The Blue City

Turns out The Blue City is way more blue than The Pink City was pink.

Let's rewind. I can't start there. I bloomin' loved Jodhpur and I can't quite put my finger on why.

Not sure if it's because of the ridiculously imposing back drop - there's a massive red rock in the middle of town with a big old fort on top.

Not sure if it's because it pretty much hits my romantic idyll of what an Indian city would look like.

But I loved it.

There were plenty of reasons to dislike it too. The sheer wilful incompetence of the AirIndia check in staff didn't help the trip start on apositive note. No tuktuk driver took me where I wanted to go for the price I should have paid. And I got bitten by something that made my hand swell up - don't know what but I now have fat knuckles. But I liked it. Liked it a lot; with its blueness and its rocks and its fort and its desert. The fort is crazy impressive now, when it was first built in the middle of desert nowhere it must have blown the proverbial minds.

In GetInMyFace news, they flavour their lassis with saffron in Jodhpur. That's a thing. Get in my face saffron lassi.

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In other news I tried to get a culture fix by going to Kingdom of Dreams, which is the closest thing Gurugram gets to a tourist attraction. I think it's fair to say that the production values of London theatre has given me unreasonably high expectations. I think it's also fair to say that Beyond Bollywood failed to meet them. Still it was colourful.