Udaipur: Indian Wedding Fireworks and Puja

Udaipur took us 14 hours and a one night stopover in Mt. Abu to reach. Located in Southern Rajasthan, it is by most accounts the most well-liked city in the whole desert state. Overall, we quite liked the energy of the place and the beauty of the rundown havelis, lakeside location, and presence of women shopkeepers. It was the latter that led us to buy even more miniatures and dozens of clanky, steel bangles. After so many weeks of doing business with only men it was quite a relief to work with women.

Udaipur is a beautifully magical city set upon a lake with palaces surrounding and so during Indian wedding season (roughly November to March (though sadly we've yet to be invited to one!)) many Indians travel here for their elaborate wedding festivities. Even though we have yet to be able to be a part of the actual wedding festivities, we have been able to view the many firework displays from our hotel's rooftop. Added to that excitement, a new Hindu temple was consecrated in the courtyard of our hotel and so we were able to witness the puja (initial blessing) and the neighborhood feast which took place afterwards. The neighbors had been preparing beautiful vats of curry and sweets for days, all of which was gobbled up within a mere 3 hours for the temple. Simply lovely to be able to be apart of this, albeit from the rootop!

As has become the norm in India, we stayed in a lovely 'quiet' hotel (Hotel Panorama) opposite from the palace. 'Quiet' in India really means lots of honking, nighttime dog fights, early morning calls to prayer and pujas, and the occasional bellowing of cows. wedding Therefore, we have rather lowered our Western expectations of 'quiet' and have relied instead upon a few Kingfishers with dinner and halves of Ambien before bedtime. Not the healthiest diet perhaps, but it has so far led us to sleep.

Udaipur is an easily walkable, though hawkable, city and our poor driver, Raj, had no idea what to do with himself for two days straight. He called us at least three times per day ensuring that "Roni madame" was doing well and that we were being charged Indian prices rather than the much higher Western prices. In the end, I found myself haggling over the price of bottled water as one stand would quote 30 rupees and the next 20 Rs for the very same bottle. As I've said before, one must never fully trust what one hears when in India. Amongst the inevitable hawking and haggling, we did manage find a lovely Lassi man who made the best banana/coconut/pomegranate lassi I've ever tasted.

Another interesting fact about Udaipur is that Octopussy was at least partially filmed in this city and virtually every hotel shows it every single night at 7 pm. After 3 nights there, we were sick of it, not to imagine the poor hotel staff who see it every night! We then decided to move on the relatively sleepy little town of Bundi which lies in-between Udaipur and Jaipur on the Rajasthan circuit.

More on Bundi and it's 'relative' sleepiness soon!

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