The Hawa Mahal looks flat in every photo you've seen of it, and then you stand in front of it and realise it's barely a room deep — a honeycomb screen built so the women of the royal household could watch the street below without being seen. I got there just after sunrise, before the tour buses, when the sandstone was still doing its pink-to-gold thing and the street was mostly just chai stalls setting up.
The old city is laid out on a grid, which sounds orderly until you're actually inside it and every lane looks like every other lane, all cycle rickshaws and marigold garlands and shopfronts selling the same blue pottery. I gave up on navigating by landmark and just followed the smell of frying kachori until I found breakfast.
