Woke, showered and went up for breakfast. Hotel staff sleeping on mattresses in the stairwell.
 
Breakfast was good. View was better!
 
The streets of the old city are too narrow for cars, so our driver has the day off while we tour on foot. We walked to the old city, passing a crazy old cow with untrimmed hooves near the hotel.
 
Wandered through the bazar for an hour or so. 
 
Then walked to the City Palace and bought tickets for a boat tour on the lake. Walked to the lake and boarded the boat for an hour long ride on lake Pichola.
 
The boat ride included a 20 minute stop at the Jagmandir Palace on the lake, which was very nice.
 
At the lake palace there was a big crew setting up for some kind of private event. We also saw some big black bee-like bugs flying around. One of them was kind enough to land on the fence so we could take a photo.
 
After the boat ride we took a guided tour of the City Palace Museum. For many hundreds of years, each new king would add on a new section, so the palace is now a maze of interconnecting courtyards and narrow passages.
 
Apparently you can rent parts of the palace for weddings - what they call 'regal weddings'. And preparations were underway for the wedding of some Indian business tycoon or other. There were literally hundreds of workers employed in setting up the decorations. The guide told us that they had also rented the lake palace for the reception, so that's what we'd seen being set up there.
 
One of the coolest aspects of the palace is the elephant infrastructure built into it. The gates are very tall for elephants to pass through, and have spikes mounted on them 10 feet up to prevent enemy elephants from pushing the gates in with their heads.
 
The first court yard has stone elephant beds with huge stone anchor points to chain up the elephants.
 
And there is a platform for the royals to mount and dismount their elephants, right next to a much lower one for horses.
 
After city palace, stopped at the nearby Jagadish temple, which has a lot of impressive marble carving.
   

From the temple yard, watched a troupe of grey langur monkeys break into an adjacent house and steal food. One after another they would go in and out of a window three stories above the plaza, each emerging with one food item..a piece of nan, a potato, etc... and then would scrap over the food. Eventually a woman came to the window and shooed the monkeys away and closed the shutters.
   
 

On the way back to the hotel we stumbled upon a ghat on the lake (which is a stone patio with steps down into the water that people can use for washing clothes, bathing, etc. Mostly it was just teenagers hanging out and watching you-tube videos on their phones.
 
Right next to the ghat there was a some sort of cow shrine on the edge of the river, with little cow statues and coincidentally, a real live cow just standing there. Ken tried to take a picture of cow but without warning the cow turned and ran at him. Cows are fast when they want to be! The cow got Ken twice with his horn - once in the ribs and once in the stomach - before Ken got clear and jumped up onto one of the stone platforms. Fortunately the horns were not sharp, so he was bruised but not punctured. It was just a light goring!
 
After that, Ken wanted a drink! (And a nice juicy steak to go with it, but that will have to wait until we're home. In India if you kill a cow you'll be beaten to death by an angry mob.)

We had to walk some distance past our hotel to find a liquor store. On the way two bulls came charging at a full run down the middle of the street. Cows are fast - these ones keeping up with they motorcycles and taxis that raced down the street with them. (As previously noted, cows are surprisingly fast. You might think you can out-run an angry cow. Nope!) Thankfully they ignored us and kept on running.

We bought enough beer (and popcorn and water) to last us the evening and took an auto-rickshaw back to the hotel. The clerk didn't want us drinking in the lobby ('for your own safety', she said) so we went up to the 2nd floor sitting area and used wifi while we had our refreshments.

When we opened up our room we found the bathroom faucet turned on full blast and water splashed everywhere. Had to get the staff to clean up the water and bring dry toilet paper.

Ate supper upstairs in the restaurant. It was very tasty again. Then early to bed.