Palaces Everywhere!

These elephants are in the entrance courtyard for the City Palace. These are figures created to display a "friendly" battle between two elephants to develop the elephants' abilities and their strength as well as to train their handlers.

The City Palace is huge. It must be almost a mile long.??. The current royal family lives at one end. The dynasty is over 1800 years old. So, earlier generations have occupied the middle of the Palace or the nearer end where these elephants are training.

So this is the outside courtyard of the City Palace. The museum is on the right and we will go in there. The royal family apartments are further down on the right.

In the museum, there were many displays of armor from the 1500s. There was a huge battle, displayed in the painting below.

There are many other fascinating displays, but over time the artistic displays of silver, jewelry and glass became the dominant theme of the museum.

After visiting the Palace, we stopped at a local craftsman. Our museum guide "guided" us to this shop. The salespeople first showed us paintings. Then the front guy showed us his silver elephants. While these were beautiful, it was hard to gauge the value. And given the current market volatility globally, who knows where silver prices are headed. We passed.

Now it was getting dark and time to head back to the hotel. We had a car and driver to take us to Jaipur the next morning. That was a seven-hour drive and we knew we had to get fed and then rest!

Ciao!

Brio