Sweet guinea pig of Winnipeg!

adventures in and around Jaipur March 24, 2008

This past week was truly one to remember. Aman and I ventured out of Mumbai last Tuesday afternoon down to Churchgate for some shopping then to Bombay Central where we got on a train for Jaipur. It wasn’t just any train – this was the Mumbai-Jaipur super fast train. The next few days certainly did go by super fast (ha).

The train rides to/from both took around 18 hours. It wasn’t that bad though because were were in sleeper class which meant we got beds (more like cushie long-ish seats) to rest on at night. I was able to sleep most of the night going up there. Upon arrival, we went to see Aman’s older brother, Bhawani, who is one of the nicest people I’ve ever meet. “Guests are treated as Gods in my country,” he told me on more than one occasion.

We spent the next two days going around Jaipur, The Pink City, seeing many different sites. It was interesting to see how different Jaipur was from Mumbai. Mumbai is much more fast-paced and large-scale, and probably other hyphenated combinations of words too. Jaipur had many more structures that I would consider “traditional Indian” like mahals, forts, and more extravagant temples. Mumbai, in most senses, is quite a modern city with lots of pollution, noise, and especially people. Jaipur had it’s share of people and noise, but the pollution was noticiably less and that was really refreshing. After seeing Jaipur city, we headed for Aman’s hometown where his parents and family were waiting. We had a great dinner with them and enjoyed relaxing, trying to forget about life at IIT Bombay for a few days.

The next day (Friday) I got pretty ill. It was probably something I ate in Jaipur – Aman and I were playing Survivor Man (or “Men vs. Wild”) with food & drinks off the streets. I won’t go into the details here but the short of it is that I was pretty down-for-the-count all of Friday and I had to taste (and feel) Indian medicine. It wasn’t that bad – being sick is just no fun

Saturday was Holi, the celebration of good’s triumph over evil. We played Holi in Aman’s house briefly and mostly just hung out and relaxed. It was nice to not have any papers to write, quizzes to study for, and autos to catch. We watched a movie on my laptop that night and went to bed in the cool desert air.

The last day of our trip, we headed to a western-style fair that was only a 20-minute bus ride from Aman’s place. I got lots of good pics there and there were even some white monkeys (the ones in Mumbai are usually darker). The train ride back was pretty uneventful and I even made it back to IITB in time for my 9:30 Networking class. Aman didn’t make it (zzzz….. )

The pictures from my trip are posted on Flickr in a set here.