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The Peacock Square or Mor Chawk in the City Palace in Udaipur gains its name from the peacocks in vivid blue glass mosaic that decorate its walls. This is only one example of the many beautiful rooms we admired in India. The peacock is the national bird of India.
At the cathedral at Monreale in Sicily, photographed in 2000, the mosaics you will see are truly outstanding.
This beautifully decorated balcony is part of the City Palace in Udaipur, Rajasthan. Though the palace remains the home of the Maharana of Udaipur, much of it is open to the public. The balcony was built as a place where the women of the palace could stand unobserved while watching what was happening in the palace courtyard below. This seclusion of women was practised by the Rajput rulers of Udaipur as part of Islam. To see the decoration more clearly, obtain a larger version of the photo by right clicking on it and opening it in a new window.
There are two things to take note of about this small vehicle photographed somewhere in Gujarat in 2007. One is the fact that it has only three wheels. There are many such vehicles in India. Secondly is its colourful decoration. We saw trucks everywhere, many of them very large, that were attractively decorated in this way. When you cross a state boundary, all commercial vehicles must stop while the driver goes to a government office at the side of the road to pay a tax. It's really something to see maybe a hundred large trucks stopped by the highway for this purpose, most of them colourfully decorated.
In 2008 we visited this very attractive cathedral, built between the 13th and 16th centuries, and located in Quimper, Finistere, Brittany. The stained glass is some of the nicest we have seen. It is easy to imagine from this example how stained glass was originally intended as a way to instruct people about Christianity and the life of Christ at a time when hardly anyone could read and write.
