Our next stop on our trip was Jaipur. We got there around 11 pm that night. Pretty good, we were only 40 or so minutes late! (the trains in India are NEVER on time, our train to Agra was supposed to be 3 and 1/2 hours long, but took 6 hours!)
We got to our hotel, Hotel Pearl Palace. It was really nice! And only 800 Rupees a night. That is about $16. It was my favorite place out of all the places we stayed on our trip. They also had a rooftop restaurant called "the Peacock" it was beautiful! The food was pretty good too. They had more variety than we had seen anywhere else. They had a lot of European and eastern Asian dishes, cause of the tourists I would imagine. We ate there every day.
On Sunday we had made plans with Cara and Andrew to meet at 12:30 at the Hawa Mahal (Palace of Winds). We waited for around 30 minutes, then Cara showed up pretty upset without Andrew. Turns out they got seperated while walking to meet us from their hotel. We spent about an hour trying to figure out where he was, but we didn't want to leave our meeting spot because we figured he would come there. Our rickshaw driver who dropped us off was waiting for us to decide if we wanted to hire him for the day. He let us use his cell phone a few times and was very helpful. I felt bad when Andrew finally came and we decided not to use the driver. He wouldn't take any money for his help though, which is quite unusual because that is what most people seem to want here. Really nice guy.
Those two getting separated made me think of getting separated from Kevin. I didn't like that idea. We made a plan for if that happened to us. Luckily, it didn't.
We did have a good time though, looking at the sights in Jaipur. The Hawa Mahal is really cool. It was a palace that gets more narrow with each floor, so the top floor is just one row of tiny round rooms with windows looking out to the main road. It was built for the wifes and concubines to be able to watch festivals and things outside of the palace, because they were not allowed outside of the palace. They were also not allowed to be seen, so the windows are all latticed to they could see out, but no one could see in.
We also went to Jantar Mantar. It is an observatory begun in 1728. It is full of huge instruments like sundials and astrological star finders. It also has 12 structures that stand for the zodiac signs and only one works at a time, the one who's sign it currently is. Lucky for me, it was March, so the sign was Pices! I am a pices so my structure was working, it was cool.
We were going to go to the city palace, where the Maharaja still lives (though it is now just a title, no political power). But found out that the 350 rupees ticket that says "City Palace and Museum" is really only for the museum. Once you go to the museum, they offer you a ticket into the actual palace for 2500 rupees! Our rickshaw driver told us, we weren't sure if it was true, (one thing I really don't like about being here is that I don't feel I can trust anyone!) so we checked. Sure enough, after asking about 3 or 4 people, including the ticket guy who wouldn't say, we found out it was true.
We heard that the palace in Bikaner was better anyway, so we opted not to go to the City Palace.
We also saw Amber Fort and the Water Palace. They were cool, especially the fort, but it was up on the mountain and you have to hike up to it and it was HOT!
The next leg of our trip wasn't my favorite I am sorry to say. We went to Ajmer and Pushkar on Holi. Not the best idea, but it was in the middle of spring break so what could we do?