Choki Dani

We visited Choki Dani, which provides an authentic Rajhastani experience, it's about 30 minutes outside of the city center so we hired a driver to take us there and wait for us to take us back to our hotel since it's difficult to find a cab so late at night in this remote part of town. We arrived at about 7pm and had to wait an hour to buy our tickets for dinner. We did not expect it to be so crowded. Once we purchased our tickets we were escorted to another area where we had to remove our shoes and rinse our hands and then were seated for dinner on the floor. There was a wooden platform for each of us and on this platform was a plate and 3 bowls made of leaves and a glass made of clay where our water was served. There was a bonfire in the middle and about 200 people were seated at a time for dinner. The servers were dressed in traditional Rajhastani clothes, white pants and deep red shirt with a turban. Over the course of the next hour they served us typical Rajhastani food, I wasn't really familiar with this type of cuisine so was looking forward to try it out. There were a few items I really liked, others were not as tasty, however, the experience was great! I was not even able to try everything because I was so stuffed mid way through. Upon completing our meal, a server poured water on our hands above our leaf plate to wash them as we ate with our hands.  Then we retrieved our shoes and checked out the rest of Choki Dani. There were many activities, given the gates closed in a few hours, we had to decide what events to purchase tickets for. We decided to see a traditional dance performance, puppet show (very popular in this region), get a reading done by a palmist and check out a snake charmer performance. The traditional dance was amazing, the women danced with 6 pots on her head, while balancing these pots, she danced on a tray, a sword, etc. The fortune teller read my palm in Hindi, so I didn't quite understand everything but, my mom said the guy said the same three statements to everyone and then the last 2 statements were interchanged across the different customers. So that was disappointing. The snake charmer had a cobra in a basket and played an instrument and the cobra danced, which was really cool.  The puppet show was amusing, the puppeteer had the puppet perform dances by famous people in India based on their personalities.  Our driver kept calling us every half hour to see if we were ready to return to our hotel, but there is so much to see/do there and not enough time most people leave when the gates close at 11pm. After the 3rd call, he got the hint and didn't call us...