Pink is my favourite colour

<p dir="ltr">Well - no it's not. But Jaipur, the Pink City certainly has a lot to like in it, despite being mostly orange. The old city was painted pink from green a couple of hundred years when the wife of the maharaja was complaining about the colours making the city look sad. Don't we all have a story like that? :) So the city became pink, the maharani satisfied and the maharaja could finally go out for a quiet evening beer with his friend the basha from Agra. This is roughly the story our guide for the first Jaipur day, Hafij, shared with us. As I mentioned he was a pretty pushy guy but he was just the right choice to guide us. As mentioned his English was good and in good Indian tradition he treated us more like guests who just happen to pay, as opposed to simple clients. The motto was "This is your rickshaw today, what you say happens", so no surprise that one of us drove the tuktuk by the end of the day :) also he was "protecting" us from scams and cheats, sending them away in loud Hindi, even helping to haggle for a lower price (well, the official price) at the gin store. <br>
We started the day at at corner breakfast place with a couple of samosas and katchouris followed by the usual sweet, spicy chai as a kickstart. It's always fun mingling with the locals, there's no such thing as "your table", everyone sits everywhere and talks you up if they feel like it, in some cases even with useful advice. With both us and the rickshaw refuelled we headed to the Pink City (I know, finally :)) which is as a district not as scenic as I expected. Basically it's the same chaotic daily city life with shops, stalls and scaffolding where in addition to the city mandated pink colour on all houses. There are 3 huge gates into this inner city, and in the very heart it hides the City Palace, the Jantar Mantar observatory and the Hawa Mahal, all good examples of the Indian architecture I expected to see on this journey. The City Palace supposedly holds the biggest armory exhibit in India (doubtful), and holds all kinds of weapons-in-weapons, throat cutting arrows, katars, anything that has place for a pistol appended has one. You can also check out a clothes exhibition, moderately interesting for us, but we at least saw a proper biliards outfit :) Next door isn't he Jantar Mantar, one of king Jai's 5 observatories scattered in Rajahstan. This has buildings as instruments, each perfectly positioned to locate celestial bodies or to tell the time with 2 seconds precision using a sundial. The whole site is surreal, with all the buildings serving a single specific purpose they don't look like proper buildings at all. <br>
Hawa Mahal is the Wind Palace, a building with an amazing facade (in the background) but not much else inside apart from a nice view on the city. <br>
Part 2 to follow, the train ride is slowly coming to an end. </p>