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).

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.