Udaipur, less quickly

Someone asked me for my favorite part of the trip so far. Well, it’s hard to say hands down that it was my favorite, but let me tell you a bit more about the few days I spent in Udaipur. By the end of my first night there, I’d added it to the list of my favorite places in the world. I sat on the edge of a restaurant that set on the edge of the lake and had a panoramic view of both the City Palace, on land, and the Lake Palace, on water. And it reminded me of an almost medieval version of Hong Kong harbour, and that made me happy. I asked one of the waiters whether you could walk along the waterfront by the City Palace, where I could see streetlamps, and he said you could, and that made me happy, too. Water and waterfront walks at night often propel places to the tops of my lists.

The next day, I sought out that waterfront, and I found it, but I also found that you had to pay an entry fee to walk part of it (which I did), and that you had to be a guest at a couple super-exclusive hotels to walk the rest of it (which I wasn’t). I walked as far as I could until a security guard turned me back, and when I asked where the nearest public waterfront area was, he said it was another hour’s walk away. Behind him lounged rich-looking folk with nice suitcases being carried onto their private ferries to the Lake Palace Hotel. I walked out past the only driveway with Benzes that I’ve seen in India so far.

So Udaipur fell off the list of my favorite places in the world. But it’s still pretty gorgeous. That night I sat in the open terrace of the restaurant at the top of my hotel, and I took a blanket from my room and drank a beer while typing out some thoughts, including the seeds of these. I listened to the music (and the emcee) from a lavish wedding going on at Jagmandir Island, and the hotel manager came up and chatted with me for an hour about his life and girlfriend back home in Jaipur, about my iPhone, and about how he was nicknamed Ricky after the Australian cricketer Ricky Ponting.

I spent the next day doing things I’d never done before, not in India, not on any trip, not anywhere. I took a cooking class in the morning, and a painting class in the afternoon. The cooking class was interesting and entertaining, and also kind of delicious. The painting class wasn’t any of those, but before I knew it, I had spent three hours imitating a small painting of an elephant and if I may say so, it came out pretty good. It was strangely relaxing. I couldn’t believe I had spent so much time just focusing on this little rectangle of a picture, dabbing awkward brush strokes on a trunk here and a tail there, almost ruining it all with my inability to paint a straight border before I got the teacher to rescue it. As I wrote in the teacher’s guestbook when I finished, it was just the right way to while away my last few hours in Udaipur.