Udaipur - If

Udaipur is architecturally, culturally, climatically, religiously and scenically what I always imagined India to be. The many rectangular houses with their roof terraces stand next to and inside each other in a disordered manner and at different heights. The windows and railings are all decorated with flourishes that are reminiscent of floating plants and make the houses aesthetic. The monkeys jump from roof to roof between the eggshell-white buildings and you can always see people doing their laundry or Muslims doing their prayers while in the distance traditional Indian music can be heard from one of the Shiva or Rhama temples. From the roof of the hostel you could see the huge Lake Pichola, the south of the city, the city palace and in the distance you could watch the sun slowly setting behind the mountain ranges in the evening. Most evenings we sat with the other travelers, drank free chai, chatted and watched the miracle of the disappearing sun.

I've never been to a place where there were so many Caucasian backpackers and here, of all places, I couldn't really connect with any of the travelers or find the right connection. To my surprise, I quickly realized that I didn't think it was a bad thing and that I would rather enjoy the city as a whole than force myself to integrate. Nevertheless, I took part in a sunrise tour where we rode scooters up the mountains and watched the previous evening's spectacle, only in reverse. In the afternoon I strolled through the city and the huge city palace, slept a lot in the sun and continued reading Momo.

In the evening I had a very strange/interesting conversation with a super nice stoned emigrant from Canada. He was reading a book on the history of finance at the time and was a strong supporter of the Bitcoin community. As we talked longer about the advantages and disadvantages of the currency, we realized more and more that we had very different world views. I noted that he was convinced that a large, narcissistic power would take away people's freedom in a few years and that the only way to prevent it was to invest in the independent Bitcoin. His moral principles, which were so important to him at the beginning, all fell apart during our conversation. He wants capitalism and liberalism, not giving up his meat, alcohol, tobacco or grass, not paying taxes, going on vacation as he pleases and becoming rich, but at the same time living in a welfare state with equality. He then quickly realized that these opposites cannot really be combined and instead of relying on his own renunciation and adaptation, he preferred to quickly turn his moral principles around 180°. Then he wanted a two-class society and those who were unlucky enough to end up as workers were just unlucky.

It was very strange because he didn't actually talk or argue like an uneducated or unintelligent person and he was extremely nice. Nevertheless, his argument had so many contradictions and massive moral problems that it was simply impossible to appeal to any kind of reason or social consciousness. When he then started telling me that my "very important test esterone, which is so incredibly important for social (NOT biological) masculinity, is being lost through my vegetarian lifestyle and the many more chemical processes that are associated with it", I would have asked him I prefer to give a lecture on the hypothalamic-pituitary-hormone circuit, on the processes of digestion of carbohydrates, fats and proteins and on the etiology of inferiority complexes. But then I decided against it due to the poor prognosis regarding the chances of success of my intention with the lecture. Whenever someone tells me that chemical processes are unhealthy or bad, deep inside my chemistry professor's voice cramps and hopelessness spreads. (Maybe it sounds a bit harsh, but it's true.) I don't go to people with my non-existent knowledge of the financial system, physics, art history or marketing and make fundamentally wrong statements with a conviction that is difficult to distinguish from fanaticism ...Well, yeah... So much for that.

Two nice English women then invited me to dinner and we had a very fun and delicious evening in a restaurant that could only be reached through a labyrinth of private rooms and stair systems, so that you felt as if you had committed multiple trespasses and had lost your bedroom saw at least two people. So I met two people with whom I clicked and felt comfortable. The next morning we went to breakfast in an even better mood and rented two scooters with which we explored the mountainous landscape of Udaipur. Then you stopped here in the middle of nowhere to drink a chai and play a game of Snake on his stone-age keypad phone with the owner, who of course spoke zero English, or there to go pee in the ruins of abandoned villages. When we stopped in an isolated village because Google Maps wanted to sell us that there really was a waterfall in the bone-dry landscape, all the children ran after us curiously and then ran away laughing. We cuddled with the cats, goats, cows and of course didn't find a waterfall.

The landscape was reminiscent of photos of some Mars rovar, with dried grass and bushes standing everywhere on the orange rocks. Even though each mountain looked individual and at first you couldn't see any system behind its location, I then noticed that the mountains, although separated by valleys, ran through the landscape in huge, long lines or ridges. This order, which was not immediately noticeable, was in direct contrast to the initially noticeable disorder and made the already fascinating sight even more extraplanetary. When you saw small villages and rudimentary houses in the distance on the mountain slopes, my head became more and more confused and I stopped thinking about comparisons or reasons for the sight and just enjoyed it.