In Jaipur I hired a taxi driver to take me to a hotel out of the guide book. There was no problem getting a room, and though it's not as nice as my Delhi room - no hot water and I have to supply my own padlock - it's adequate and it costs a tenth the price. After checking in I hung out in the sun and read up - it's not only sunny - it's hot here!

Around noon I hired a rickshaw driver to take me to Hawa Mahal (the Wind Palace) in the walled city center. I'd been planning on just starting there and wandering around - I certainly wasn't going to pay to go in. But after seeing the graceful cascading lines of the facade I decided to go in. The lines remind me of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul - not for any architectural resemblance, but just of the way the building seems to flow. I wandered around the ruins and took a lot of photos both with my SLR and my new digital camera.

After leaving the Wind Palace I wandered around the street. I really like this place. It's not that there are no hassles, I was constantly having to turn down persistent rickshaw and tuktuk drivers, escape salespeople, and was usually followed around by a dozen kids. But people seem friendly and everyone lacks the hard predatory edge they had in Delhi. The city reminds me a lot of Dar es Salaam - maybe because of the heavy Indian influence there? It also reminds me of Aleppo (Syria) and some of the smaller cities in Morocco - it reminded me of so many places, I think because it's completely different from any other one place. The traffic was a solid mix of trucks, cars, tuktuks, mopeds, bicycles, and carts pulled by people, bikes, ox or camel - but somehow it seemed to work.

I finally gave in - I've tried to be good, but I was hungry and it smelled so good - I had a lunch of street food. All spicy, and most good - I'm curious to see how my stomach is tomorrow. And my eating there was amusing to many of the locals. After lunch I eventually found my way through the maze of the City Palace to Jantar Mantar (the observatory) and eighteenth century garden enclosure full of very precise astronomical instruments made mostly of marble. The whole thing feels like a delightful sculpture garden. The most impressive device is the large Samrat Yantra - a sundial that is nearly a hundred feet tall and accurate to within two seconds! The big sundial was closed, but the views of the palace from some of the other structures (still several stories tall) were well worthwhile.

The afternoon light on one of the more beautiful parts of the palace intrigued me so I decided to go into the City Palace as well. The palace complex was more of the same, and really not even as good as the Wind Palace, the observatory, or any of several dozen little courtyard areas off the street - except for the beautiful Chandra Mahal (Moon Palace). It was closed so I couldn't go in it, but the golden light on it's pale surface contrasted with the deep red color of the surrounding structures was sublime - and I have plenty of photos to prove it.

When I left the palace complex I wandered down some random streets until I came upon a boy energetically flying a kite. When I stopped to watch I realized that I could see several dozen of little kites in the sky - flown from neighboring streets, the top of walls, roofs, and even a balcony - they were everywhere. Then I also noticed that the trees on the streets were dressed in the remains of the kites they had snagged. One tree held the remains of what must have been several hundred kites.

I caught a tuktuk back to the guest house as I couldn't bear the thought of entering the heavy traffic again in an unpowered rickshaw. Back in my room I edited the seventy or eighty digital photos I took down to thirty-five keepers. I had dinner then tried to stay up reading, but by ten o'clock I was really starting to feel rundown.