India Day 6 still...sorry for the delay.

Ok, so I need to get caught up on stuff, but it's more fun just to to prattle, but if I don't get stuff written down, I'll never remember what I actually did, so excuse the boring parts.

We arrived in India a day early, the original 7 of us, so our guide took us touring that day, a "bonus" bunch of sightseeing, so to speak. That was the Gandhi museum, making naan at the Sikh temple etc. 

And that's enough of that chatter. Back to the day of the elephant ride. After the ride we visited the City Palace and Jantar Mantar, which was pretty amazing. 

This is the technical explanation:

"The Jantar Mantar is an equinoctial sundial, consisting a gigantic triangular gnomon with the hypotenuse parallel to the Earth's axis. On either side of the gnomon is a quadrant of a circle, parallel to the plane of the equator. The instrument is intended to measure the time of day, correct to half a second and declination of the Sun and the other heavenly bodies."

Well, that's no fun. More fun is the fact that it was built in 1724 and keeps the time to the second. One can actually watch the shadow of the sun move. It's the correct time even today. There are five other astronomical "devices" here as well. 

After that, a few of us decided to take a rickshaw ride through the old city, holy cow, it felt like I was taking my very life in my hands. The traffic is horrendous enough when you're in a bus and have all that metal between you and the ground, but in a little rickshaw with traffic almost touching you, well, yikes! He careened around corners, and hollered out various bits of info...or maybe he was hollering to hang on, hard to say, in any case, I felt like I was on Mr Toads Wild Ride! It was a dusty experience if nothing else. Wind in my hair, Indian dirt in my teeth. 

Weaving thru the traffic.

We flew past the Palace of the Winds, lovely architecture until you realize that all these windows had sandstone "grills" on them so that the women could see some sunlight and blue sky, but could not really see the outside life, nor could they be seen. It's a tough life for women in India now, but it was far, far tougher back then, and they still have miles to go.

Our rickshaw driver, who may or may not have been trying to kill us with fear. At many points I was within a fingers reach of big trucks. An elbow misplaced may well have been deftly removed by a bumper or side-mirror.

My rickshaw partner almost lost her kneecap!

Anyhow, it was all fine and we moved on, except we didn't really move on at all. We got on the bus, but this happened:

It was a holiday of some sort, for Muslims, and after their visit to the mosque, they were leaving by the thousands (literally thousands) and they wanted to be able to walk down the street unimpeded by other pedestrians, traffic and even police. They refused to move, and they refused to let our bus through. They even took over the small "hut" that the police used to direct traffic. It was an interesting experience, that's for sure. They all looked rather angry, but I wasn't concerned about our safety at all. I think they were just trying assert themselves, but I wouldn't have left the bus, that's for sure.

Anyhow, it was all good and we drove to our hotel, which was a fabulous respite after the somewhat hectic day of dust and heat and protesting, angry men with sticks.

The hotels all met us with hot towels, red dye for the bindi mark on the forehead and a blessing. The red dye they use for the bindi dots is something thick and oozy, and we all walked around looking like we had taken a bullet to the forehead. It was hard to remove too, so all the hotel facecloths looked like they had cleaned up a crime scene.

Also, each hotel greeted us with a non-alcoholic drink, which I know many hotels do, I'm not a total novice in a hotel, but these were all interesting drinks. One was a hot drink with ginger, cardamom, honey, lemon and maybe cinnamon, one was rose-water...mmmmm, lovely and pink and tasted like roses, one was a sickly-sweet mint which was brilliant green, so no doubt it was filled with some type of food colouring, and one was warm coke, which struck me as odd, and others were masala tea. 

Rose water.

So after we checked into the hotel we had to go to a gem cutting demo. I hate that kind of thing  because I have no intention of buying anything at the shop they herd you into after the demo, but there is nowhere else to go...these shops are invariably in an area with nothing nearby. To me it's a waste of an hour or two, and a reason why I wouldn't go on another organized tour....any kind of shopping is not my thing, and "forced" shopping is even less my thing.  I'll admit that the actual demos are interesting though, and I really did enjoy them. 

Anyhow, that was the end of that day, and in "real life" I'm home now, so I can take some time to go thru my photos and write up the rest of the story in more interesting (hopefully not boring) detail.