Jaipur Day II

March 8, 2014,

Off to the "City Palace" in the old (pinkish-orange) town. It is another monument to the opulence of the Mughal kings (maharajahs). Excessive spending exists everywhere you look. The extreme were the 2 giant (900 gallon) silver jugs one of the Singhs had made to carry water from the Ganges to England as he attended the coronation of Edward VII in 1902. I guess that all royalty have a tremendous sense of entitlement, but I have to speculate on the condition of the average citizen of Jaipur at the time. Our next stop was the Jantar Mantar an early observatory, once again an extravagance of one of the Maharajas. It was interesting because of the involvement of both astronomy and astrology. Almost appeared to be an attempt to justify myth with science.

In between these two visits, we managed to ditch Khan (not easy to do) and wandered outside the walled city to the busy bazaar area outside. We were able to find a little restaurant to get a "Kingfisher" (Indian beer) and some snack food. The contrast in people, traffic and noise between the inside of the walls (the old town) and outside is extremely dramatic and worth the experience. Raised in Toronto, traffic does not frighten me too much, but Joy, from small town Ontario, is terrified to cross the street. I grabbed a nice young police officer to help her. Police, particularly traffic ones, don't seem to do much here and the traffic is chaotic, as I have already indicated in my Indian driving rules.

After, the Jantar Mantar, we went to the "Albert Museum" hoping to see some relics of the time of British rule. What once was a grand place seems a little tired and run-down now, but there were excellent displays of ceramics and textiles. But the big score for me was the display of 5 Jaipur State stamps from the period before the use of British design Indian stamps. I had told Joy of the existence of hand-stamped water coloured stamps and had even showed her some before we left, but these were the first we had seen in India, despite going to 2 postal museums. In addition, I believe that I have samples of at least two of them in my collection.

After, we returned back to the hotel and retired to the roof-top restaurant at the hotel for some truly wonderful Indian food and a Kingfisher?

Jim