Today was the day me and Anup split up from his family to go traveling on our own, heading to New Delhi as our first stop. This morning we had breakfast at our hotel then packed up all of our things to head to the airport.
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| The view from our hotel room window in Vadodara |
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| The hotel lobby, our luggage all packed up and ready to go |
Anup’s parents rode with us to the airport. His dad is really funny, he was in the front seat in the car with us as we were about to leave the hotel, and says “Ok have a good trip”, and then got out of the car and walked away. About 30 seconds later, he comes back, gets in the car and says “Ok I’m ready let’s go.” Turns out he wasn’t saying goodbye, just commenting that we should enjoy ourselves. We were wondering to ourselves why he gave such an abrupt goodbye.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this yet, but we have had thus far, and will continue to have, a personal driver taking us everywhere we want to go. He is in the car 24/7 at our disposal. When we don’t need him, he sleeps in the car until we call him. It sounds cruel by American standards but it is a good job in India, and people do not complain about their jobs in this country. When we arrive in Delhi there will be another driver waiting for us. Atul booked all the drivers through a travel company before we got to India.
We waited at the Vadodara airport for about 1.5 hours then boarded our flight for Delhi. We made a perfect landing in Delhi, thank God.
The Delhi airport is brand new and beautiful inside. It sounds bad, but I was so happy it didn’t smell like India (spices, dust, armpit). It smelled clean, like the states. The inside of the airport was so huge, and most of the space wasn’t being used. It was really bizarre, walking through these enormous open hallways that could have fit thousands of people. It almost seems like they built it that size just because they could.
When we got our bags and left the airport, we were picked up by our driver, his name is Sham. He speaks only Hindi, so Anup had to put his limited Hindi into practice to get around. When we were in Vadodara, which is in the state of Gujarat, everyone spoke Gujarati. Now that we were in what is called National Capital Territory of Delhi, the most common language was Hindi. Americans cannot really appreciate this fully until they’ve been to India, but it would like driving from Texas to Oklahoma and all of a sudden not being able to understand anyone. Sham is a pretty cool and relaxed guy, which is pretty hard to accomplish when you drive in India for a living. He lives with his wife and kid in Delhi, so he can go home at night when we don’t need him. The driver in Vadodara had to sleep in the car since he lived out of town. He wasn’t particularly talkative and so I never learned his name.
Sham drove us to our hotel. Even as a passenger, Delhi traffic is like hell on earth for me. Someone had the bright India to combine Indian style driving with western style stoplights, and it’s a horrible combination. In Gujarat, there was traffic everywhere, but it was very relaxed. Here the road rage is so bad that yesterday a man was stabbed during rush hour, which lasts from about 8 AM -10 PM here, with no relief.
We drove by a beautiful hotel, and I said to Anup “Wow, it would be cool to stay at that hotel.” Just as I said that Sham pulled into the parking lot of that hotel and I realized that was where I’m staying. It is called the Jaypee Vasant Continental hotel. It is extremely nice inside. The rate for the hotel is about 11,000 rupees per night for a room, which is about $240 per night. I would not have been able to stay in such luxury on my own, Atul was generous enough to cover the hotel rooms for both me and Anup. He said that because he would have paid the same price if Anup had gone alone, he did not want to make me pay since it was not costing him any extra. It was very thoughtful and definitely made the trip much more manageable, since even at the end of hectic days I had some comfort and cleanliness to return to.
The exchange rate is better at this hotel than it was at the airport, here I can get 44 rupees per dollar.
Our room has 2 beds, which is nice because previously we were sharing a bed in Vadodara. We had a flat screen TV, wood floors, desks, chairs, a very nice bathroom, and a water boiler. I used the water boiler the first night but I still ended up not drinking the water I boiled. I am that paranoid, I drink bottled only in this country.
After taking some time to rest in our hotel, Anup and I went to the Lotus Temple, which is a temple of the Baha’I faith, which I learned sometime after that Rainn Wilson, the actor who plays Dwight in The Office, is a part of. The Baha’I faith is a relatively new, monotheistic religion started by someone named Bahá'u'lláh', whom they consider a prophet. The temple itself is used for services of other faiths as well. In fact, on Fridays the temple is open only to Muslims.
