vodra or baroda or whatever, just don't ask me about the river
laying on this questionable hostel mattress with my phone at 3am googling what idiot decided to build a city on a river that dries up when it gets cranky. welcome to vadodara, where the vishvamitri river apparently ghosts everyone every summer like my ex after festival season. just checked and it's 25°C out there right now with 65% humidity clinging to everything like overcooked noodles, hope you like that kind of thing.
you know those cities where the left side looks like europe's weird uncle and the right side smells like history took a wrong turn? here you've got alkapuri pretending to be london while the east side still thinks the gaekwars might come back any minute. the laxmi vilas palace looms over everything like that one friend who never shuts up about their royal ancestry - someone told me there's actually elephant graves in the backyard but the caretaker shooed me away when i tried to peek.
janitors should unionize against whatever architect designed nyay mandir though - that clock tower's nicer than my entire apartment back home. found this weird poetry slam happening behind some temple pillars where college kids argued about whether baroda museum's sculptures are improperly labeled (someone slipped me a note saying 'the tibetan ones are totally fake' but museum staff gave me death stares when i asked).
if you get bored, ahmedabad's 100km northwest playing the cool metropolitan cousin and surat's down south doing... whatever surat does. honestly couldn't tell you - still recovering from taking a wrong turn into one of those 'shanty buildings' near mandvi that smelled simultaneously like incense and bad plumbing.
the ramsar wetland near dabhoi sounds fantastic until you realize it only got protected in 2021 and now has more selfie sticks than migratory birds. why does every local coffee shop play 2010s bollywood remixes at full volume? why is the post office the nicest building in town? why did three different people tell me 'you must try our famous cuisine' before admitting they meant starbucks because actual local dishes aren't tourist-friendly? anyway, here's a photo of some concrete monster i found while hiding from monsoon rain that started with zero warning. perfection.
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