Amber fort and Jaipur

This was a few weeks ago (I'm a bit behind), but we took an elephant up the path to the Amber Fort (just outside Jaipur). It was included with our tour, otherwise I'm not sure we would have done it. We're cheap. Also I doubt India's ability to take care of animals in a manner that does not cause me to flinch, which is what we did every time our elephant driver smacked the poor old slow elephant in front of us trying to get him to move faster. The poor guy has a sore on his backside from all the beatings. He was a 70 year old elephant! STOP BEATING HIM. When we got off the driver tried to talk us into giving him a tip, but we just jumped down the stairs and ran away. Later we had to hide a behind a wall going back down so he wouldn't see us. We're very Canadian...

The fort was alright, very full of little passage ways and stairs. It's been very heavily renovated, I doubt it originally has light switches in every room. They aren't really into "authentic" here. I would have enjoyed it a lot more, but I was grumpy. I am usually grumpy. Poor Derek.

There's an awesome old theater in Jaipur that is apparently well known, so we caught a Bollywood movie there. It wasn't in English, but Bollywood movies tend to be very simple with formulaic plots and lot of music, so it didn't matter. They're also very long, three hours, but they do give you an intermission.


It was gorgeous inside, like a really fancy cruise boat. The ceiling in the theatre was heavily decorated with long flowing scalloped ceiling carving things (I have a BFA! woo). Everyone chats, cheers, whistles, answers cellphones, does whatever throughout the movie. It's a much better movie experience. If I want to sit in a dark room and not move or make any noise, I don't need to pay 20 bucks. It's a large part about why I never want to watch movies back home, I'm just too ADD for that.

Our driver came with us, and I have to say, he is the worst translator ever. For the most part the movie was really obvious about what was going on, but whenever we were confused and asked him what just happened he'd be like "they are mad". Yes... I can see that, but WHY. We saw Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (A Match Made by God), thankfully the wiki article cleared things up. It was good, I would recommend it is you are interested in Bollywood movies. I've seen a few others and they were unwatchable with shockingly bad music. Like cheap Saturday morning cartoon level of quality.