The highway which goes to Jaipur is tared, but you can’t help swallow a lot of dust. Our nose is full of it, our skin covered by it, our lungs filled by it. When you see how bus drivers drive, you understand why there is dust. It’s all about horning and might makes right. In fact better not to look at the road except if you have nerves of steel.
Jaipur is without any doubts a touristy city and in our opinion Jaipur suffer a bit of this. Accommodations are expensive and more annoying than elsewhere. It is also the scam capital, and we probably escaped it by an inch.
But don’t let this short introduction deter you from this city, as there are many good things to see and try, like the very interesting and beautiful buildings-astronomical instruments (UNESCO heritage site), which are buildings designed to be used as instrument to measure course of planets and stars, and even give the time with a 2 seconds precision. They were all designed and constructed by a strange mix : a king fanatical and scientific at the same time.
This beautifully shaped buildings, curvy, could have been imagined by a modern artist.
We don’t have the pretentiousness to understand the utilization of all these buildings, but it is amazing to wonder that if we hadn’t know that they were astronomical instruments. So we wonder if maybe we already encountered such buildings without noticing.
Just in front of the observatory, a snake charmer is charming the crowd, or maybe the snake is. The poor fellow is frequently bitten by his cobra, what in his opinion justifies an incredible price to take a picture of him. Alas in our opinion it is bad to distribute money, so you won’t see what he looks like. But happily audio recorder were free of rights (as more discreet).
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The old city is nicknamed “Pink City” because many buildings are build with rose sandstones, and all where painted in rose in 1875 for the coming of Prince of Galles. It is actually pretty rare to see such an unity of architectural style in India.
We also visited the turban museum. The common believ for us coarse Occidental people is that of course Indian do wear turbans. But we miss all the subtleties of turban wearing. This piece of tissue you role around your head are sometimes several dozens of meters long and have always a particular signification. Each town, each occupation, each class and cast, every month in the year, each life event (wedding, birth … ) is shown in a different kind of turban.
An expert (and the Indians them-self) can walk in the street and recognize a farmer coming to the city, a cobbler who just had a son, the healthiest merchant of the city …
When the dust storm dissipates, a little girl runs into the pigeons to make them fly.
J’ai adoré Jaipur quand j’y suis allé ! Le palais des vents, les éléphants au fort rouge, l’observatoire …
Bonjour c’est Grand-Père !
Je reconnais bien les mêmes bâtiments astronomiques que sur la carte que j’ai reçue de Jaipur. Merci beaucoup !
Je ne sais pas si la précision méridionale de nos cadrans solaires est aussi bonne mais ça marche bien aussi.
Rémi a bien changé depuis que je ne l’ai vu, j’espère que tout se passe bien.
Gros bisous à Rémi et à Romane qui connait bien ma région.