The City Palace is again a former Maharadja's home converted into a museum. I have to admit that Udaipur's City Palace is nice, but Jodhpur's Meherangarh Fort is really hard to beat. However, the palace allows great views on the city and the hilly surroundings. From there, one has also great views on Lake Pichola and it's "floating" palaces. But, blimey, the lake is dry and the palaces stand in grassland. Apparently, the lake dried out after a few successive years of bad monsoons.
I then made may way to the "Edelweiss" coffee shop and got lost again in the streets of an Indian city. I asked a guy who - instead of answering - asked me back which country would be suffering from my absence. When he heard that I am Austrian, he greeted me with a warmly "Servus" and asked me whether I knew Andre Heller. This guy allegedly lives in Vienna and works as a chef in an Indian restaurant close to Westbahnhof. He told me that he started off selling roses. A tough job for which he worked 12 hours a day.
Edelweiss is an tiny but stylish place with only five tables. If you are lucky (I was not), you get one of the two roadside tables in plain sun. I pampered myself with a chocolate cake and a pot of real coffee (no instant stuff). It didn't take very long until a beautiful young girls joined my company. Her name was Nina and she was Austrian as well but left the country a few years ago and lives in Zurich now. We had a good chat about India and explored the markets and streets of Udaipur in the afternoon.
At 7pm we went to the highest rooftop restaurant in town and watched Ian Flemmings James Bond "Octopussy" with Roger Moore. About half the movie takes place in Udaipur and it was really funny to watch. Filmmakers are impostors! They pretended to get to a palace, but once inside, the setting was filmed at a different location. Also, Bond, James Bond overflew the Taj Mahal and landed in Lake Pichola. But the Taj is at about 800km (as the crow flies) away from Udaipur. It was also funny to see how the filmmakers exploited every stereotype one can have about India!
What a pleasant evening.