Have you ever been the only group of people at an amusement park?
I'm not trying to post this much, but this...this was Chokhi Dani.
It's a Rajastani-themed low-budget amusement park, with a ferris wheel that relies on gravity like bicycle pedals and a swinging ship powered by a lawn mower engine. Free henna stains hands first like candle wax, then once it dries, it's similar to brown Sharpie. An acrobat climbs a pole to a twenty foot high hemp rope, where he swings and walks backwards. The grand finale is him using a flip-flop and a frying pan as sandals to walk across the tight rope with about seven wooden hats of the Russian doll variety stacked upon his head. Quite impressive.
Other performances included a band with two young women whose smiles were stretched so thin you could see them going postal any minute just by looking at their eyebrows.
We had five tickets to spare and I spent two shooting a BB gun at some balloons. I assume that balloons are Rajastani.
A fortune teller and a masseuse shared a hut, and the room of mirrors had about six slightly warped mirrors in a room the size of the Topsy's on the Plaza. Whoah! I was freakin' out, man!
More than anything, I felt bad for the employees, who were forced to say "Ram Ram Sam" (a Rajastani greeting) to every single guest all the time. All day, every day, it made my job as a host at Applebee's almost look fun. And considering our group of 27 Americans was one of two groups at Chokhi Dani (the other being a family of five), we received extra "Ram Ram Sam" greetings from everybody.
I could imagine that being the last thing somebody said before giving their boss the finger, throwing their Rajastani headdress in the air, and storming out of there in self-righteous liberation.
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