Jaipur City Palace

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Jan 26, 2007 Part 2

Our first tourist stop was the City Palace. It was built by Marharaja Jai Singh II a long long time ago - I don’t remember the dates. And Marharaja royalty still lives in parts of the palace today. We didn’t hire a tour guide here, but I’ll do my best to try to explain what I saw.

City Palace is in the middle of the old part of Jaipur. We drove through a very tall, but very thin arched gateway to get to the parking area. It was barely big enough for 2 cars to fit through with just a few inches to spare on either side, but hell in India that’s PLENTY of room, so our driver plowed right through.

He parked and Michele and I set out for the palace. In the parking lot were many vendors selling their wares, fruits, grains, trinkets, etc. There were also a lot of very poor old people just sleeping in the dirt and again more beggar children running about.

We had to purchase tickets to get in. Locals are charge one price and foreigners are charged a much higher price. (I later found that this pricing system applies to virtually everything in India.) We also had to pay a second fee because we were taking cameras into the palace. Video cameras were forbidden but still cameras were OK. Of course my digital camera is capable of video as are all most all digital cameras and cell phones these days, but it didn’t seem to change the policy for people that had video cameras.

The fist picture is a picture of the entry hall. It was huge and features the pink sandstone walls for which Jaipur is so famous. A massive chandelier hung from the ceiling and now had electricity running to it. They seem to be completely comfortable making certain modifications to their historical monuments - like electrifying a chandelier.

There were 2 enormous silver pots in the entry hall. One of the tourists said that they were listed in the Genius Book of World Records, but I don’t know if that’s true or not. I had Michele take my picture with two of the guards in front of them. Guess what?! The palace guards turned out to be tip hounds. They followed me saying, ‘Tip, tip, tip’ until I gave in and offered them a tip. But because they made me mad, I just offered them a 2 rupee coin. Well that pissed them off and they refused to take it. I didn’t care; I just put the coin back in my pocketed and walked off.

The palace has many many rooms and courtyards. The next picture is from one of the courtyards looking back at a passage way between rooms. It is pure carved marble. Notice the elephant statues. They were carved from a single piece of marble. Beautiful. The next picture is of an archway above a doorway. It was decorated in peacock carvings and the paintings were in pretty light blue and green pastels.

Inside the palace were a few museum areas. One of them contained old palace carriages. They were interesting. Some had wheels; others were intended to be carried by humans. But more interesting were the craftsmen who were working with sewing machines right there in the museum. They appeared to be repairing silks from the carriages, but I can’t imagine that they do that type of work out in the open everyday for the tourists with a sewing machine. So I think it was a demonstration, but I’m not sure of what.

I mentioned earlier that Marharaji still live in the palace. The taller white colored building in the background of the next photo is the current personal residence and is off limits to the public. Pretty nice pad, don’t ya think?

The public can also rent out areas in the palace for banquets or weddings and such. This is a picture of one of the courtyards set up for a public banquet. The thing that struck me about this was the huge carpets rolled out to cover the courtyard wall-to-wall. I can’t even begin to guess how long they were… 100’s of feet probably.

After the City Palace we headed next door to a very old outdoor astronomical park called Jantar Mantar.

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