Christmas!

Jaipur.

Our sightseeing in Jaipur started at the City Palace. It is a large palace in the heart of the city and is currently inhabited by the son of the last Maharaja. It's also home to part of the Maharaja Sawai Mansingh II Museum which contains an amazing collection of carpets, paintings, photos, books and other crafts.

On entrance to the palace, we encountered a couple of cobras, which we gave a wide berth!


Belowis a picture of the Mubarak Mahal or Welcome Palace. It's a covered open area built for receiving and entertaining dignitaries.



Near the City Palace is the Hawa Mahar (Wind Palace). It is five stories high and only one room deep; a true facade. The rooms are designed to allow the ladies of the harem to observe the happenings down in the street without being seen. We took this picture the evening we pulled into Jaipur.

Qutb Minar.

On our trip to Jaipur, our first stop was just outside Delhi at a place called Qutb Minar. It's a World Heritage Monument site containing, among other things, the highest tower in India. This tower, built as a symbol of military might, was constructed in 1196 AD (!!) and rises 237 feet above the ground. The grounds contain a number of ancient structures including several mosques but it's the tower that your eyes continually return to. For better or worse, the interior of the tower is closed to visitors so we had to admire it from the ground.

India!

Meg and I just returned from a trip to India. She was there for two full weeks on business while I followed a bit later for pleasure. While there, we stayed in Noida outside New Delhi, we visited the Pink City of Jaipur by car, and we flew to Hyderabad (and it's high tech suburb HiTec City) in Southern India.

It was my first trip to India and it's safe to say I was overwhelmed. The vast numbers of very colorful people, the crazy roadways filled with everything from water buffalo and camels to modern SUVs, the extreme poverty of the streets juxtaposed with the extravagance of the temples and Hyderabad's High Tech City (Cyberabad), and of course the broad variety of wonderful food are but a few examples of the new experiences I had.

We were the recipients of tremendous hospitality from our hosts and without that, our experiences would not have been the same. Our thanks go out to all of them.

I’ll try to post more from the trip before long but right now I’m still trying to adjust from the long trip home and I think I need to take a nap. In the interim, I’ve included a picture from my first day of sightseeing in Delhi: the amazing Lotus Temple near sunset.