Hallo, hallo, hundred rupees, very nice quality!
Trip Start
Dec 05, 2004
1
12
25
Trip End
Jan 17, 2005
Jaipur,
India
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Our large hotel was teeming with western tourists in their 'backpacker garb' of stripey trousers and scarves, flip flops and baggy Indian style tie dye tops
Cow and his friend!
. Israelis, French, Ozzies, Kiwis, English, Italians. We were pretty exhausted, so after a rest we ambled down to the central bazars of Jaipur - all organised by theme - pots and pans, blankets, underwear, jewellrey (Jaipur is a silver and gem centre). We popped into the Jantar Mantar (observatory) built by the maharajah's grandfather, then onto view the outside of the Hawa Mahal - Palace of the Winds - built in 1799 in pink sandstone with a facade of 953 small casements each with a balcony and crowning arch from which the ladies of the royal harem could view the processions outside without being seen.Our day finished with a visit to the huge art deco cinema Raj Mandir to watch a 3 hour Bollywood movie that's been playing there for months and still attracting crowds. Dale had already got our tickets, but we saw that there were two queues for buying tickets! - one for ladies and one for gentlemen. We had tickets in Diamond class, there was also Silver, Ruby and Pearl classes - the idea being that refined ladies sit in Diamond class so as not to rub shoulders with the uncouth rickshaw wallahs!!! It gave us a good view over the immense theatre, where even once the film started, the audience chatted, or answered the mobile phones, babies cried, and the audience booed, cheered and clapped at appropriate points in the film. Apparently they also throw food at the screen if there is a real baddie
Decorative temples at Amber Palace
! The film, all in Hindi (and it's amazing what you can understand from the over acted 3 hour film, with a line of English thrown in every ten minutes or so for effect) was called Veer Zara - basically about Helicopter Flight Commander Veer (Sikh from Punjab in India) meets rich spoilt Pakistani (Muslim) Zara during a rescue from a bus that's crashed off a cliff. She is on her way to scatter the ashes of her Sikh grandmother in the Ganges in India. Smitten by her beauty (and she is as is he of course) He goes with her and then takes her on a frolicking journey on tractors and donkies to meet his parents. There is fabulous all singing and dancing scene with spectacular costumes. The parents adore Zara and tell Veer that it's ok to pursue her even though she's Pakistani. He takes her back to the train and she is met by a man who turns out to be betrothed. Veer is gutted and Zara is torn between them. In the lead up to her wedding Zara dreams constantly of Veer and her maid secretly contacts him and he resigns from the Indian Air Force so that he can cross into Pakistan to find his beloved Zara. He arrives just in time for the wedding, when Zara sees him (and of course it starts to rain - all innuendos for lust and passion - no kissing allowed throughout the film) as she runs into his arms. Her father then has a heart attack from the shock of it all, so she is forced to agree to marry the Muslim guy despite her heart being elsewhere
Palace of the Winds
. In the meantime, her fiancee, high up in political life in Pakistan, arranges for Veer to be stopped on a bus and arrested for spying and taken to a prison. Zara is unaware of this and the wedding proceeds, in the middle of the wedding she refuses to proceed. The bus then crashes off a mountain, so when Zara learns of this she thinks Veer is dead and leaves Pakistan to work in the school which Veer's parents had founded (his parents actually die of the shock of losing their son). Then many years later a female human rights lawyer rises to the challenge of getting Veer off the charges of spying and she goes to find an aged, grey Zara to tell her that Veer is still alive...... and they all live happily ever after!!!!!!!!! It's all absolutely hilarious, all the tears, and 'love' scenes and the acting!!!! Of cours the Indian audience find it all perfectly serious and a real escape from their humdrum lives.The next day (today actually), we caught a rickshaw and then a bus up to the Amber Palace. Well actually we got an elephant up the steep path to the Amber Palace harrangued by touts, only to find that the Palace was closed on the anniversary of the death of a minister or something. Of course they weren't going to tell us this before we arrived, otherwise it would have dented the elephant ride trade! It was also so cold and foggy that we couldn't see any of the apparently fabulous views of Jaipur! So we took our elephant (Lakshmi - after the god) down the path again! Lovely creatures!
