beautiful sunrise at the edge of the Aravalli hills and through stretches of rolling plains and tiny towns. It was worth losing sleep. The sun rises bigger, brighter, and more fiery than at home.

We finally got to Udaipur and got an autorickshaw to take us to our hotel on Hanuman Ghat. Since check-out time wasn't until 10 a.m., our room wasn't empty - which also worked out in our favor. We went up to the rooftop restaurant overlooking the water and City Palace on the opposite bank, and we ate a delectable breakfast. And drank the most delicious masala chai I've ever consumed.

Once our room was ready and we deposited our belongings, we headed off to City Palace. It was big and beautiful and close to where we were staying, so it seemed like a logical starting point. On the way, we stumbled upon the Jagdish temple, which was really pretty. We also walked in while a special puja was occurring, so there were extra bells and singing and incense. 

The City Palace was very cool. It's actual a series of palaces all kind of built next to and on top of each other, but you can't really tell by looking. The oldest part of the palace is from the mid 1500s - young, by Indian standards. The neat thing about it is that it has a lot of furniture and decorations still; it was lived-in until the 1960s or 1970s, I believe. The interior walls are also very colorful, which is not a common feature or any Indian building, even palaces. (Not old palaces, anyway.)

We spent much of the rest of the day shopping. We're very good at that. Rajasthani art is very distinct, so we visited some of the art shops by the art schools in Udaipur...very cool stuff. We ate lunch and dinner that day on two other rooftop restaurants (again, one of my favorite features of Indian architecture: useable roofs). The restaurant where we ate dinner was one of the very many restaurants who had nightly showings of the James Bond movie Octopussy. I had completely forgotten that that one had scenes in India - most of those scenes were filmed in Udaipur. It's just really crazy to be walking around a small city in India seeing all these signs advertising screenings of Octopussy.

Also, Udaipur has an incredible number of French tourists. They were everywhere.

On Saturday we went out to Moti Magri (Pearl Hill) to walk around the park. We wanted to ride out to the gardens in the middle of the lake at the bottom of the hill, but the boat people were charging crazy amounts for foreign visitors and wouldn't give us a discount for being students in India, so we went just outside the city to see a village several people had recommended to us. It turned out not to be what we expected, but it was still kind of charming in its own right. It was similar to a place called Dilli Haat here in Delhi, only in a village setting. Every two weeks, the dancers, musicians, artists, and vendors in the village change; they come from real villages all over Rajasthan to sell their wares and entertain tourists. When we were done there, we headed back to downtown Udaipur, where we did more wandering and more shopping.  Then it was back on the bus for the 13-hour ride back to Delhi.

This week has been extremely busy, with a microeconomics presentation, Cities of Delhi midterm, abstract and beginning research for Cultural Diversity, and winding up actual classes at Ramjas. I haven't slept much this week, but I got everything done, and I'm here in Delhi this weekend, so I can catch up on my sleep and get ahead on my work.