7TH Sun. Udaipur, Rajasthan (Morning walk)

Whilst eating breakfast at the rooftop restaurant this morning a couple of parakeets swooped in and parked themselves on a spotlight and posed beautifully for a few minutes whilst I snapped away.   There is a huge flock of these birds spending much of their time in a large tree behind our hotel - they are extremely noisy but quite beautiful to watch

 Part of the 'Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' was filmed in Udaipur and there are pictures of some of the cast filmed at our hotel on the walls of the rooftop restaurant/bar.    David standing next to one of the pics

and here he is posed in roughly the same spot as the 'stars' of the film.   

We'd made no real plans for today other than to explore the local area.   We set forth after breakfast and I thought it would be fun to follow these two ladies as they seemed very positive about where they were going with their loaded baskets

They soon disappeared in a busy side street so we just carried on wandering and I photographed whatever took my fancy.      We steered clear of the City Palace as there were loads of tourists being brought in by bus and that inevitably leads to loads of hawkers harassing passers-by and I really get fed up with being pestered

Lots of the buildings here are very tall and we figure this is because they open their rooftop areas as bars and restaurants with good views of the Lake Picholo

Street scenes.   The streets of Udaipur are very narrow with many junctions and 'blind' bends which leads to some interesting situations with cows parking themselves wherever they fancy and the usual mix of pedestrians, cyclists, tuk tuks and cars/vans ..... not for the faint hearted.

Here's a cow getting chased off from a local vendor's stall where it had been helping itself to some of the vegetables she was selling

Just as a change from street cows here are some street goats

Girls posing for the camera

David sampling Dagari - pure sugar much loved by the locals

This lovely lady was pumping water from a street pump and was happy to pose for me

Local metal workers making brass serving bowls - here he's hammering them into shape

and here they're being rubbed with various grades of sand to polish them

We stopped for cups of Masala Chai ... here's ours being made prior to being served in small terracota cups

Chai break

Back to the street scenes - they really are quite amazing

We then went back to the hotel for an hour so I could upload the photos onto the computer and resize them ... then we headed back out to cross to the other side of the lake to see what we could find there.