Abby Gets Bumped By A Cow
A few things we saw yesterday in Udaipur:
A beautiful palace full of mirrored rooms, jewel-encrusted walls, stained glass windows, panoramic views of the valley, and gruesome paintings of valor on battlefields of yore. (Including one where the Maharaja slew horse and rider both with one blow of his sword. Barf.)
Next door to this palace lives the current Maharaja, Arvind Singh. I met him once on a previous visit to Udaipur. He has a walrus moustache and isn't very chatty. His brother lives down the hill in a minor-league palace. They aren't very chummy with one another by all accounts, due to the fact that the brother with the house on top of the hill got most of the dough.
In other news, we saw some very interesting contemporary-art galleries. Udaipur is basically a small town that has a large community of artists with galleries on the little winding streets. We met a few artists, and Mom and Abby bought two small etchings.
Afterwards, out on the street, Abby was bumped out of the way by a cow.
In the evening, we stumbled across an interesting parade, for lack of a better word. We aren't sure what was going on -- maybe the start of a wedding procession? It included colorful and wildly decorated wooden carts, along with a camel-drawn wagon piled with loudspeakers blaring Indian music. Trailing the loudspeaker wagon was a group of about a dozen little kids -- maybe 12 years old or so -- each carrying basically a giant chandelier. The chandeliers were strung together by an electrical cord that was wired to an electrical generator on yet another cart. The generator was so old and bizarre, it would be perfectly at home at the county fair, over with the old-fashioned engines from the 1920s.
When we tried to snap a picture of the procession, the girls struck Indian-dance poses while cradling their weird lights. After a while, the whole thing meandered down the narrow lane.
A beautiful palace full of mirrored rooms, jewel-encrusted walls, stained glass windows, panoramic views of the valley, and gruesome paintings of valor on battlefields of yore. (Including one where the Maharaja slew horse and rider both with one blow of his sword. Barf.)
Next door to this palace lives the current Maharaja, Arvind Singh. I met him once on a previous visit to Udaipur. He has a walrus moustache and isn't very chatty. His brother lives down the hill in a minor-league palace. They aren't very chummy with one another by all accounts, due to the fact that the brother with the house on top of the hill got most of the dough.
In other news, we saw some very interesting contemporary-art galleries. Udaipur is basically a small town that has a large community of artists with galleries on the little winding streets. We met a few artists, and Mom and Abby bought two small etchings.
Afterwards, out on the street, Abby was bumped out of the way by a cow.
In the evening, we stumbled across an interesting parade, for lack of a better word. We aren't sure what was going on -- maybe the start of a wedding procession? It included colorful and wildly decorated wooden carts, along with a camel-drawn wagon piled with loudspeakers blaring Indian music. Trailing the loudspeaker wagon was a group of about a dozen little kids -- maybe 12 years old or so -- each carrying basically a giant chandelier. The chandeliers were strung together by an electrical cord that was wired to an electrical generator on yet another cart. The generator was so old and bizarre, it would be perfectly at home at the county fair, over with the old-fashioned engines from the 1920s.
When we tried to snap a picture of the procession, the girls struck Indian-dance poses while cradling their weird lights. After a while, the whole thing meandered down the narrow lane.
posted by jespes at 11:59 PM
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