jaipur

Jaipur definitely started us out on the right foot. After taking a night train from Jaisalmer, we arrived in the real early morning. There was a worker snoozing in the office and gave us a room right away (we were soooo thankful) and we instantly slept a good portion of the morning/early afternoon away. After waking up and getting it together, we decided to walk the town to find a book store. I was not crazy about the thought of going to Jaipur just because its another huge city and the capital of Rajasthan but decided it was worth a shot. After leaving the hotel, we turn the corner and this guy in a rickshaw stops by. Where are you goin? We tell him this bookstore, and he tells us it’s a far walk, but not at any point does he try and scam us, but tells us how it is. ‘you can walk, but its pretty far, and trust me, jaipur is not a walking town’. something about him sparked something in us, and we asked him to being us. Little did we know this changed our whole trip. From here on out he fell in love with shakeer, a tall lanky Indian man who in a weird way looked like a young Michael Jackson. After bringing us to the book store, he said it was almost the perfect time to go to the monkey palace for sunrise. Sure, why not. As we pull up about 30 minutes later, we are in awe. We see the palace with towering walls and you got it…HUNDREDS of MONKEYS!!!!!!!!!!! We start walking our way up and get closer and closer. There monkeys are HUGE. The kind of monkeys with beg red booties. Baby monkeys, ancient monkeys, running around climbing walls. After about 10 minutes of walking up and almost approaching the top, we see this huge group of kids, teenagers, on top. Slowly, one by one, they start to watch us approach. They start laughing and saying all these things we cant understand, more and more kids, I would say about 55 kids at least. I was hesitant to walk up. Were they ridiculing us? What are they even saying? As we keep walking we see an older man, the teacher staring in amazement as well. He gets up, asks gieves if he has any American money he can give him rupees for, then hugs him. Around this time, all hell breaks loose. They are running up to us, smiling, asking us questions, hugging and shaking our hands. The teacher comes to me and leads me over to these 3 girls sitting by a ledge and they get all nervous. I think they wanted to talk to me but were too scared to do it themselves. Their friends start taking photos, before you know it, I am surrounded by at least 30 kids, gieves snaps some photos on film. We are so frazzled. They are acting as if we are CELEBRITIES. After a while and 2 or 3 more goodbyes (after we’d say goodbye they would run back down to where we were) they go to gieves and ask him to sing. Please sir sing an american song! Under pressure…gieves starts beatboxing. Beatboxing! The kids go NUTS and start cheering. Finally on our departure one of the girls the teacher led me to ran to me, and gave me a pair of earrings she had. No words can describe how crazy it was, and how excited they were, and it was a moment I will never forget, it was one of the weirdest, craziest, silliest most touching moments of my entire life. Needless to say, we loved monkey palace.

After monkey palace Shakeer brought us through the pink city markets. It was CHAOS and I was very thankful to watch my surroundings from the rickshaw. He was right, besides the markets (which I wanted no part of anyways) Jaipur really isn’t a walking city. When he dropped us off, we enjoyed the few hours with him so much we asked if he would take us around the next day as well. He was glad to. One thing I have learned about Indians is that they are very truthful. They tell you how they feel. The ones I have met here briefly in this small frame of time in my life are peaceful and very compassionate. Shakeer has a heart of pure gold. He called me ‘boss lady’ just because I was so sweet he told gieves they needed to do what I said and even on the second day snuck away from us at a temple cause he ‘forgot’ something then when we met back up he had bought for us a ball of yarn for bracelets we were trying to find. Also on that same day, he took us to another special place. Earlier we had stopped at the amber fort where we saw elephants for the first time really in India. After leaving the fort, we went to where the elephants lived. It was beyond amazing. As sad as it was them being chained up, I got so close to the magnificent beasts my heart melted. The man who works there had a kind heart and kept bringing us up to the elephants, letting us rub their trunks and hug them and take photos. What a moment!

There was a lot more we saw in jaipur, but those were definitely the best of them. I loved my time there, mainly because I got to see so much of the city because of Shakeer. Driving around on the rickshaw was definitely the best thing we could have done, and it kept us sane in that city.