The Pukka Place

"That Pukka Place" will be the name of the gust house we eventually have...until then we are warming up the name at our place.

Accomodation is hard to find in Pushkar, Ramsingh thought he had found us a 3 room flat , which sounded OK but then it was not going to be ready for 2 months [being Indian time - that could suggest quite a while!]

The owner did have an old hotel that was half a building site we could have that if we liked?

Interesting idea, worth a look...it is fantastic [OK, yes it is half a building site bit the space we can have is large and light and airy - all things I was concerned would not be possible in accomodation]
We have the only key and there will be no building whilst we are here...

so we said yes please! It has possibilities, even though it was thick with dust when we arrived it was pretty clean.

We have 2 rooms on the bottom floor and this large central space, a kitchen and an upsatirs room we will use as a bedroom for visitors.

Truely, I feel we were very lucky and the place is rather quirky, the view from the roof is fabulous and we are on the edge of Pushkar so fairly quiet in the night, just the gentle sound of continous chanting from a nearby temple.

As we started to clean, I reaslised we have lovely salmon pink marble floors and green marble kitchen benches.

An amazing feature of our kitchen is a rather large rock in the middle of the floor.

Why you might ask?...I do wonder too,

when I asked if we might move it I was told no it is important it stays right there on the door to the water storage tank underneath.

So either I have a large water tank monster that lives under there and it is to keep him in, or Parveen is afraid I might try and jump in for a swim.

Parveen is a good Rajasthani man and does not swim.

Even when we have been by the beach down South I have not been able to even tempt him close enough to the water to get his feet wet!

I once told him of an Australian tradition of waiting until the middle of the night and you rip all your clothes off and go skinny dipping- he looked terrified.

Even though he is very proper I think it was the idea of water rather than running around naked that was the biggest worry to him.

Actually, I think he thought I was pulling his leg about the naked bit until we were in Vietnam talking to some Swiss travellers who had just spent a night on a boat on Halong Bay...they were sharing with a group of Australians and commented on how funny and nosiy they were AND that in the middle of the night thaey all stripped off and jumped off the boat to swim. Parveen's eyes nearly popped -it was true it was not just a story I was teasing him with. ha ha

India is amazing...some simple things can take forever to happen and other things happen quicker than you can say Jack Robinson[or what ever the expression is]

First day at the house and we head over to Ajmer for some furniture and stuff.

A fridge- what colour would you like- all the same cost so we chose cherry red...I asked how many weeks until delivery and every one looked at me like I was crazy...how long does it take to drive home? Same day delivery...anything in Australia takes for ever! Here is the guy with our little cherry red fridge, TV, mattresses etc, etc literally 2 hours after we got home! As we are only renting the place I did not want to spend to much money on it...even though it seems we have carte blanche to do what ever we wish....

Once we had scrubbed the kitchen down in the morning light I thought it just looked too grotty, so I asked if we could consider giving it a lick of paint?
I went upstairs for a shower and came down to find this gentleman there with a paint chart- what colour did I want? By the evening of our second day at home we had the kitchen painted for a total cost of about $25...trades men the world over take heed!

End of the day good to chill out, Ramsingh and Parveen.

Pushkar [ and most of India]does not have rubbish collection- boy! does that make you start to realise what is going in the bin and then what do you do with it?...but a story for another day..

This is Parveen just straight outside our front door to the right, we can keep a local family of pigs happy with the vegetables scraps at least!