Rajasthan- Day 9- Jaipur

After we finally got our act together in the morning, we hopped into rickshaws and headed for the City Palace. Our rickshaw drivers were friends and we had friendly races and banter between the dueling rickshaws. We finally arrived, paid our "foreigner admittance" fee (which is always almost tenfold the Indian fee) to gain entrance into the City Palace. The Palace was a bit underwhelming after some of the sights we had seen along our journey, and I was getting a bit tired of touring through old buildings. We all split ways to walk around and agreed to meet back at the main gate. I finished rather early, and sat on a bench near the gate monkey and people watching (the monkeys were more interesting), and the palace was quite crowded.

After the City Palace, we headed over to the king's Astronomical Observatory, an outside observatory filled with archaic astronomy tools. It was interesting, but mainly under repair and sort of resembled a crumbling sculpture garden. Also, it was poorly documented, so we were left clueless of a majority of the instruments. After this, I was completely "toured out" and decided to hop a rickshaw back to the guest house. After much negotiation (none of the rickshaws in Rajasthan have meters, I'm really glad the ones in Mumbai do, as it saves a lot of headaches on haggling), the rickshaw driver agreed to take me back and chatted a mile a minute on the short journey back. He was impressed with my Hindi, and wanted to tell me about some of his clients. He then insisted I sit in the rickshaw an extra five minutes to look at his business card collection from around the world, and then he showed me different phone numbers and text messages from foreigners. Finally I was able to break loose as I said my "boyfriend" (which he asked about, like all other Indians, probably looking for a greencard) was waiting for me.

I sat around and finished my book Teacher Man by Frank McCourt, and we were meeting at 7 pm to go to Om restaurant which is a revolving restaurant that rests atop Jaipur. The dinner was good, and the view was spectacular. It was nice to take in the city night life without the noises, and we had a panoramic view of the fireworks and Diwali lights. When we finished dinner, we took bicycle rickshaws back to the guest house (we walked there), and I felt bad for the rickshaw as a skinny little guy attempted to bicycle two girls back to our guest house, I felt like I should get out and help push, but eventually we started going downhill and his job became a lot easier.

I was tired, and went to bed relatively early after reading an US Weekly that one of the last American tourists had left behind about a month ago. I slept horribly, however, worried about whether or not we would make it back on the train tomorrow since at that point we had four unconfirmed tickets.