Lost in Jaipur

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After our complimentary toast and a luke warm shower we met our chauffeur who took us tp the train station. We were advised to arrive an hour early due to the 'commotion' at the train station and not to show anyone but the officials our train ticket; although I found the station not busy and not even the officials wanted to see our tickets. Things were running suspiciously smoothly!

We were in one of the sleeper carriages but each had three bunks to ourselves it was so quiet. There's no chance of going hungry either, every 10 mins someone walks through shouting 'chi!' (tea) - we also had a cheeky samosa.

When we arrived at Jaipur Jimmy, another rickshaw driver, greeted us off the train and took us to our next hotel, giving us his guestbook to read on the way!

Hotel Maharaja Plaza was even nicer than the last one with a big marble lobby and a pool (even if it is currently out of order).

Jimmy later picked us up and took us to the 'pink city' with his nephew, Lak, who his is teaching to drive and speak English. They bought us flower garlands and told us to walk up to the next round-about and take the left and he'd meet us there. However we took an earlier left at a cross-roads instead. I felt like a member of the royal family - down the small streets all the children wanted to shake our hands, adults all want to say hello too, there were even people hanging out of windows to wave and shout hi.
After not finding Jimmy we went back the way we came and after walking in circles for an hour gave up and tried to find another rickshaw, and then realised we didn't take the name of the hotel we were staying in. They asked if we had our room key, but we'd given that to reception, so they asked if we had our booking confirmation on email, which I did, only my phone died, which also had Jimmy's number on. You can imagine the slight panic we had. Just as we started guessing hotel names to a bunch of other drivers Lak turned up, panting - he'd been running up and down the road looking for us whilst Jimmy drove around. i thought they'd want to find us because we hadn't paid yet but they seemed genuinely relieved to find us and Jimmy said he knew we'd forget our hotel name.

After that we went to Jimmy's ciousins fabric shop full of Pashmina's and sari's etc. I had a beach dress made uin floral print for about 8GBP.

We then went to a rooftop restaurant where i had a smorgishboard of different curries and Marlies had a cashew nut curry - they really were the best curries I have ever tasted.
2 bottles of whiskey later (and still with the intention of driving us home) lak had confessed his love for me, however he didn't mind me having a boyfriend, he was willing to settle for just me teaching him how to kiss like a westerner, what a gent, thanks but no thanks. We also learnt that Jimmy's (muslim) marriage was arranged when he was 6 but didn't meet his wife until he was 21. he's also a self confessed cassanova and is pretty certain Marlies is going to come back to India for him.

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