Kingdom of Dreams

We were looking for something fun and cool to do last weekend, when we remembered reading about an entertainment park called Kingdom of Dreams. We had to check it out. It’s relatively new – it opened in 2010 and is located just outside Delhi in the state of Haryana. It’s a Bollywood meets Disney kinda of experience complete with shopping, food and entertainment. It costs about $15 per person (over four feet tall, so Chutney was free), which makes it too expensive for many Indians but only about $2 is the entrance fee. The rest is consumable.

The entrance to the park looks like this:

Inside there are a couple areas where they have shows, which look like this:

We decided to pass on the shows for our first visit and chose to visit Culture Gully, an indoor, air conditioned area similar to Disney’s Epcot where different states/cities of India are presented with their typical foods, arts and crafts.  The entrance to Culture Gully was dreamy:

Once inside, you see a street lined on both sides with pavilions of the different parts of India:

Here are my favorites:

Rajasthan

 

Chennai’s (Tamil Nadu)

Kerala

We ate at a gorgeously decorated Lucknow restaurant, in honor of our our Hindi teachers in the US, most of whom are from Lucknow. Unfortunately, pictures were not allowed inside the restaurant, so we took a few outside:

:

The food was delicious and plenty but they wouldn’t pack our leftovers to take home, which was strange. Our consumable money (from our entry fee) covered our dinner and we had a couple of $ left to spend on souvenirs. The stores were full of neat arts, crafts, books and music, so there was a lot to choose from. Overall, our visit was wonderful  – a real feast for our eyes, minds and bellies. We were impressed by how well everything was done. The whole place was beautiful, neat and clean and the air conditioning was a bonus. We seemed to be the only foreigners there at the time but that’s OK. We will probably be back to check out the shows. Our experience ended on a high note with Nia playing the drum with an Indian dude at the exit.