This morning we went on a two-hour guided walk through Hyderabad's old city. We had to get up earlier that we would have liked (for a Sunday) in order to be downtown by 7:00am. The meeting spot was Charminar, the four-hundred-year old granite arch in the center of town. The tickets cost Rs 50 (about $1.20) and included, at the end of the tour, a breakfast of idlis and coconut chutney, served in an off-limits area of the Nizam's palace. Our group of twenty or so also had an escort of two "Tourist Police," who stopped traffic with their whistles every time we needed to cross the road.
The neighborhood we walked through was predominantly Muslim. Note the goat in the foreground. (Incidentally, this goat recited several verses of the Koran for me, in Arabic, but did not know what they meant.)
Around 9:00am, the guide led us through a gate into a vast sandlot filled with boys playing cricket. I still don't understand the rules of cricket, so it felt like chaos. Right under the stairs we were standing on when I took this picture was a doorway marked "Mohammed Wachman." A man with a handlebar mustache stood outside the door, hands on hips.
The tour ended at Chowahalla Palace, the seat of the Nizam's government from the mid-eighteenth-century until Hyderabad joined independent India in 1948. He had four palaces, seven windows, four mosques, etc etc (all the palace/fort stuff runs together after a while). I was just impressed with how green they kept the grass. The natural color of the ground around here is cinnamon-brown.
We capped the morning with a trip to one of the hundreds of bangle shops in the area. Imagine a store the size of Claire's Accessories selling nothing but brightly-colored bracelets, floor to ceiling. The attendant runs around like mad, picking them off the wall, measuring your wrist, and flipping them back and forth in his hands to create custom color combinations. The bangles are sold by the dozen. Most Indian women around here own at least a few hundred, and probably more. Our driver says that his wife wears two colors at a time--one color completely covering the left forearm, the other covering the right.
