Udaipur
In the morning on 6/14, we visited
the city palace in Udaipur. The most interesting decorations in the palace were
painted peacocks that adorned doorways and peacock mosaics made of miniscule
fragments of glass. Our guide at the palace was a little misinformed about
certain subjects related to Indian history and expressed his opinions about
other “scientific” facts. One such fact was that women “vomit up their emotions,”
whereas men do not. Professor Ganguly told us to only listen to the guide if he
was telling us facts about the palace, otherwise ignore him.
For lunch a group of around 10 of
us went downtown to walk around. We had had a lot of thali recently, so we were
looking for something new. I spotted a place called “The Egg World,” a
miniscule store front only big enough to store a cooler with drinks; all the
cooking happened in front of the building on the sidewalk. I led the group
across a busy street to the restaurant, where we proceeded to look at the menu
for a while, not knowing what any of the items were. I was not getting a “delicious”
vibe from the look of the place, so I walked half a block away to where a man
with a street cart was selling some sort of potato dish. I learned later that
it was called Aloo Tikki, potato with chickpeas and a sweet sauce. I ordered by
simply walking up to him and asking for one, pointing at a potato patty. I
showed off my food to the group, many of whom decided to get their own after
trying mine. While I had been away, a few students ordered egg rice, similar to
spicy fried rice, from Egg World. Other food from egg world included an omelet
with bread inside—this looked really good but I was not hungry enough to try
it. Looking for something to drink, I did find a juice stand down the road that
was serving some delicious mango juice. I asked the man if there was any water
in the juice and he responded “only mango.” I do not think my question was
clearly understood, as when I ordered a second I got to watch him make a new
batch. One blender full of juice consisted of three mangos, a couple large
scoops of yogurt, and approximately two cups of sugar. No wonder it tasted so
good!
In the afternoon we had an
academic session with Professor Majumder from the University of Burdwan. He
spoke about energy economics and compared the emissions of many prominent countries.
The next morning, 6/15, we continued Professor Majumder’s lecture and had some
hands-on programming lessons led by Udit, the graduate student TA. We had a
good lunch at a restaurant near our hotel, relaxed for a few hours, then took a
boat ride on Udaipur Lake. There is an old palace, now a fancy restaurant, in
the middle of the lake where the James Bond film Octopussy was shot. We were
informed of this fact many, many times while in Udaipur. When we got off the
boat, we noticed hundreds of bats hanging in the mango trees by the lake. These
bats were not small bats, but had bodies the size of small cats and wingspans
of over two feet! They were mostly sleeping in the trees, but a few had woken
up and were beginning to fly around. They were very cool to watch, even though
they were a bit scary because of their size.
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