India Trip: Day 2, New Delhi

I booked all our hotels based on glowing reviews on TripAdvisor.com and was not disappointed by any of them.  It was such a valuable resource!  Sai Villa was our hotel in Delhi.  It didn't look like much from the outside, but inside were a handful of perfectly appointed rooms done in a tasteful, modern Indian style.  A chef cooked breakfast to order each morning in a kitchen no bigger than our closet.

Sunday morning, we ordered breakfast and had our choice of a Western or Indian menu.  Without hesitation, we both chose paratha (potato pancakes, kinda like above, but that's a random one from here) and a stuffed sandwich (think a grilled cheese sandwich with seasoned mashed potatoes inside) served with fresh plain yogurt and juice.  The paratha were AMAZING and immediately became Trent's favorite!  We had been advised not to eat fresh produce unless we had washed and peeled it ourselves, so we ate mostly cooked food the whole time we were there.

Our tour guide met us at the hotel door and we said we had arranged one stop to make before we started his itinerary: going to our church services.  He was a little confused at first, saying that normally tourists don't come to India to go to their own church; normally, they want to see Hindu temples and mosques.  But we wanted to keep the Sabbath as best we could, and I was curious to see how a sacrament meeting ran in India.  I had looked up a meetinghouse and meeting times on mormon.org before we left (which is a really impressive site now, by the way).  We got there a few minutes late because it was hard to find and the driver had to stop numerous times to ask directions.  Surprisingly, the Sacrament meeting of the New Delhi 1st Branch was conducted in English and two excellent and well-referenced talks were given by two college-aged girls; following was a talk given by an older man in half-English/half-Hindi.  The meeting closed with singing to pre-recorded hymn accompaniment on a keyboard.  We visited with the American missionaries afterward, met the two sisters who had given the talks (turns out they had only joined the church a couple weeks before!!!!!), and also met a guy from Texas who was in New Delhi for his Houston MBA program (small world).

Then, we started our "real" touring.  Unfortunately, this also marked the beginning of a week-long assault by hawkers and scam artists, trying to persuade us to buy their cheap souvenirs (cheap, as in: out-of-focus postcards, necklaces with dye rubbing off on your neck, etc).  They saw us coming up to every monument (with our height, skin color, dress, and accompanying guide there was no way to blend in) and immediately bombarded us with requests to buy their postcards/bracelets/"genuine" Indian stone carvings.  Our tour guides couldn't fend them off for us because they have to interact with the hawkers every day and don't want to take sides.  Having been warned in all the guide books to avoid these people, we didn't buy anything, but after a while, I began to wonder why I wasn't buying a postcard book for $1 (instead of $6 at the bookstore we went to later).  But our guide reminded us that if we bought from one hawker, we would immediately be surrounded by 5 more (even to the point of physically not being able to walk away).  The only thing to do was to keep walking and repeat, "No, thank you" every 30 seconds as they walked and argued with us until we got in the car.

Sigh...moving on...

First, we stopped at India Gate, a memorial which is inscribed with the names of the 90,000 soldiers who died in World War I and the Afghan Wars.  An eternal flame burns continually underneath to mark the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  

The official residence of the President of India.  (as seen from outside the main gate)

Birla Temple, also called Laxminarayan Temple.  While I'm usually a big fan of all the color in India, I was taken aback by the garishness of the outside: bright red and yellow.  Note the swastika designs over the door.  Swastika (from Sanskrit, svastika, meaning good luck) are very common in Hindu designs and are still used unapologetically in religious motifs and celebrations.  The way I understood it, they see Hitler as having hijacked their symbol for a time, but the "good luck charm" meaning for them never changed.  Intellectually, I know this, but as a Westerner (and having served my mission in Germany), I still had a heart attack every time we saw one.

Our tour guide in front of Birla Temple.  His English was very good, but he had a really thick accent (almost like a lisp) that made it really hard to understand.  He was contracted by our driver and spoke 5 other languages including Spanish and Japanese.

Inside and out, were countless statues and carvings of different Hindu gods from Hindu mythology, and we interrogated our tour guide to keep it all straight.  There are 330 million of gods in Hinduism, but there are a few main ones like the Great Trinity of Brahma (creator), Shiva (destroyer), Vishnu (preserver, the blue guy you've seen), along with Ganesha (elephant god).

My favorite time for snapping pictures of people was from our car.  I didn't want to gawk or appear like a total tourist getting in people's faces, but my favorite pictures were of the everyday life: on the street, markets, traffic...Our driver and guide drove us to Old Delhi, a poorer part of town to visit the Jama Masjid (Great Mosque).

Once we got closer, the streets were too congested for a regular car to fit, so we hired a cycle rickshaw to take us the rest of the way.  We felt bad that he was exerting so much physical effort on our behalf, but it was the only way to get up to the mosque.  (All the scares of the traffic passing by within inches on all sides are magnified tenfold when there is nothing between you and the other vehicles!)  He spoke English surprisingly well and chatted with us as we manuevered down the streets.  We had been under the impression that more people spoke English, considering it's the language of business there, but we found that fewer people spoke English than we thought.

Navigating the crowded streets.  Ahead of us you can see the green and yellow auto rickshaw or "tuk tuk"--a 3-wheeled taxi.  (More about those later.)

Textiles for sale.  We saw merchants pushing their own carts to the markets, loaded with fabric, produce, and cheap dollar-store type utensils.

