Four Palaces in One Day

Gem Palace

Typical Jaipur Street 

Bullock Cart

Raj Palace

Pool at Raj Palace

The all important Raj Palace Bar

Outdoor Literary Party at Rambaug Palace

Fireworks Announcing Dinner is Served

We talked to John in the hospital several times today. He is feeling a little better. The doctors don’t seem to know exactly what the infection is; but the medicine he is getting seems to be working. If you want to email him: johnNsf@gmail.com.

When we got up we decided that we really wanted to move from the Samode Haveli. We have stayed there many times during our trips to Jaipur and but alas things had changed. They reconfigured the Haveli moving the restaurant to a distant building and basically making the area where we were staying a waste land. The wifi, which I require to write the blog, was still the one thing that had not changed – slow, unreliable and you had to be outdoors to use it. It still sucked. It was time to move on. Searching for hotels, we found the Raj Palace would more than meet our needs. We had Vijay drive us over to the hotel we looked at the room and grounds and decided this was the Palace for us. It was a real palace. It apparently was built of marble by the Raj (King) to last. It had wifi. I practiced my bargaining skills in negotiating a room rate.

After moving our luggage from the Samode to the Raj Palace we went to our second palace of the day: The Diggi Palace. This is the site of the Jaipur Literary Festival. We needed to pick-up our passes for the event. We walked through the venue and like a typical Indian Wedding, it looked like it would never be ready. Workers were scampering everywhere trying to complete the construction. However, I am sure they will pull it together and be ready for the hoards of people tomorrow.

After picking up our credentials we went to our third palace of the day. Gem Palace is world famous for it jewelry. Doesn’t Cathy look smashing? After a bit more shopping, it was back to the Raj Palace. We explored our marble clad palace beautiful grounds, fabulous swimming pool, great bar, and then prepared for dinner.

We were to attend an outdoor dinner party for the authors and delegates (that be us – fancy name for the fact we paid for tickets to this free event). This was held at our fourth palace of the day: The Rambaug Palace. This Palace is where the Maharaja of Jaipur lived. Suffice to say he lived very well.

It was cold, but no one seemed to care. It was an amazing night, exactly as I hoped it would be. I don’t like large parties, and always find it difficult to just start up a conversation with strangers. This was a party of strangers and everyone sort of simultaneously knew the trick was to walk up to anyone and say: Hi, why are you here?

That was to be our plan, so we grabbed a glass of wine, and sat down. So much for our plan, we just sat alone. As soon as we did, a big man walked over to us looked at us and said: Hi, why are you here? We replied we like books, why are you here? I am speaking at the conference about war - he told us. We asked him what if anything he had written. He replied he is the author of: The Orphan Master’s Son. This book about North Korean prison camps, won Adam Johnson the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2013. Both Cathy and I had read the book and loved it. It is amazingly emotional, and how this jovial author could be the writer amazes me. We asked this big white dude from San Francisco how he happened to write a story in the voice of a North Korean Prisoner. He told us at length about his writing journey. Another Pulitzer prize winner, Gilbert King winner for the book: Devil in the Grove: “Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America” walked over and joined us. Eventually Adam Johnson drifted away and the three of us remained. So I asked Gilbert, how he came to write about this obscure period of Thurgood Marshall’s life. He told us how he was a photographer and had many books published, at one point the person that was writing the words for his book of photography dropped out and he stepped in and wrote his own text. He had become a writer. He then proceeded to tell us how he discovered the story of the corrupt southern Sherriff, and how Thurgood Marshall was able to assist a wrongly accused black man. This was the start of Thurgood’s career trajectory that led him to the Supreme Court. The Sherriff was such a bad guy, and yet so colorful, he will be the subject of his next book.

We were getting the hang of it. Just walk up to someone and start a conversation. At one point we sat down and VS Naipaul, a Nobel Prize winner, was sitting in a wheel chair across from us. We didn’t start a conversation with him, but I am sure we could have.

All of a sudden the sky above us was illuminated with fireworks. One after another they loudly exploded above our heads. We knew they had just announced in their not so subtle way: Dinner was served. There were huge buffets of both Indian and Western Food. After selecting our food we sat down at a round table, and asked the man next to us: Hi, why are you here? He was from the happiest place on earth: Bhutan, where 700,000 Bhutanese live sandwiched between the billion plus Indians and the billion plus Chinese. He talked at length of how their Buddhist Culture has kept them free and independent. We look forward to hearing him at the Festival.

We were getting cold, we had said enough: Hi, why are you here, and felt it was time to leave. Our driver, Vijay, picked us up and returned us to our Palace, where we had night caps in their bar and went to sleep, ready for the festival to begin.