The Wedding and Bombay
We arrived in Bombay on Wednesday night after a day in Hong Kong. We stayed at a hotel in Juhu beach, outside of Bombay proper. Thursday was spent procuring traditional Indian clothing for the various wedding festivities, then we piled on to a bus to a gallery downtown for the opening of an African art exhibit curated by Noah and Shifra. Friday morning we piled on the bus for a tour of Bombay. Here is the Dhobi Ghat, or public laundry in Bombay. In the cement cublicles at the bottom of the pictures, the dhobis, always men, stomp the laundry clean on the cement. Everything looks really scuzzy and the water is a very troubling gray color, but look at those whites!
Below is the Gateway of India, a useless but lovely stone archway built in 1911 to welcome Queen Mary and King George V of England, and rendered obsolete shortly thereafter by a decline in the number of people travelling to India by boat.
Bombay, from the bus.
Friday night the parents of Noah and Shifra hosted a dinner at a club to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah. Dinner was yummy Gujarati food. In the second picture, check out the fab fresh flower garlands.
Saturday night was a Mehndi party hosted by Aaron and Shneiur, the brothers of Noah and Shifra. The invitation noted "Indian Dress preferred," so I paid a nice lady a couple hundred rupees to do my hair so I looked like a Kennedy and to twist me into the sari that was a gift from Shifra's mother Lily. The sari was held in place by only two safety pins and seemed a little precarious. I was sure as soon as I sat down on the bus that I would be naked and hoped out loud that there would be sari repair services available at the party for all the white people. Sure enough, a few hours in to the party, after a little dancing and resulting sari slippage, I was walking and came upon an Indian woman that I had not met who looked at me, clucked her tongue disapprovingly, grabbed my sari and did some tugging and tucking that miraculously returned everything to its former tension, then went on her way. Woohoo, that is service! In this picture of Noam and me in our Indian dress, you can't see my huge fat rolls flopping over the top of the sari. Don't worry, they're there:
Noah rode in on a white horse, and Shifra was carried in on a litter.
The bride and groom were then blessed in an elaborate ritual involving a flower headdress, painfully sweet sugar cane, and rice pelted at the brothers of both bride and groom. Here is Shif in the flower thingy and Shneiur getting henna wrapped around his finger:
The party was very carnival-like. There were palm readers, henna artists, dancers, fire-breathers, modern Indian music that Noah referred to as "Punjabi MC," a parrot that told your fortune, and tons and tons of food and drink. They really know how to party in India. Here is me getting some henna painted on my hands, a fire breather, and Ronni and Lily holding spinning plates during the dancing.
And, something near and dear to my heart, the chow line:
Sunday was the actual wedding at the synagogue. Instead of a rabbi, Noah himself conducted the ceremony. Here is the happy couple:
Noam, Ronni, and Yehudit:
At the reception following the wedding, me with our handlers Bonnie and Vidhi. I am nearly in tears at the prospect of being without them, while they are probably happy to get rid of us. The night before the wedding, we broke their arms in four or five places from all the twisting to get them to take us to a club. Poor Boni and Vidhi had to get up early the next morning and work, while the rest of us slept all day.
Night Train to Agra
On Monday evening, a group of 17 of us left Bombay for Agra on an evening train. Here are Noah, Yehudit, and me at the train station.
The train was interesting. Hopefully that is the closest I will ever come to being in prison. The toilets are, as stories promise, literally a hole in the floor, complete with two foot pads and a handle. To get the full experience, I waited until the train was really ripping down the tracks before I went to the bathroom. The air sort of swirls in a tornado effect, it was cool.
We arrived Tuesday in Mathura, the birthplace of Lord Krishna. There is a mosque built right on top of the Hindu temple, resulting in a handful of guys with guns, metal detectors, and pat downs. It reminded me of visiting religious sites in Israel. We couldn't take pictures in the temple, so here is a random horse cart picture. They have cool horses in India, the tips of their ears curve inward.
