Jaipur.....The Pink City

Jaipur – The Pink City

“Jaipur, the pink city was founded in 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, a Kachwaha Rajput, who ruled from 1699-1744. Initially his capital was Amber (city), which lies at a distance of 11 km from Jaipur. He felt the need of shifting his capital city with the increase in population and growing scarcity of water. Jaipur is the first planned city of India”. Source: Wikipedia

Another short and sweet trip to a beautiful city close to Delhi helped us polish our bargaining skills after long time (since there are hardly any markets left in Delhi where shokeepers indugle in it!)!! Jaipur is alovely and colorful city- but extremely chaotic in terms of the traffic and parking space. The City palace was nice – organised in different sections – on textile, armory, art gallery etc.

Jantar Mantar was a place we were hoping not to spend too much time – but we ended up enjoying it quite lot! We actually could tell the time in jaipur using the sun clock. It was great to see how advance was astronomy at that time.

Being in Jaipur on a weekend- that too on a valentine Day weekend…ooof……we went for dinner to Chokhi Dhani (http://www.chokhidhani.com) – an ethnic village resort near Jaipur. It was full of people - there was actually queue to enter!!! But a very place and great experience!!

Shopping was a wonderful experience – wat was interetsing that if you are lookingf or something specifc(which we were!!), every shopkeeper will say he has it and would want you to come in and settle and then show you something else…..and then in the end tell you that he does not really have the exact thing – but there is lot more that he can show!

The most exciting part (apart from shopping of course!) was the elephant ride to the Amer Fort - while it was not avery long ride- our elephant (Bobby) took his own sweet time and almost 15 other elephants crossed us by the time we reached the top. Midway, he startedmaking all kinds of noises and we were told that this is bacause he saw his "special friend" coming down and he could recognise her anywhere!

What was disturbing was how our heritage is being misued by govt for making money - most of you woudl have read about the wall collapse at the Amer Fort recently- duirng the shooting of a movie – “Veer”. Well, we saw the abondoned set made in the fort and remains of the wall that fell - its really sad to see how these people get permissions to tamper with historical sites. On top of it, once the wall collapsed, the High Court issues suo moto notice and the shootingw as stopped immediately – but the makers shifted the shooting to the City Palace – in the private portion of the palace.

All and all a wonderful trip!!!