Jaipur – The Pink City

Hotel Abhinandan, 100 Rs

The nice and friendly staff of the hotel made me decided not to move anywhere. Eventhough I got very bad location for my room, just next to the main road, which always makes my bed quaking when a bus or truck passing. And yesterday night was really a nightmare, with the crackers exploding for every single minute for the Diwali celebration, up till 2 a.m. Fortunately today the hotel staff offered me to move to another room, which was much better.

My Malaysian travel companion and I went together to the pink city of Jaipur today. Since my first day in India, actually I lost the mood of travelling and taking pictures. I hope with her appearance again I would gather fresh ideas for my photography work. The pink city itself is not really pink, only the buildings around the mainroads are painted pink, and just for the surface. The “old town” itself looks new and modern, brightly coloured in pink colour, and has very busy traffic. The real “old atmospheric” part of the town was near the palace area. The royal palace
ticket is 180 Rs, which is too expensive for our budget. The impressive pink Hawa Mahal (ticket 5 Rs) was really colourful under morning sunlight, really fantastic from outside (free ticket) but not as splendid from inside. Maybe that’s why the ticket for foreigners is so cheap.

Then our painful stomach (dont know why both of us have the same stomach problem since in Delhi) forced us to go back to hotel. The hotel owner has brought his DVD player, and we watched some movies together. A fresh Bollywood movie about Romeo and Nehal Singh (forget the title). Surprising that when it comes to songs and dances (typical of Bol movies) he pressed the fast forward button. “Wasting time,” he said. I
thought that all Indians love to watch singing and dancing in the movie. Apparently that Bollywood movies are getting shorter also, compared to the usual 3 hour movies I watched in Indonesia. Now the hit in India is the pop song Aashiiq Banaya (“You Made me Lover”) and everywhere they play this music loud.