After Mathura, we headed to Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal. Agra flourished during the reign of Mogul emperors Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb (1542-1707). Shah Jahan fell in love with Arjuman Banu, the niece of Jahangir's wife, and married her in 1612. She died in childbirth in 1630. On her deathbed, the story goes, she begged Shah Jahan to build a monument so beautiful that the world would never forget their love. Construction began in 1632 and lasted for 17 years. Shah Jahan was deposed by his son and spent his last years imprisoned across the Yamuna river in the Agra fort, gazing at his wife's tomb. Here it is, in its description-defying glory, the Taj Mahal:
Here are a few pictures of the Agra fort, including some evidence of mad-cappery:
We left Agra and Uttar Pradesh for Jaipur in Rajasthan. On the way, we stopped at a bird sanctuary in Bharatpur, where we cruised around in bicycle-rickshaws. Our rick-driver was kind enough to allow Ronni a turn pedaling the rickshaw, which despite Ronni's great depth of talents, did not go well. Anyway, here is a kingfisher and a painted stork at Bharatpur.
This is Shneiur on the left and one of the cycle rickshaw drivers in the middle, looking at a polaroid Edwin (another traveller in our group) took of the driver and gave to him. I love this picture.
A couple of scenes from the Rajasthani countryside.
Jaipur and Pushkar, Eastern Rajasthan
Jaipur, Rajasthan's Pink City, takes its name from Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, the scientist, architect, astronomer, and maharaja who founded the city in 1727 after moving down from the Amer fort in the surrounding hills. We rode up to the Amer fort on elephants.
This is the sheesh mahal, the palace of mirrors, in the Amer fort.
Noam with our tour guide and pal Sunil.
A guy selling munchies at the Amer fort.
After the Amer fort we headed downtown to the city palace of Jaipur, in the walled part of the city. We did a little shopping in a market by the city palace. Here are some flower stalls at the market.
A camel cart:
From Jaipur we went to Pushkar, a Hindu pilgrimage town in the desert. Hindus believe that one must bathe in the lake in Pushkar if one's other pilgrimages are to be successful. Noam got blessed in Pushkar, and assures me that I am also covered by his blessing. In Pushkar we ate at the sketchiest restaurant on the whole trip, complete with a dirt floor and a waiter using the same rag to wipe both the plates and silverware and his face. Though many people in our group had expressed an interest in eating, by the time we sat down, only four remained. We merrily scrubbed our utensils with antibacterial wet-ones and watched carefully to make sure our dishes were cooked in a pillar of fire. It was well worth it: we were served some of the best food we had in India, and no one got sick. Yehudit and me in Pushkar:
At a shop in Pushkar, piles of brightly colored makeup:
Monkeys!
Chittaurgarh and Udaipur, Southern Rajasthan
Chittaurgarh and Udaipur are in the Mewar region of Rajasthan. The Mewar rulers resisted the reign of the Moguls through a series of guerilla wars. Chittaur was the capital of the Mewar princely state from the 8th to the 16th century, when Maharana Udai Singh moved the capital to Udaipur. Chittaur is famous for the suicidal tendencies of its maharanis (princesses), who were always throwing themselves on funeral pyres for one reason or another. Uh, anyway, here is Noam at Chittaur, and the view from the Chittaur fort.
From Chittaur we went to Udaipur, the Venice of the East. Me and Ronni and the Lake Palace, in the middle of Lake Pichola, in Udaipur:
The City Palace of Udaipur, still occupied by the current maharana.
The Monsoon Palace, at the top of the hill in the distance, where the maharanas took refuge during monsoon season.
Here is a family on a scooter. Eeek.
From Udaipur we flew back to Bombay, then to Singapore where we ate salad next to a fountain at a mall, a nice change from India where you never know if the food is going to haunt you. I leave you with a shot of this billboard, which we saw throughout India. Ponder this: what is in non-vegetarian toothpaste?
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