The Pink City

We started off the day this morning by visiting the City Palace in the heart of the Pink City. With the entrance ticket came an audio tour so we spent the next couple hours following the audio tour signs. One of the highlights for me was seeing the single largest piece of silver (in the Guinness book) that was used by the royalty to gather water from the Ganges and carry it for long journey's. Next we went to the Jantar Mantar which was one of several observatories built by Jai Singh II. This one was suppose to be the most well preserved and indeed it was. The highlight of this place was a large sun dial that read the time within an accuracy of 20 seconds! There were many contraptions that were suppose to calculate various aspects of the solar system and it would have been really neat to watch someone who knew what they were doing demonstrate with them. We then headed towards the Hawa Mahal which is the Palace of Winds. The path there took us down many crazy bazaars. Every shop owner would yell and people would even block your path trying to get you to come into their store. We ate lunch at LMB (Laxmi Mashthad Bhantar, I think). This was an amazing retreat from the craziness of the streets even though it was located right in the middle of the Johari Bazaar.


Outside of The City Palace and adjacent to the Jantar Mantar were these three snake charmers. Chris touched one of the snakes but he didn't want to hold them. Of course that cost him 10 Rs though. These snakes were defanged so these men were not worried about getting struck. They were struck at and bitten several times while we were standing there.