More Jodhpur (Sam)

(Sam)  Well today was a very tiring day, my dad and I headed out at 8:30 to send a parcel, have breakfast and make train reservations. We took a rickshaw to the post office, weighed our parcel inside to make sure it was not over 20 kilos, (thanks Rey, it was only 8), then went to find a tailor to make a bag for our parcel. We found one quite quickly and sat in his shop for 30 minutes while he put the stuff in a box, covered the box with cloth and put wax on the seams. It was a nice wait, with an endless supply of chai and a good view of the street. From our seat, we could see 2 men bathing on the sidewalk, 3 cooks cooking breakfast, numerous people washing dishes, 3 guys peeling potatoes on red plastic chairs in the middle of the road, one kid squeegying the floor of a restaurant, then the benches, then the tables and 2 guys with a pile of re-bar breaking each one in half with a sledge hammer and a makeshift anvil. Back to the story, I forgot to mention that we had tried to ask the price, but the parcel packer had to mesure it in the box first. He never did give us a quote and by the time we noticed he was putting on the cloth and there was no going back. He charged 500 rupees, that's 12 dollars, or one night in a hotel room. There was little we could do and we didn't want a hassle so we just gave up and paid him, after all 12 bucks isn't exactly going to put us in debt. Dad was quite annoyed and using all sorts of words that may not be appropriate for some readers, I was hoping that no rickshaw drivers approached us because Dad may have strangled them. He said that 500 rupees didn't bother him he just didn't want to tell Mom. We went back to the post office, got a form to fill out and were then told to go down the street and get it photo-copied, anyways, long story short, we walked for a mile, eat breakfast, walked 500m more then found a photo-copy place, walked back, learnt that there was one across the street, made the post office guy accidentaly pull out his keyboard drawer and drop it on the floor looking for a sharpie, got a sharpie from some American behind us, and sent the parcel. We went to train station and then walked down an alley/garbage dump/toilet to the reservation office which was right beside the post office, waited in line for 30 minutes and got 4 wait list tickets to Jaipur.

Later that afternoon, we went to Vaswant Thada, a marble mauseleum for some Maharaja. The location was suberb and the views to Mehrangarh and the rest of the city were great. The building itself was cool and the gardens were very tranquil, in some places the sun was glowing through the marble walls and we had fun putting our hands on it and then the people inside could see our handprint in the wall.

That evening we had supper on the street. We started by going to the Omlette Man, a famous Jodhpur restaurant with a floor space of about 1.5 square metres. He cooks on a tiny kerosene stove and has a stack of eggs beside him. He has two benches and a table made out of an egg crate and there is always a line up of people. He has a stack of books full of testimonials and a newspaper article to boot. The masala cheese omlette was superb and I'm afraid I will never again be satisfied with an omlette. Because an omlette was not quite enough food for supper, we walked down the road to a cart with a guy cooking up a variety of different things. I told him we wanted something spicy for 20 rupees, he asked how spicy, so we decided just to have fun and go all the way. We told him to make “Indian Spicy”. While he was shaking the chili on I saw him turn to his friend and grin and then turn back and shake a bit more on before stopping. It turns out it was some sort of potato and deep fried spinach in sweet yoghurt, it was very spicy but due to the sweet yoghurt it was still edible, in fact we ordered another.