This city was instantly quiet, calm, and clean compared to Bangalore. Pete had Mumbai as a brief benchmark, and was also struck by this. Living in Bangalore, I’m used to sights like random enormous heaps of trash that are basically ad hoc dumps, construction sites with the workers’ families begging out front, and cow feces EVERYWHERE. In Udaipur, they’d limied things to just the cow feces.
On our way to our hotel from the train station, we noticed two recurring signs. One was a series of signs pointing to Savage Garden, which Pete and I made sure to photograph. The other was restaurants advertising nightly screenings of Octopussy, the Bond flick. I’ve never actually seen it (and still haven’t, sadly), but apparently a good chunk of it takes place in Udaipur, where the eponymous villainess lives in the Lake Palace. We didn’t get to see it because when we tried to on our last night, the restaurant’s DVD player was broken, and we were too hungry to want to switch restaurants. I did see some clips on Youtube, though, and all I can say is that rickshaw chases wouldn’t work like that. It would end within 2 minutes when one stopped for gas or the other blew an axle by flying over a pothole. I really would like to see the part of a rickshaw chase when both have to slow down to 5mph to get over a speed bump.
Pete wanted to pick up a suit and/or shirts while in India, and Udaipur turned out to be the place to do this. Each of these touristy towns has some sort of specialty in terms of shopping, and Udaipur’s were miniature prints and tailors. Most places advertise suits for Rs.3,000 (about $65), but those are pure polyester. For a merino wool suit, the going rate is Rs.6,000. Pete instead bought three tailored shirts for total Rs.3,300, and then began to haggle over an already-made wool suit that fit him perfectly. He wound up buying that the next day for Rs.4,201, with the owner wanting the extra rupee "for luck."
So the tailored clothing here is sorta cheap, I guess. I buy my shirts from Marshalls and TJ Maxx for $20-$25, almost exactly what Pete paid for his. His are probably somewhat higher quality, as they’re tailored and in very nice fabric, but mine are almost exclusively Calvin Klein slim fit, so it’s not like I’m buying crap. The only major advantage was that he got to select his fabrics from a huge array of choices, while at Marshalls you buy by going there once every other week or so for a few months and snagging what’s good when it arrives. As for suits, mine are from Jos. A. Banks, and they’re $150 when they go on sale. Adding tax and tailoring, and I think they come to about $180 each. Pete definitely had me beat there, but he also was buying ready-made. As we were leaving, I mentioned to Jony (the young, friendly owner) that I might come back at some point, and he said it’d be Rs.5,000 each for me. That’s still cheap, but I must say it’s not THAT cheap. You can’t pay for the trip with suits. Since a suit’ll be tailored anyway, the only real advantage is the wide array of fabrics, while Banks only has 5-6 to choose from on the $150 suits. Anyway, I’ll keep looking in Bangalore to see if things can be had more cheaply. We actually haggled really well on the suit, if not so much on the shirts.
As for the sightseeing, Udaipur had several highlights. We didn’t actually get to go in the Lake Palace, as that’s now a privately-owned hotel, but we did take a boat tour around the lake, which was the key, anyway. I’m sure there’s some cool stuff in the palace, but the main thing about it is that it’s in the middle of a damn lake. The city palace was also great. It’s a large complex built up to the lakefront, and in the courtyard they had a light show in the evening that was narrated with the history of Mewar, the kingdom of which Udaipur was the capital. As far as I can tell, Mewar’s history is mostly women ritualistically killing themselves by fire, followed by now-widowed men fighting with nothing to lose. The light show closed by describing the formation of the current trust (I was waiting for the narrator to drop "501(c)"), then trashing the eldest son for suing said trust. I guess public family strife is still a step up from mass femmecide, though.
We spent a night in Udaipur, then took a night train to Jaipur. Which was decidedly less clean, calm, and quiet than Udaipur. But it just showed us, immediately, how different each city is in Rajasthan, the Land of Kings. We didn’t hit another city much like Udaipur, and I’m quite glad we started with it. It was a nice intro to India, before we got to locales that were a little edgier.
Our jump shots:
And again, I apologize for Pete’s photography. My photos were better :)
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