Ahmedabad, Gujurat, India – We had a good sleep, that was, until 4:30 a.m. when the mosque across the street (the one with the 500 amp loudspeaker 20 feet from our window) began morning prayer. It really did sounds as though the priest , or whoever it is that catterwalls into the mic, was standing in our hotel room screaming at the top of his voice. That’s right! This section of India is predominently Muslim!
Back to sleep after prayer, but up once again for the 6:30 a.m. wake up call. We got up, ready to have a look at Ahmedabad. The first thing that struck me was the people in Northern India are more fair skinned than their coffee skinned bretheren to the south. There people up here were also much more forward, screaming their “Hellos” and coming up and chatting to us.
We walked the streets of Ahmedabad, which had dirt and trash everywhere mixed along with the exhaust fumes from the seemingly never ending streams of cars in all directions. I was getting this Cairo flashback from the noise, cars, and dirt but that was until we found the market. As Ahmedabad is only known for making most of the fabric in India, it is the textile capital of the country that’s all they sell in the market, fabric. I didn’t go crazy as I did in Mysore. I just bought two sheets to make a sleeping sheet out of. One with the Gujarati print and the other your basic made in a factory print.
There were fabric stores everywhere each with the pole hanging out over the street draped with every colored fabric imaginable. It gave the market a very festive feel to it. Everyone was really good-natured and were unfolding fabric for us to look at every time we turned around. More than once, I saw a rim of fabric roll away as though it had a mind of its own, leaving a long colored trail behind. We managed to find the Swami Narayan temple in the middle of the market, so we took off our shoes and wondered around this brightly painted monstrosity for a while.
We had a really nice dinner. Then saw quite possibly the worst movie made in the early 80’s James Bond’s Never Say Never Again.