It’s my birthday and I wake up to a power outage – something that would happen regularly over the next couple weeks. I also happen to share the same birthday as India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

I decide to do some sightseeing and make my way to the very hectic city center of Jaipur. This is the historic area surrounded by pink walls giving Jaipur the nickname ‘the pink city’ or गुलाबी नगर in Hindi.

Everyday I travel by auto rickshaw (sometimes called its Onomatopoeia name ‘tuk-tuk’). With elephants, camels, bullock carts, motorbikes, cows and cars all sharing the road, Jaipur has some serious traffic gridlock. I climbed up to the top of the ‘heaven piercing Minaret’ for views all over Jaipur.

Here’s a gallery of the views from up top. You can see the myriad means of transport on the roads.

There was even an article in the newspaper about the really bad traffic, complete with a picture including an elephant stuck in the gridlock.

After the minaret lookout, I went to Jantar Mantar जन्तर मन्तर, an astronomy observatory with tons of huge astronomy instruments built in 1738. There’s an excellent audio tour that comes with headphones that offers very detailed and interesting info.

The pic above is of a huge sundial, used to tell time by the shadow cast by the sun.

From here I went to a much newer site, the Birla Mandir बिड़ला मन्दिर.

The Birla family is very wealthy (this temple is dedicated to Lakshmi लक्ष्मी, the goddess of wealth) and they build massive temples all over India. This one in Jaipur is all gleaming marble and beautifully sculpted statues and carvings everywhere.

Weddings शादी are major affairs in India, with guest lists that routinely hit 1,000 and are huge business. Horses and bands are needed and you can routinely see them on the streets making their way to an event.