The pink city: huge, busy, loud, pushy, uninspired, uninspiring, hot, adventurous.
Friday early in the morning we arrived in Jaipur, both tired and a bit done with sightseeing and input we did not leave the hotel pool and airconditioned room the entire day and only went out for diner at one of those rooftop restaurants.
On Saturday we got up early to go to Amber Fort outside of the city where you can ride up to the fort on the back of an elephant. Pretty touristy of course and the ride was a bit shaky as well, but of course that was on our to do list. Amber Fort itself was also impressive, with beautiful views over the countryside and the neighbouring forts. On the way back to town we stopped at a blockprinting manufacture where we got an insight into how fabrics are handprinted with layers and layers of different handcarved stamps and colours.
Afterwards we stopped at the monkey temple to which we had to hike for half an hour at 43°C... phew!!! But got to see a little temple with a pool in which monkeys were bathing. Quite cool!
In the evening we had diner in a little restaurant on top of the city wall, looking down to the crazy traffic on the main road.
Today on Sunday we slept in and then went into the city centre. Well so far not the most spectacular city we have seen, Stan calls it the Rotterdam of India ;-). A pink city wall is surrounding the old town and under its arcades there is one bazar next to the other where you are hassled into buying this and that.
Inside those city walls, the old city is neither pink nor beautiful!
Even the city palace doesn't seem overly impressive. Only the Jantar Mantar, the largest observatory for the sun and stars and it's huge instruments is quite special!

But on our sightseeing trips we stumbled over a new business idea: if we took 50 rupees of everyone that asked to take a photo of or with us, we could surely pay our daily diner with this income! People here go crazy when they see us! Women giggle, kids wave or cry, men stare... and this is even in the quite touristy places ;-)