🇮🇳 Jaipur - Sightseeing and Bollywood

The chillest city in North India?

To conclude my tour of India’s golden triangle, my final stop was Jaipur. I spent a few days here taking it easy, with my 10-day silent meditation retreat sandwiched in between (I’ll write about it in the next post). Jaipur is a much less hectic city compared to Delhi and Agra, so exploring it felt more comfortable, and I had to watch for tuk-tuks clipping my ankles a little less. The architecture here was also the most cohesive I’ve seen in India, with most buildings built of sandstone, featuring tones of pink and amber.

Landmarks

I slowed down a bit on visiting the landmarks here, only opting to go for the things I really wanted to see. There were quite a few highlights here. First, the Amber Fort - a 16th-century hilltop fortress. The approach to it was a scenic 15-minute walk, requiring some caution as elephants would pass from time to time, squirting water everywhere.

Next, the Jal Mahal, which is a palace intentionally built in a lake for the Maharaja to host duck-hunting parties. I’ve never seen anything like it, and it had a really serene energy about it. I visited once in the daytime, and once in the evening with a friend who was visiting for work from London (Bea). The palace looked stunning in the sunset.

While waiting for Bea, I got chatting to a local who runs a bitcoin farm. I found this pretty interesting, as crypto mining is barely profitable in most of the world since the yields usually barely cover electricity costs (and I didn't think it was popular these days given the impact it has on the environment). Many people I met here seem to do obscure tech work like this that’s infeasible in the West, which has been pretty cool to get to know as a tech nerd at heart.

Finally, the Hawa Mahal, which is a screen built to allow royal women to watch the street without being seen by the public. This is one of the coolest buildings I’ve seen here so far, reminding me a lot of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Coincidentally, there was some sort of procession happening when I was there. I encountered a few others like this during my time in Jaipur, with locals rarely knowing whether it’s for a festival, wedding, or something else. I’m glad I got to see this, as it seems a few of the trucks had DIY sound systems that I’ve seen obscure clips of on Instagram before and was curious about, like this one:

The trucks were a variety of electronic music (with crowds of Indians behind dancing like crazy), featuring a surprising amount of Latin-sounding drums (not in the video).

Finally, I stopped off at the Albert Hall Museum. Admittedly, the building looked much better than the collections inside, which featured mostly artefacts from other countries (I was keen on learning more about Indian culture).

I really liked this backstory for an old painting depicting a myth around Sri Lanka:

Seeing some Bollywood

I really wanted to see a Bollywood film in India, having never seen one before. There’s an old cinema in Jaipur that the locals recommended to me (Raj Mandir), so I went there despite it only putting on films in Hindi with no English subtitles.

The cinema was only screening one film - Border 2, which is a war drama about the India-Pakistan war of 1971. Films mostly based on action sequences are not my thing, but I thought I’d go for it.

The cinema itself was really cool inside, reminding me of a fancy hotel or casino. Many of the locals came to the screening with their families dressed up smart, so going out to the cinema might be a bit of an event here.

I really enjoyed the film, mostly from a novelty aspect. The fight scenes featured an excessive amount of sound effects, mundane scenes were made to be super dramatic, and the actors would seemingly randomly break out into English to say phrases like “cheeky devil” and “relax boys”. The film itself was also nicely shot and colour-graded. The music lacked a little, though, with parts of the same 3 scores repeated all the way throughout the 2.5-hour film, reminding me a little of low-budget Polish films. The story was also easy enough to follow despite not speaking Hindi (India wins). One of the locals was also really excited to see a foreigner watching a Hindi film and kept excitedly checking up on me before the film and during the intervals.

Food

The food in Jaipur has been great, with vegetarian thalis being very popular in the region. I also had the best meal I’ve had in India here, in a place called Chokhi Thali, which has only been open for 3 months. The restaurant is run by a family and is set in what used to be their living room. The mum was cooking, her older son was waitering, and her younger daughter would also pop in at points to give me more food that was coming freshly off the stove.

The food here was incredible, with their thali consisting of around 15 individual dishes.

The atmosphere was unlike anything I’ve experienced before in a restaurant, feeling like I was eating at a friend’s family home. During the meal, I talked to a few of the locals and the son, who was studying liberal arts at uni. The son also showed me a nearby Hindu temple that was built in a style similar to Khmer architecture in Cambodia, which I don’t think many tourists know about. I don’t have a photo, as some guy in a corner started shouting at me when I got my phone out - hopefully my karma didn’t drop too much by doing that.