India trip part 10-A: Amer Fort, Amer (outside of Jaipur)
Amer Fort! This is the picture post I've been most looking forward to putting up because it was my favorite part of India. Gorgeous and amazing and it just really resonated with me somehow. There is lots to learn about this place, so here is the wiki page.
Amer is located outside of Jaipur, and was the capital of Rajasthan before the Maharaja moved to Jaipur due to water concerns. This fort was continually built upon from 1592-1727 (when the capital was moved.)
We hired a tourguide which was actually an extremely good idea. Not only did we learn a bunch, but he took LOTS of pictures of us! :D Facebook totally sapped the quality of them, so I'm uploading to photobucket, so these pictures are 800pixels long, so they are all under the cut. If that is too big for your screen 1. wth you have weird dimensions, 2. Press CTRL and the - sign at the same time to shrink everything for easier viewing.
Amer Fort behind us!
You can see another fort from this fort!
The enterance.
There is a goddess temple near the entrance. Our tourguide called her Kali but the wiki page calls her someone else, I don't know. But, he made us take our shoes off and then sent us in there, but didn't come with. It was slightly odd... and then the priest flagged us over and garland/tikka'd me, and as an afterthought, Thomas. I came out of the temple and our tourguide was impressed and said "Oh wah! that means that he felt the goddess move him when he saw you, it is a blessing!" No one else, even the white tourists had the garland that I could see. So I felt pretty special! In retrospect it kinda seems scammy (you go to india and you soon will also expect everything to be) but I didn't see any place for donations that they were trying to get out of me or anything. *shrug* It was a really nice garland, though, and reminded me of all the strings of them that women put in their hair in the movies so I wore it for the rest of the day. Thomas was embarassed though and took his off. Haha.
This is the audience hall where the emporer would hear the concerns of the common folk.
Gorgeous.
Gold paint!
Faded art
This trip got me SO interested in landscape architecture & gardens! City planning was mostly started by landscape architects, and I really could see how that was on this trip.
Good view of the city of Amer from here.
Hall of mirrors!
All that shiny is tiny pieces of mirror.
This! This upsets me that I can't remember the whole thing, but basically the tourguide put his hand over parts of the picture to show other parts that are hidden, parts of important symbolic animals. Like, cover the bug-part of the butterfly, and you see an elephant's ear. The flowers also are scorpions. There are rattlesnake tails in there somewhere. Argh, i wish i could remembe, I was so imporessed! I loved hidden symbolism like that.
Where the emporer and hsi family would sit.
Our tour guide knew all the good photo ops!