India - Day 28

I had asked Jayashree where the old city of Delhi was so that I could go look around there. She had pointed me to a metro station and told me that it would be on the same line as the metro stop on the other end of the street I was living on.

By the time I got to the metro station, the mystery of the frequency of dreadlocks had been solved - it turned out that what was on the other end of the street was the New Delhi Railway station, thus making the street one of the most frequently visited by tourists. I do have to admit that in other parts of the city white people were a much less common sight. That did not mean everyone was native, however. For instance, there were a rather large number of Punjabi Sikhs on the streets, who were all fairly easily identifiable by having a considerably stronger and stouter build than the average indian, making them easy to recognize even without the help of a beard and a turban that are the hallmarks of Sikhism.
In general, Delhi seemed to be poorer than Hyderabad. For instance, instead of motor rikshas, the traffic was dominated by manually pedalled velorikshas. There were also quite a few ox carts on the streets - I saw dozens in one hour of walking whereas I saw less than 5 in my whole stay in Hyderabad.

All this I found out while taking a nice long walk around the city - having come out in a wrong metro station (as I had forgot exactly which one she had pointed to the day before). It was for the best though, as I allowed me to get a more balanced view of the City.

However, after walking back to the railway station, I decided to try my luck with yet another metro station I was hoping would take me to the old city. This time I stroke lucky... well, until I empirically confirmed what Jayashree had told me the day before - that all the sights are closed on mondays. So - I got to look at a nice castle, an even nicer temple and a rather large mosque - from 200 m outside their front gates :).

All that required quite a bit of walking, however, and as it can be quite exhausting in 35 degree heat, I decided to find a cool place to sit down and rest for a while. Parks did not work, as the few I saw were either closed or did not have trees for shade. So I just settled for a metro station, where I found a pillar behing which I could hide (so that noone would come to bother me). I sat there for about an hour, waiting for the clock to strike 4, which was the time Jayashree should get off work.

At 4 PM I walked to the nearest payphone, only to find it out of order. Not a problem - travel to the next station and try there. I got a dial tone this time, but now ran into another problem. Jayashrees accent, bad qulity of the reciever and the fact that the telephone booths only accepted one rupee coins (which gave you 30 seconds talk time each) meant that I after 2 minutes on the phone I was absolutely none wiser and was, in fact, feeling a lot stupider that before. I decided to go back to the hotel and try to get change to pay for a longer call. This I failed at, but after a conversation with the hotel receptionist (who did not speak much english), I found a payphone where you could pay to a person rather than with coins, thus solving my problem.

Sadly, Jayashree was busy in the evening so I decided to just go take the metro to one end of the line and back to see some more of the city (as the train comes above ground out of central Delhi). Again - Shanghai came to mind, but now in a bit different way, as this line went through a rather different neighbourhood than the one before. I would have taken photos but when I tried that, a policeman came to me and asked me to delete the pictures I had taken because it was illegal in the metro. I complied.

When I got back to the center, I realized I had not eaten anything for the whole day. I had not really felt hungry either - the heat has a way of taking away the appetite, as I had already learned before. I headed back to the hotel and paid my bill there. I then asked them to order me a taxi for the following morning. Learning that the taxi ride would cost 350 rupees, I put one 500 rupee bill aside for the morning and set out to spend the rest of it, first on dinner (which I had alongside a german bioinformatics student) and then on small but nice little tokens that would make for good gifts. I actually found quite a few nice things that were remarkably cheap, even considering I probably got ripped off buying most of them.

I did try to bargain a little, as in Delhi it seemed to be standard practice, probably more due to the fact that tourists expect that to be the case. When in China, I got one thing 5 times cheaper than the initial price, the best I could get here was a bit less than a factor of two, and that too just barely and with some trickery.

Shop owners fell in two categories. Type A was quite pushy - asking you to come in, showing you all sorts of things, then offering discounts when you liked something but still did not buy it. Type B was the complete opposite - you literally had to go to the owner, ask for attention and even then he might ignore you on the first try. As you can probably guess, bargaining only worked for Type A cases, as Type B always just named their price and stuck to it.

The prices were pretty even around the street and, despite being one of the most tourist-ridden place in the whole of India, did not seem significantly higher than those I saw in Hyderabad. I guess that the stiff competion that goes on on the street probably keeps the prices in check and that it is reasonable for them not to elevate the prizes too much because that way, people actually buy more. Not that I would be suprised to find that the prizes they ask are 2-4 times what the things actually cost... Which still makes them 2-8 times cheaper than they would be in Estonia:P

I spent my last 100 rupees on a bottle of water and two bracelets.

In the morning, I took my bags and went out to wait for the taxi, which they supposedly had ordered.. only to find out that they didn't - and that overnight, the price had gone up from 350 to 400 rupees :P The price rise was because the old clerk had seen me check in, under the watchful eyes of the hotel owner who had told him to be nice to me. The new receptionist had not. However - this (plus any other "unexpected" service charges) had been the reason why I set aside 500 instead of 350 and had planned everything with one hour to spare. So I was still in good shape. I got to the airport without problems, went through customs and practiced playing my bass for an hour before boarding (as I had still arrived an hour too early).