The walk up to the temple was pretty breathtaking. The area surrounding the temple is beautiful and the temple itself is enormous and architecturally stunning. There were thousands of people coming and going from the temple. We moved close the temple and joined the line that was going into the temple. We had to take off our shoes to enter the temple, and there was a storage area underneath the walkway we were on where they were storing our shoes. Once inside, we were not allowed to talk or take pictures. There was a 15 minute prayer service that included readings from different faiths, the acoustics inside were pretty amazing. As soon as the service ended we were shuffled out and a new group was brought in.
After the temple, we went to the Dilli Haat market. It was a strange place, and very overwhelming. Americans feel very pressured in Indian markets because in the U.S. we can freely browse without harassment, and in India you are constantly hounded and as I said previously, anything you look at is immediately taken off the shelf and brought to you. You just have to get over it or it will drive you nuts and stop you from shopping altogether. The only thing that seemed worth buying in the whole place were these handmade silk and Kashmir scarves, but they were too expensive for me. They were about $40 each. Now, they were extremely high quality, handmade scarves from the Kashmir region of India, but I didn’t need one and I wanted to get out of there so the salesman would leave me alone. Anup bought one for his mom. It’s funny that people think that everything is cheap in India. I thought the same thing when I came here, and have learned this is not true. For quality items you pay quality prices. It might be much cheaper than the equivalent in the U.S., but it s not going to be dirt cheap. Also your likelihood of being scammed goes up exponentially when you try to buy something of quality in India.
The difference between the spending habits of Anup and I are starting to clash. Anup hates to think about what things cost, especially once he’s decided he wants it. When we are thinking about buying something, and I convert the price in rupees to dollars in my head, he gets upset because he doesn’t want to know. When Anup wants something, he buys it, and I’m just not that way. Also our whole mindset about spending differs a lot. His view on buying seems to be “If you have the money, why not?” We saw an extremely expensive car on the streets in Delhi and I commented that it seemed wasteful, and that was his reply, Why not? I am not saying that either of us are right or wrong, I just wanted to point out the differences. To me, luxury has no appeal. I will not dive too deep into it, but at my very core I see luxury as a liability, as something to worry about, to distract me. It’s just how I feel, I don’t know where it comes from because my parents also do not agree with me completely. I know I drove Anup crazy during the trip with my spending habits, sorry about that Anup.
After we left the market, we headed to the Red Fort. On our way there we stopped at the Chandni Chowk market, which is directly across the street from the Red Fort and named after the street it sits on.
I have never been in such a chaotic place. Everywhere there are people, buying and selling, yelling, spitting. Lights are blaring from blinking gadgets and shop fronts. Camels, scooters, motorcycles, and cars all pushing their ways through the crowds up and down the street. Besides a convent I saw in Vadodara, I saw the first operational Christian church so far on my trip in this market. It was a Baptist church, being run out of a storefront. It was quite strange to be honest, but I give much credit to those who were willing to do mission work in that chaos and set that place up.
I have never been in such a chaotic place. Everywhere there are people, buying and selling, yelling, spitting. Lights are blaring from blinking gadgets and shop fronts. Camels, scooters, motorcycles, and cars all pushing their ways through the crowds up and down the street. Besides a convent I saw in Vadodara, I saw the first operational Christian church so far on my trip in this market. It was a Baptist church, being run out of a storefront. It was quite strange to be honest, but I give much credit to those who were willing to do mission work in that chaos and set that place up.
We crossed the street to go to the Red Fort. We took an out of the way path to get to the entrance. To be honest I’m not sure the path we took was entirely legal but nobody stopped us. It was about this time I encountered my first cold night in India. Unfortunately I had no jacket and I hadn’t eaten much at all the entire day, so I was pretty numb. From the outside the fort looked amazing. Even though it was night time its red hue was striking, almost better than it would have been during the day.
We bought tickets for the “light show”, which we had heard so much about, and went into the fort. The fort itself was pretty amazing, but everything else inside, such as the marketplace, was pretty crappy in my opinion. I would not have even stopped in any of the shops, but I knew that opportunities to buy gifts for people would be rare. I bought a marble pipe here for my dad. We used the “walk away” technique to get a good price, and Anup bought one too. We walked the path through the fort, and made it to the light show on time.
I’m not going to lie, the “lightshow” was literally one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen. I have no idea why people said it was good. Most people, including me and Anup, walked out after about 5 minutes. It was not a “lightshow” at all, at least not how Americans envision one. It was just a recorded speech played over a loudspeaker, and when a certain building in the fort was talked about, a light would shine on it so you knew it was the right building. That was literally it. Stupid.
After the Red Fort, we went back to our hotel.
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