Apparently Jaipur is the Pink City... If pink is the new orange then I suppose I can see how this would work.
Our Hotel was a tidy old stately home setup with a big garden and doors which can be locked from the outside without a key as Catherine found out. With such pleasant surroundings in our hotel we felt very detached from the mad traffic, dirt, prolific homeless people and local stick mags on the streets.
Cat and I both indulged in meat for the first time since arriving in India after seeing a Bollywood flick at the local cinema. The meat unsettled me for a bit, but now that Cat had a taste she was keen for more. The film (in Hindi with token bits of English chucked in for effect) reinforced all those great Hindu beliefs of arranged marriages surviving, love marriages failing, young supporting the old, foreigners finding happiness by adopting the Indian ways and was threrefore a little too predictable but worth the $2 it cost (isn't it $12 at home...)
The Amber fort was... another impressive fort but was in the middle of some major renovation which it desperately needed and the Wind Palace looked pretty cool from the outside as we helped fix the engine of our Tuk tuk for the second time that trip on the roadside out front!
We visited an NGO called Ladli which works with over 3000 street kids daily doing a class room on wheels setup, and vocational training and work for boys and girls. All work done by the kids is paid and after less than five years of surviving on donations, the outfit is almost at breakeven point. We spent some time with the girls learning how to make jewellery. With hundreds of thousands of street kids in Jaipur alone, the efforts of this organisation is a drop in the bucket, but shows that it is possible to make a massive difference. To make the biggest difference, mitigate the problem in the first place: widely, easily and discretely available contraception... the Indian government has yet to do more than pay lip service to this notion to date, but watch this space...
