Day Three

Today we were planning to find an elephant to ride, but it turns out it's harder than we thought (Side note from Aditi: In Delhi. Only in Delhi. There are plenty of elephants elsewhere ie. Pune!) , so we scrapped the idea when we heard of a place called the Kingdom of Dreams. (For all those who have been to Dubai think of Global Village...but more legit.)

Kingdom of Dreams was
awesome! They had a whole section dedicated to food from 14 different States, it was a giant hall with a sky dome and a golden lotus entrance. They didn't have all of the states (not that I noticed this - that was all Aditi) but they had a good selection, including: Assam, Mumbai (Side note from Aditi: She means Maharashtra), Goa, Chennai, West Bengal, Kerala and 8 others, which for the life of me I can't remember the names of. They had traditional food from each place and it wasn't just the fancy traditional food, it was also the traditional street food and market foods. Each place has huge wall decorations pertaining to their state; it made for a lovely atmosphere.



Aside from the food, there were shops selling notebooks, jewellery, hanging ornaments etc from each state/area; there was even a stall where you could do pottery and get your name written in rice and then put inside various keychains. The stores were great but a little pricey considering what I've heard about the markets (Side note from Aditi: But this was a shmancy tourist place, not a market market). The food was also a little pricey (for India) but it was mainly whole meals as opposed to small tidbits to nibble on. I have to say this is TOTALLY worth seeing. If you're not a food person (Side note from Aditi: Who are you? Freaks.) then it's great for the atmosphere and the stores and the random dancers that come out every now and again. If you are a food person like Aditi and I, then this place is like a SparkNotes of India.

Left is the giant lotus that is the entrance to the food hall.

Right is me next to the sign for Mumbai, looking oh so impressed.

We ended up eating some indo-chinese, from the West Bengal restaurant, which as weird as it sounds was SO good but was also crazy hot; I could only eat a couple of pieces of chicken and then my mouth was on fire (and I consider myself ok at handling spice). From Goa we had a Komdi Masala, which was a chicken curry thing - very nice, not so spicy and they served with with lime that you could drizzle over which made it an incredible dish (Side note from Aditi: Laura totally got high on lime. It was strange) . We went back to this one restaurant twice because the food was just that good: Assam. They had these things called Momos (Side note from Aditi: MOMOS <3 ), which are kind of like dim sum but better- we ended up running back into the giant lotus hall to get more.

Aside from the food and stores there was also an upper floor, which housed things such as Tarot, palm reading and Numerology booth, as well as a massage parlour. We booked a show for 8pm so when 7pm came around we didn't have much to do as we'd been eating for 3 hours straight and didn't really want to spend too much more money. So we decided to get ourselves a massage to pass the time.

After the massage we just sort of ambled around until we could go into the theatre (Side note from Aditi: By this she means, we choreographed the macarena in time to Everybody Talks and ran to the security guards like birds). The general area around the lotus hall was also decorated and designed as a sort of tourist thing. There were: giant elephants; big gates with golden designs; a 100 foot long sleeping Buddha on the wall, and a couple of other spectacular things. (Side note from Aditi: Laura TOTALLY said 'na?' completely subconsciously and in context. It was awesome.)
















8 o'clock came around and we went into the theatre only to be greeted by thrones, velvet lined walls and the such; the whole place was done up to look like a palace or a royal residence. We couldn't resist the thrones.

The show we went to see was called 'Zangoora: The Gypsy Prince' and was basically what it's title suggests: a love story of a gypsy who is actually a prince but doesn't know it who falls in love with a princess who actually isn't. It claims to be the first Bollywood Broadway show and I can see why. There were people on strings pretending to be swimming through the ocean; there was the evil king who laughed manically at every chance he got (Side note from Aditi: This was an alarmingly good evil laugh. I feel like he must have been to evil laugh school or something); there were elaborate costumes; crazy dance numbers, and some very badly lip-synched singing. But all in all, it was awesome and definitely an experience. I do suggest if you ever go to the Kingdom of Dreams and see Zangoora that you get the headset that translate it into English. I watched the first half without it and I got the drift of it but was thoroughly lost on reasons for stuff happening. The headsets aren't great, because it's either pre-recorded or whoever is translating doesn't know anything about timing or just can't see the stage. I was often a whole segment ahead of the actors or behind them by a couple of lines, or in a couple of cases the lines actually weren't translated at all. Apart from the sketchy translations it was worth it. (Side note from Aditi: During the curtain-call, the dancers came out to the audience and one of them got Laura and I to start dancing with him. At first I thought it was just because we were clearly top audience members, but alas, they did it with a bunch of people. Still thoroughly enjoyable, though! Except he looked like he was dancing and we looked like we were spazzing. Standard.)

I'm off - we're going market shopping tomorrow!