We’ve arrived in the town of Udaipur. We’re a week into our trip and I think we have finally gotten used to the chaos that is India. Mumbai is chaos to the extreme and was a really great and eye opening experience. Still, it is nice to get to the relative calm of Udaipur and just kick back and think about nothing on our hotel balcony overlooking the famed lake. I say relative quiet because the streets here are still crowded and there is still a lot of horn honking going on, but the horns seem more like peaceful bird chirps compared to those in the bustle of urban Bombay.
We left Bombay at 10:00PM and took the night train to Udaipur which is in the desert state of Rajasthan. Our hotel is a great old stone building centered around a shaded central courtyard with big trees and a big wooden table where travelers hang back and exchange travel stories. According to the owner, Sanjay, the guesthouse was built 300 years ago and was also a guesthouse in the past for people who came to visit the Palace and the King (there’s a large palace in town). The town, more accurately city, of Udaipur is set around a peaceful lake which our room looks out on. The lake has a famous hotel that seems to float on the water called the Lake Palace Hotel. 1,700 US a night compared to our 12 dollars at the guesthouse, which is the best room in the whole place here and has three rooms in it. You can stay for 2 bucks or so a night if you don’t mind dorms and a shared bathroom.
Our last day in Mumbai/Bombay was sort of low key, low key definitely being an out of context word for anything in Bombay. We tried to go to the National Museum but it was closed on Mondays. That was out so we wandered around instead, sat in a café, had a beer and went inside the Taj Palace Hotel to check out what it was like. Being inside the Taj is a huge contrast to what you will see on the streets of Bombay because it’s a ritzy joint and full of people who, judging by their stylish and new looking clothes, seem to be very rich. A striking juxtaposition to those outside.For lunch in Mumbai we decided to give my favorite authentic diner down the street one last chance. When we walked in there were no empty booths and we thought we would have to wait, but now knowing how people interact in such a crowded country this apparently should not have been an issue for our consideration. Here it is common to share a booth with strangers. This put us in a very small booth with, and very close to two gentlemen who were already eating. The older of the two actually beckoned for us to sit down with them. We said hello and ordered or sort of gestured to the waiter that we wanted the same thing that they were eating, some kind of lamb stew and naan bread.
In India people eat with their hands. Actually they eat with only their right hand because, due to the non existence of toilet paper which is replaced by a water squirter thing, their left hand is used for bathroom duties. It is bad-mannered to eat with your left. Kevin and I had a hell of a time trying to use one hand to break our naan bread into bite sized pieces to use as a scooping utensil but we didn’t want to offend our hosts so we tried our best. This effort may have not been enough because the younger of the two men seemed to be making snide comments under his breath when we tried to make conversation and was hushed several times by the older man who was friendlier. I tried to be a good ambassador of the US and made small talk but got nowhere because the older man said something to the extent of “now we have quiet” or something like that after a few questions. It was a little awkward toward the end. Kevin did not have a good time at all because the younger guy who he was sitting across from kept giving him dirty looks. People in India have so far been extremely friendly and maybe in this situation our guests just didn’t feel like chatting. The food was good though and couldn’t be beat for two bucks.
We decided to wander some more after lunch and eventually ended up in the bazaar district again. We headed toward Victoria Terminus and, being that it was around 6:30PM, we were met by hoards of people making their way to the station. We got a firsthand immersion into one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Seas of people streamed around us, cars and motorcycles battled to make their way through the crowds and the whole experience put us to silence with awe and oversaturation from the huge amounts of people concentrated into a single area. Inside the station itself it was even more crowded and was definitely the most people I have seen in one place ever, far surpassing New York City. Even more awe inspiring was the fact that this concentration is not only centered into just the area of the station but is city wide which we would witness in our taxi ride to a different train station to catch our train to Udaipur later that night. We rode for miles and the seething mass of people never ended.
That’s it for now, going to check out Udaipur.
No comments:
Post a Comment