So New Year's Eve was a blast! The party was modern Indian Bollywood blow-out all the way. They had tons of food from all three of their restaurants and you could go back as often as you wanted as it was buffet style. They also had an open bar, so as the evening wore on folks were more and more merry! The crowd was almost entirely Indian. Only our group of tourists were there. They had professional singers (Bollywood singers) and a belly dancer and very loud music and dancing for hours! Folks from our group were dancing with some of the Indians and generally everyone was having a blast and taking pictures like mad on cellphones. I laughed as the dancing was heating up when I saw a Sikh man with his long beard and turban really dancing up a storm on the dance floor all night! Tracy was the first of our group to fall prey to "Delhi belly" so she rested in her room and didn't come down till a little after 11. We danced till just after midnight and then called it a night. I enjoyed all the music and merryment, but my ears were ringing from the incredibly loud music and after several hours of it, I was ready for some quiet.
Today we rose early to get our bags out by our doors for pickup by our bus driver, who drove to Jaipur while we did some final sightseeing in Delhi before taking a flight to Jaipur.
We started out visiting the India Gate, which is a huge arch at the end of the long boulevard at the other end of which is the President's house and Houses of Parliament that we saw the other day. The India gate is a war memorial to the British and Indian soldiers who were killed in World War I. They were having a memorial ceremony so while we were there a parade of vehicles arrived carrying highly decorated officers of the Indian armed forces.
After that we drove to the Lotus Temple, which is a huge complex in South Delhi, a Bahai Temple. We had to go through security to get on the grounds, which are extensive and then went to the Temple itself and were able to go inside. There were hoards of people visiting, but they managed to get folks through fairly quickly. We had to take our shoes off quite a ways in front of the temple and walk up to it and into it in stocking feet. The building is quite impressive, shaped like a lotus and made of marble that was quarried in Greece and polished in Italy. The interior of the Temple is very simple but quite stunning. The pews have marble seats with wood supports. That marble is pretty cold to sit on we discovered. After leaving there we drove through heavy traffic (pretty much the norm in Delhi) to the restaurant where we had a delicious lunch. The "appetizers" were a whole variety of skewers of fish, chicken and shrimp over a hot grill built into the table. Then there was a full Indian buffet, with delicious vegetarian and meat dishes of all kinds. Some of the food was really spicy, but it was all delicious. While we were eating our lunch, thinking we had time for a leisurely meal, our guide got a phone call that our flight to Jaipur was changed to a departure time 50 minutes earlier than scheduled. So we had to inhale our desserts and leave in haste to get to the airport on time! Our driver was amazing racing our bus through dense Delhi traffic and getting us there in record time. We had to get through security and then race through the airport to our gate, which was, of course, about as far away as it could be and then board a bus to get out to our plane! It was a novel experience to look at the monitor in the departure lounge that showed a scheduled departure time and an actual departure time where the latter was earlier than the former!! By the skin of our teeth, we all made it on time and the flight to Jaipur was 45 minutes and quite comfortable. When we arrived here, we had to wait almost half an hour for our driver, who had left early this morning from Delhi. We finally fetched up at the hotel by 5 PM.
Jaipur's air quality seems a bit better than Delhi's which is a relief to all of us. The air in Delhi is truly dreadful, with a thick grey haze hanging over everything all the time. Today it was really like pea soup, so we were glad to get here, where its not quite so bad. Jaipur is known as the "pink city" and on our way in we saw some of the signature buildings that were built in the 18th century and are painted pink. We also passed an absolutely enormous, blue glass and chrome building that looked like something dropped here from another planet, which turned out to be a shopping mall! Our guide says that India is starting to move away from small family owned businesses towards malls as places to shop and the malls they are building are unbelievably ostentatious looking structures. We passed one in Delhi this morning too. Its interesting that they are starting to build malls, just as we in the States are dealing with malls going out of business as people choose to shop online or are going back to preferring smaller, local businesses.
Our hotel is really nice, although the neighborhood around it is rather run down looking. I have a great view out my window over the city, but I am also being serenaded by a flock of pigeons who are hanging out on my window sill, scrapping with one another and cooing noisily! I'm wondering what that's going to be like in the middle of the night when I want to sleep!
No comments:
Post a Comment