India - Day 27 - Delhi

I arrived in Delhi at noon. I had made agreements with Jayashree (a friend of Tom) so that I would call her from the airport and she would tell me where we meet up. To get to the appointed place from the airport, Tom had recommended I take a prepaid cab, which works as follows: you go to a booth at the airport, tell where you want to go, they tell you the price, you pay the man in the booth and they then give you a receit to take to the driver, who will then take you to the agreed place. As I understand, the system is there to prevent taxi drivers ripping off foreigners. Quite clever.

Unfortunately, the driver did not quite take me where I needed to go so I had tohop on the metro and ride to the next station. This, however, turned out to be a non-trivial task. After buying a token, I had to go through a security checkpoint - with my large backpack, which they wanted to examine quite thoroughly, making me just miss the train. Thankfully, the trains run every 10 minutes.

Looking out of the train, absolutely everything reminded me of the suburbs in Shanghai that I had seen from a similar vantage point about a year ago. Except for the people and the advertisments around me, I could have sworn I was back in China. Strange.

Jayashree turned out to be a very friendly lady in her 40-es, supreme court lawyer and a social worker by profession and fluent in three languages (nepalese, hindi and english). She did not like to brag, however, so all these facts turned out casually during the conversation.

She took me down to the city center via the metro. In there I had a rather major cultural shock, as this place was about as un-Hyderabadlike as it can get in India. 2/3 of the people were foreigners and 1/10 of them had dreadlocks - making me a completely normal, even to-be-expected, sight - something that has never happened to me before. This in stark contrast to Hyderabad, where 99.9% of people on the street are of indian origin. There were other differences too - such as the ratio of women dressed in western clothing as opposed to traditional clothing being half-and-half, there being relatively few muslims and, of course, me spotting my first budhist monks. Anyways, Jayashree went to a hotel owned by a friend of hers and helped me get a room.

Once I had dropped my belongings there, Jayashree asked me what I wanted to do next. I told her I had yet to see a large temple. So she took me to one. One where the security measures were absurd, to say the very least. You had to hand in all your belongings, save for your wallet and possibly a bottle of water, but - here is the punchline - before handing in the camera and the mobile phone, you had to remove the batteries from them. Don't ask me why. After that, men and women were separated and there was a rigorous metal detector screening (I think the fourth one today).

The temple was for one guru, whose name I can't remmember and which does not matter much anyways. What does matter was just how intricately beautiful the whole complex was. It was carved out of sandstone, and when I say carved, I really mean carved - most of it was intricately decorated with patterns and small detailed statues. And considering the size of the complex, I was in awe as to how much work must have gone into it.

After exiting the complex, I asked Jayashree to show me something distinctly Indian. So, in a parody of tourist sightseeing, she took a riksha and asked the driver to drive by a few large and important looking buildings (banks, government offices, the India gate). Not that there would be much to see. Not that I could, even if I wanted to (I did not). Not that I would learn much from it. But it did make me laugh :) The more western part of Delhi, where the gate was located, reminded me of the university district in Moscow. Similar architecture, similar streets (with parks) and so on. So I did learn that large cities have a lot of contrast in them, if not anything else.

She then had some business to take care of so we agreed to try to meet up again the next day and I went back to Sri Ramakrishna Asham station to try to find my hotel. Which was not as easy as I first hoped and took me well over half an hour. In the end, I went to one of the side streets on a hunch and it turned out to be the right one.

In the evening, I went out to try to find some dinner. I eventually settled for a small diner that served chinese food (as I did not feel like eating spicy Indian cuisine), and yet again had noodles. I then browsed through some shops in the hopes of finding a few more interesting things to take back home with me.

Arrived in the hotel with a bunch of gifts, a bottle of water and a roll of toilet paper. Watched a movie from my netbook before going to bed.