Udaipur - the white city

Jaisalmer the golden, Jodhpur the blue, ... we simply didn't have a chance, we just had to go and take those terrible buses again and visit Udaipur, the white. Especially after other travellers had told us all that Udaipur was really a beautiful city. We thus changed our plans, took another bus, feared for our lives for 6 hours, and arrived in a city that was at the same time Indian and not Indian at all. I guess when looking at the pictures you can get quite a good impression of the color of the city and we were really impressed that the streets and houses were really quite white, clean, rather calm, without the usual number of beggars, vendors, harassements,... we had found a jewel amongst Indian cities! At once, we decided that we had to stay a couple of days in this fantastic place and one of our first activities was to take a boat cruise on the Pichola lake to get a closer look of the Palace hotel and the other huge island within the lake. In the picture, you can see me in front of the Palace hotel.



If you are interested to see some more of the city, you might consider watching the James Bond movie "Octopussi" because it was filmed right here in Udaipur! All the restaurants and bars in the city show the movie in the evenings and of course we couldn't miss out on this. It's hilarious how well the movie shows India and Indian everyday life! If you pay particular attention to Bond's rikshaw drives and you'll understand why we always fear for our lives when getting on some kind of transport here. :) Anyway, even though we did spent some romantic evenings in wonderfully atmospheric restaurants and got lost in the beautiful night views over the lake (see picture in David's post), we mostly spent our days watching everyday life on the streets. We were particularly well positioned to do this as our favorite cafe - Cafe Edelweis - which offered the most delicious German pastries was situated right on one of the major streets leading from the old city to the ghat. A ghat here in India is like a quay, where people go to either wash themselves or their clothes (as you can see in the picture). By the way, we also deared to get our clothes washed at our hotel but the result was that I had to spend hours sewing the walnut-sized holes in our T-shirts, that some of our T-shirts would fit giants now and that many of our things have strange stains now that won't go off anymore! Great idea! Next time I'll do he washing myself!

Talking about clothing, what do you think about the colors of those Indian dresses? Isn't that a pleasure for the eye? When sitting in our cafe one day, we saw this wedding parade passing by going down to the ghat and to a> temple there. Several hours later, they made their way back up, carrying, I presume, holy water in the vases on their heads and sprinkling it on everybody who came into their way. While walking, the women were singing and laughing and apparenly having los of fun. Well, we also loved watching them and were once more propelled into the stories of 1001 nights.

Hm, I also have to introduce you to a special friend of ours that made our stay in Udaipur even more enjoyable. As the picture shows, this is a "small shop but many things". The picture only gives you a slight idea of the size of this shop but it was truely tiny. The owner barely had space enough to sit in the middle of all his "many things" but I guess he was the living proof of the proverb "Klein aber fein - small but fine". In this shop we did not only find all kinds of cookies to help us through our visit of the city place, the boat-tour, our strolls through the streets, no, we found the most crucial food of all: Nutella! If you are from Europe, I guess you can imagine our joy at this discovery and you'll know that we could not resist!

Well, before I leave you again, I still have to tell you about a very special night we spent in Udaipur. We went to see a show of traditions music and dance and it was very, very special and beautiful. Yes, you know the word will come but it's true, it was magical! :) We were sitting on cushions on the floor in the inner yard of one of the old havelis with lots of pillars and arches around us, above us the night sky with its stars,... the music was a little frightening, I have to admitt, but the performances were astonishing. We had ladies in all colors dance in groups and alone with vases of fire on their heads, we saw a hilarious guy making marrionettes dance or lose their heads on other parts of their bodies, and finally, we saw a woman who started to dance with a vase on her head. First one, then two, then three vases - she then danced balancing on a bronze plate - then four, five six vases - she started dancing barefoot on pieces of broken glass - then seven, eight, nine vases! It was fantastic! (I won't tell you about my attempts to walk with a single book placed on my head!!)



Of course, we enjoyed every single day in Udaipur and we didn't mind at all that we even had to prolong our stay because we couldn't get train tickets for the day we wanted to. We relaxed, enjoyed the calm (you could even here grasshoppers at night), visited places once in a while, and observed Indian every-day life. Still, one day we had to move on and some more trains took us to Jaipur and Agra!