Day Fourteen - Udaipur - the City Palace and a Tibetan market

Looking from the winter palace across to the summer palace

A decorated archway

Our city palace guide with film star good looks!

So much detailled decoration to gaze at

A lattice window

Fantastic painting - with just one hair from a squirrel's tail

A day when I took 60 pictures. 

In the morning we visited the huge City Palace on the shores of Lake Pichola. The Lake Palace was where the ruler and his family decamped to for the summer months and there were boat rides out there but I was too entranced by the decorative walls, windows and ceilings of the larger palace on the shore.

There were rooms of coloured glass and intricately painted ceilings. Artists' finely painted scenes of  life as it was then. I'll do another post just of pictures to show you these things.

We were shown round by the impossibly handsome man pictured. Maybe he acted as guide round the City Palace when not starring in Bollywood movies !?

Each room inside the palace was a colourful thing of wonder, and outside there were guards on horseback dressed in red and orange and holding flags. There was also an enormous 'portable cage for trapping and keeping tigers.' 

This place is a feast for the imagination. There was a picture of an indoor pool containing crocodiles...and a room containing just cages for carrier pigeons.

All too soon we had to move on to the Jagdish white marble temple nearby dedicated to Lord Vishnu, preserver of the universe. Here for the first time we heard loud chanting and singing...

After lunch at the hotel we drove back into the town centre. It was the last day and still I hadn't got any cotton fabrics. We were taken to a plush building and were asked to sit down to listen to a talk by the textile house owner. I had a creeping sense of deja vu  (see Day Eleven) and quietly myself and several others left the building.

We had spotted a Tibetan market from the coach and here, at last I found the simple printed cottons I had been hoping for.

 I bought several of the largest size of long nightdresses in assorted prints and colours for between £2 and £4 each knowing that there here was lots of fabric that could be re-used.

 Feeling very happy we walked down the narrow shopping streets and found handmade banana paper and, best of all, some stunning beaded ribbons, that I am now wishing I'd bought more of. (pictures soon)