The Hawa Mahal and Train Ride

Well, the Hawa Mahal is pretty zany. It's this five-story, one-room-deep building in Jaipur where the gals in the harem could sit behind elaborate carved screens and watch the world go by, without being seen themselves. We spent an hour climbing all over it. Up near the top it gets pretty narrow and all the railings are crumbling. Not that it matters, because the railings are only about a foot tall.

In other news, we rode an elephant. When the elephant started walking, Abby let out a yelp. She was afraid of falling off of the giant elephant and into a pile of elephant poop, which is also giant.

For lunch, we went to this spectacular palace hotel. While we sat on the veranda eating things like pasta and drinking things like beers, we watched three women in bright saris weeding a croquet field. In the distance, we heard a faint, droning sound that we decided must be a vacuum cleaner. But no, it was music.

Spaghetti, croquet, gardeners wearing saris, exotic distant sounds ... what a strange mix of worlds.

Last night we rode the overnight train to Udaipur, the "Lake City." First we were shown to a really nice compartment (it even had a closet) , but guess what. Wrong car. So we ended up sharing a compartment with a fellow who is a manager at a local bank in Udaipur. He was heading home after a week of training on computers -- his bank is just getting computers.