Day 580 - Pacing it to the Palace

After having stunning views of the dusky pink Umaid Bhawan Palace from the fort yesterday, we decided to go and check it out up, close and personal today!As the palace is still lived in by the Maharaja and his family, and is part hotel, we could only see a small section of this impressive structure and its grounds. We enjoyed ourselves in the small but quite interesting and informative museum, where we saw photos of the history of the palace and of the kings and queens who lived or live there. Adam was especially happy at the size of the museum as he tends to lack the attention span required to read his way around large museums!!!


Our walk to the palace had been successfully navigated, mainly thanks to the people we came across along the way who were more than happy to help us out and point us in the right direction: we have found India to be full of amazingly friendly people, so long as you don't ask someone trying to sell you something! Despite the successful walk there, we decided to grab a cheap rickshaw back to town where we found the post shop (postcards are coming their way to 8 lucky people ...) and lunch at the corner of 2 busy intersections.


Here we dined on traditional Thali, an all-you-can-eat meal made up of several curries, chapati, pickle, rice, raita, and a sweet - all for the bargain of $1.75. Once again we had a lively walk home through the bazaar, and enjoyed another lassi for desert!As we've been doing a lot of sight-seeing over the past few weeks, we decided to have a complete chill out this afternoon and spent it listening to music and reading in the sun. We enjoyed chatting to the Nepali cook at our hotel, who has come to India for the better money!

Adam went out to get his shoes fixed (once again!), though we fear this may be the last time this pair of shoes gets revived ... On his way home Adam listened to some Concord Dawn at full volume, which when walking around India is a bit dangerous as you can't hear the "get-out-of-my-way beeps" from the traffic, but gave him a whole new experience of being able to really see the faces of the people around him with a new soundtrack.

We spent the evening chatting with a couple of kiwi boys over here for their uni break, swapping travel stories and tips and enjoying the view from our high rooftop.


Adlibing a princely Palace.