pune | the last weekend

do not get into a staring contest with this guy...you will lose.

For my last weekend in Pune, I hit up some suggested sights in the old-town. The office was nice enough to extend one of their drivers through the weekend so I could do some last minute shopping, sightseeing, and get to the airport in Mumbai. Of course, since my luggage space was limited, I ended up just doing a bit of sightseeing and wandering around the old-town part of Pune.

There was a museum that everyone recommended called the Raja Kelkar museum, which was the private collection of some guy that spent his life accumulating random artifacts from india and parts of asia. The museum was pretty cool, and had an eclectic collection of random things. There were lots of random idols, wooden artifacts, foot scrubbers (I know…it was weird), and household items.

weird collection of foot-scrubbers

There were some museum items that were pretty odd. One of the was a scale model of the taj mahal. It was damaged around the edges, and some of the towers were damaged as well. I remember seeing it and thinking it was built around the time the real taj was built, and I thought “oh it’s in pretty good shape for being a few hundred years old”. Then I looked at the sign: circa late 20th century. So basically somebody built it back in the 80’s or 90’s. In that case it’s in surprisingly horrible shape for being only 20-30 years old. Another odd thing was the collection of foot scrubbers. Apparently this guy had a huge collection of foot scrubbers for the callous on the bottom of your feet. Who collects stuff like that?!

The museum was situated in an old house, and upon getting there, I was reminded of my home in Shanghai. It was a weird feeling, because the museum doesn’t look anything like my home, but at the same time, I knew that eventually where I was living would be turned into a museum in a few years (I live on a cultural street, and all the homes were getting bought out by the city to turn into museums). I dunno…just an odd feeling as I walked in.

apparently chess is from india...

After the museum, I headed over to Laxmi road to see where locals go for shopping. At this point the driver just dropped me off since I didn’t want him to wait and I figured I could easily get a rickshaw back to the hotel. I was looking to buy some souvenirs for my folks, but soon I realized this is where real locals come to do shopping…and real locals don’t buy souvenirs. Apparently the shops were for pots, pans, household items and home-improvement stuff (i.e. sinks and pipes). Yeaaa…good luck finding scarves and elephant paperweights.

Of course at this point it started raining. And by raining I mean it was more like a torrential downpour. This is also the point where I learned that rickshaw drivers don’t like to drive in the rain. Every driver I approached turned me down. Finally I was able to flag one down that was willing to take me back to the hotel. Of course by now I was drenched…he wasn’t too happy about me dripping in his backseat =/

The rain didn’t stop the next day (apparently during monsoon, it can go on for weeks at a time). The original plan was for the driver to take me sightseeing in Mumbai for a bit before heading over to the airport. We ended up leaving the hotel at noon for a 2am flight since I figured I could go around Mumbai for a bit. Of course…the rain didn’t let up, and at this point parts of Mumbai were starting to flood so the sightseeing plan was pretty much scrapped.

awesome.

Since the airport doesn’t allow people to check in until 3 hours before the flight, I ended up getting dropped off at the ITC Muratha, a hotel near the airport, to wait it out and have lunch/dinner. The hotel was pretty cool, but the prices for food were ridiculous. I mean…at other hotels like the JW Marriott the Grand Hyatt, food prices were relatively reasonable (it is india afterall). But here the prices were roughly 4x as much (seriously?? USD15 for a bottle of kingfisher??). Oh well…still cheaper than getting a room for 8 hours I guess. I ended up just bumming around the hotel until it was time to check-in.

**the next post will be the last in this series…**