Astronomy, Cake and Candles.

On Monday, we finished work a little earlier than usual, and as the sun was shining we embarked on a late afternoon voyage of discovery! 

The place we were bound for was called Jantar Mantar, which was built by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, the man who also founded the city of Jaipur. He was as the sign described it “keenly interested" in astronomy, but we suspect it may have been more of an obsession! He built several of these Jantar Mantars around India, the one in Delhi being the oldest. It was a giant observatory and all the huge stone constructions, were actually instruments to measure various astronomical things. Bearing in mind this was built in 1724, the readings they produced were apparently very accurate. Large masonry instruments such as these are unusual anywhere in the world, and some of the ones found here are completely unique. 

Looking over some of the Jantar Mantar

Despite very helpful signs describing how they worked, it was very difficult to get your head around it! As one example - The Ram Yantras were two almost identical circular buildings side by side, that from the outside looked like mini coliseums. The height of the walls were equal to the internal radius of the building, and the floor was divided into 30 sectors with the intervening open spaces measuring 6°, making up 360° in total. The walls, floor and pillar all had markings on them at certain measurements.  Its function was to measure the horizontal and vertical angles of celestial bodies such as the sun and moon.  Whilst puzzling over how exactly this worked in practice we posed for a few photos as it was such a good looking structure!

The floor divided into sectors inside the Ram Yantra.

Michaela posing by the Ram Yantra.

Emma's turn!

The one we are standing in front of below is the Misra Yanta (Yanta means instrument we think), which measures multiple things, as it is made up of five different instruments. These include the declination of an object as the object moves east to west in the sky during the day, the altitude of the sun, the longitude of a celestial object and the local time. Here you could see close up some of the measurements marked out on the structures. It was a beautiful thing to look at, and almost every surface it had curved very specifically in multiple planes. 

Us in front of the Misra Yanta.

Some of the fine measurements you could see when you got up close to the instruments.

To get back we had to walk through a favourite market of ours, so it would have been rude not to have a little bit of a browse! Before we caught the metro home however, we embarked on a mission to find a cake shop that we had heard a lot about called Wengers. We were not disappointed! Indian's certainly know how to do sweet things, which we approve of very much! It reminded us of a scaled down Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory, selling a wonderful variety of cakes and chocolates. After much deliberation we eventually settled on two to take home and enjoy after dinner. 

Amazing cake shop!

At home a whole different adventure was waiting, as the power had decided to turn itself off! We were given a non-specific and optimistic estimate of a couple of hours until it might return and a suggestion that we should find candles, so we got one of our Indian friends who had the same problem and went to a stall outside the hospital that seemed to only sell cigarettes, biscuits and toothbrushes. We were doubtful that we would be successful there, but lo and behold, he produced two candles and a box of matches, so we set up camp with our little candle and ate our cake by candlelight! Emma also decided to attempt writing in her journal by the light of the candle and a very small torch (she felt quite Jane Austen-esque...)!  

Setting up camp for the night with our wee candle.

Emma recording the events of the day by candle and mouth held torch light!

Just as well that we packed a lot in on Monday afternoon as Tuesday bought with it an apocalyptic storm, with some very impressive thunder!