Jaipur, India

The morning we were supposed to get a 7am bus to Jaipur, Robin woke up feeling nauseous, and proceeded to throw up in our hotel bathroom, then again on the street while bargaining with a rickshaw, again while we were riding in the rickshaw, and again out of the bus window while on our way to Jaipur. We expected to get sick in India but “Delhi Belli” hit us before we even made it there! Luckily we made it to Jaipur without any further incident and jumped into an auto rickshaw. After circling around the neighborhood looking for E block we finally found our way to Amit and Neelam’s house for Robin to rest. They live in New Jaipur and we expected more of a tech feel but we found it quite rural, with most houses in a state that makes it hard to tell if the house is either falling down, or being built. Luckily, the guard cows in front of their house were friendly.

Surprisingly, after resting on the couch for several hours, Robin felt much better and even managed to eat some dinner at a fancy rooftop restaurant. Amit and Neelam were also hosting a girl from the Ukraine, whose birthday happened to fall on the day that we arrived so Kevin helped Amit decorate for the surprise party as Neelam showed off her amazing artistic skills while giving Robin a proper Hindu henna tattoo on her arm and hand.

The next day we ventured into the city and had a hell of a time finding any shops, cafés or restaurants with some real aircon. Kevin started feeling ill that afternoon, so we headed back to our house to lie down. While Kevin tried to sleep under a fan that seemed like a convection oven in the dusty 100 degree heat, Amit showed Robin how to cook curry with a pressure cooker and taught her about the basic Indian spices that every household keeps in these nice silver tins:

Unfortunately, by the time the curry was ready to eat, Robin felt extremely nauseous and ran upstairs to puke only to find Kevin just beat her into the bathroom. This was probably our lowest moment on the entire trip thus far, yet one of the funniest since we were in separate rooms when we simultaneously felt ill and collided in the bathroom. The next day, we headed into the city to a luxury hotel with AC, and spent the next two days recovering.

We eventually managed to walk around what is known as “the pink city” because it is surrounded by a pink wall that is rumored to have been painted pink for the arrival of Queen Victoria. We checked out a few of the tourist sites including Hawa Mahal (wind palace), which is has a beautiful façade, and a great aerial view of the city and one of the crazy busy intersections below.


Then, seeing as Indians are very interested in astrology (and use it heavily when arranging marriages), we went to visit Jantar Mantar to check out some of Jai Singh’s instruments including the Vrihat Samrat Yantra (great supreme instrument) which is a 90ft tall 147ft base sundial that can give the time to an accuracy of 2 seconds!

To escape the heat we took a trip to the fully air-conditioned movie theater for a Bollywood movie in a relic theater called Rajmandir. We splurged on the most expensive “Diamond” class seats on the aircon balcony with reclining, comfy seats… all for just $2.5. When we walked into the theater, we felt like we were celebrities attending the opening of our own movie at the Fox Theater in L.A. We talked to a nice couple for only a few minutes and by that time we had amassed at least 20 other Indians in a circle around us and were then asked for “one snap” over and over, until the lights started flashing to signal the start of the movie. The movie was called Tezz, and is basically the same as the Hollywood movie “Speed” but using a train instead of a bus. Although the movie was in Hindi it was a predictable action movie and there were enough funny one liners in English that kept us clued in. During an old fashion intermission we walked to the concession stand and had a good chuckle watching the upper class Diamond seat holders battle for the last of the samosas.