Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, India – We met Nikki and headed into the city to get some breakfast. Our restaurant of choice was on the roof of this building overlooking once of the streets with a blank head balanced on two poles serving as our roof. So pleasant in the morning sun, so we sat up there and ate and read the papers for a while.
Nikki and Rich went to the bank, so I sat in the chai shop talking to the men who makes tea who I had befriended a few days before. Rich found me and we went walking through the city and eventually found one of the larger havelis which was opened to the public, so we had to wander through this large mansion. When we exited the haveli, I looked across the street where I spotted this Indian man wearing yellow turban, a traditional coat, yellow in color to match and dark sunglasses. One close-up look at the man in the yellow turban confirmed my thoughts. So I turned to Rich and said, “There he is; who, the man with a longest moustache in the world.” The school teacher reconfirmed what I had just told Rich and explained to us that this man’s father was the world record holder but he had his throat slit by Pakistani terrorists, so this man now hold the record for the world’s longest moustache.
He was a funny-looking Indian with his four feet long moustache all curled up in a huge circle, one on each side of his nose. We asked him if we could have a photo with his moustache unrolled and he said it would cost 25 rupees. We gave him 20 rupees and he grabbed each end of his moustache and stretched it out. Rich stood next to him and I snapped a photo but the second I had taken the photo, he let go off each end of moustache and sprung back into its rolled up position. He had put wire in his moustache for easier maintenance.
We walked around some more and eventually met Nikki for some dinner. Little did we know that this would be a real third world restaurant. The restaurant was almost full when we arrived, but no one appeared to be eating. We ordered and began the standard one and half hours wait for dinner to come. After 90 minutes of waiting, no one in the restaurant had been served yet so when one couple who had been there for over two hours inquired about their order, the workers who did not speak more than 25 words of English could not even confirm this couple had ordered any food.
Ten minutes later, they brought out this egg dish and tried to serve it to a different table, but Nikki screamed that it was her food so the waiter jumped and brought the plate to her. The whole serving turned out to be a fiasco. They had cooked the wrong orders and most people did not get any food. Chapatis were being passed from table to table, so Nikki intercepted one of them because her rice did not arrive.
After it was all over, Nikki was the only person out of about 10 people to get any food, so everyone else got up and walked out as I grabbed the restaurant receipt book and wrote out our bill to ensure we were not charged for anything that we had not received. Your basic DIY (do it yourself) restaurant.