Approaching the mosque.

Mosque towers.

Walking up the steps, approaching the mosque entrance gate.  "This is the principal mosque of Old Delhi in India. Commissioned by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal,in the year 1650 CE and completed in the year 1656 AD, it is the largest and best-known mosque in India. It lies at the origin of a very busy central street of Old Delhi, the Chawri Bazar Road." (wikipedia)

This is still an actively used mosque, and the courtyard of the mosque can hold up to twenty-five thousand worshippers. 

And then we turn around to see the way that we had come...

And see this!  Looking down from the mosque steps, I can hardly believe we made our way through that gauntlet of merchants and shoppers and other people coming to the mosque.  Unbelievable.

A view in a different direction of residences around the mosque.

We're still outside the main entrance of the mosque when we realize that something isn't quite right.  Since the main touring season is over (November--March), we are accustomed to being one of very few white tourists, but as we looked around, we see that we are the ONLY white tourists.  It turns out that we have accidentally gone to the Indian entrance instead of the foreigners entrance.  Why the difference?  Indians only pay 5 rupees ($0.10) and foreigners pay 200 rupees ($4.00).   

So back down and around we go to the other side to enter, and then we can't take any more pictures until we are outside.  Shoes must be removed and are tended by a guy while you're inside.  Afterwards, you have to tip him.  One thing we learned, India is not necessarily a cheap vacation.  You have to tip EVERYONE for EVERYTHING.  But the good thing is that your shoes are still there when you come out (and he even covered them up with plastic when it rained).

It took us about 5 seconds on the hot stone to realize that we also would be renting slippers (since we had forgotten our extra socks in the car).  Because Trent was in shorts and because I had short sleeves, we also had to rent robes for modesty purposes.  

When we stepped through the arched entrance, we were surprised to find that it was a big open courtyard with covered hallways on each side.  There weren't any statues or plaques or anything to really help us understand anything, so we were grateful for the "helpful" man that suddenly appeared and started telling us when the mosque was built and interesting facts about it.  We suspected he was a freelance tour guide who hung around looking for clueless-looking white people (that's us) and were happy to pay for his services.  Without his explanations, the visit would have meant very little; with them, we were able to learn a lot.  Unfortunately, we made the mistake of not asking the price ahead of time and were totally gouged at the end.  Live and learn.

When we asked our driver the difference between New Delhi and Old Delhi, he said "the power lines."  And we soon saw what he meant.  Now I understand why unexpected power outages are the norm here.  

Our hotels and car were air-conditioned and most Western-style restaurants were too.  Otherwise, there was the occasional window unit sticking out.  Locals kept wanting us to be shocked and amazed at how hot it was, but then we explained that we were from Texas and that the weather was actually similar in many ways (minus the monsoon).  Interestingly, Austin and New Delhi are only 1 degree different in latitude (30.26  N and 29.01 N respectively).

A few minutes after I took this picture we drove down one of the most congested streets we were on in our whole trip.  Part of it is a well-known market and we were trying to drive right down the middle of it in a car.  The traffic is almost impossible to describe; it flows more like water than anything else.  If everyone were to follow Western traffic rules, than it would be impossible to get the same volume of people through.  Delhi is home to 17 million people.  Distance between people/cars/motorcycles/buildings are measured in inches.  If a bus passed an inch in front of someone's toes, he wouldn't even blink, just calmly wait until the bus passed and then cross the street as the oncoming motorcycle passes an inch behind him.      

Jama Masjid, as we were leaving.

Last stop of the day was Raj Ghat, a memorial to Mahatma Gandhi.  "It is a black marble platform that marks the spot of Mahatma Gandhi's cremation, Antyesti (Antim Sanskar) on 31 January 1948, a day after his assassination. It is left open to the sky while an eternal flame burns perpetually at one end. It is located on the banks of the river Yamuna in Delhi in India on Ring Road officially known as Mahatma Gandhi Road." (wikipedia)

Then we ate out at the Red Onion--a tasty, but supremely bizarre experience.  While we waited in the car, our guide ran up and asked the owner something and then came back out and led us upstairs.  Apparently, the restaurant was hosting a private party and was officially closed to the public, but we were seated at a table by the kitchen and assured that it was fine that we eat there.  No other guests were there since the party hadn't started yet, and we wondered the whole time why we were privileged (?) enough to eat there.  Unfortunately, we couldn't eat at just any restaurant because of sanitation issues, so we were completely dependent on our driver to take us to reputable "touristy" restaurants that were more expensive than others, but with less worry of getting sick.  

In fact, we were regularly spending more on meals out than we would have back in the States.  Everyone seemed to think that since we were Americans that we were wealthy (and of course, by most standards we are), but I don't think they realized that $25 for a meal out is not something we do regularly.  Nor could they comprehend that we didn't have a smart phone and that our only cell phone is a $15 bare minimum plan.  

It was also our first evening out with THE MOSQUITO.  We saw one in the restaurant and I panicked and whipped out the 

industrial strength insect repellent we had been advised to buy by the travel nurse.  I thoroughly covered myself with the 33% DEET cream since we had opted not to take the anti-malarial medicine (it causes stomach upset; not exactly what you want to add on to other potential stomach problems in India).  I am happy to report that Indian mosquitoes are much less aggressive and weren't constantly buzzing in my ear waiting to give me malaria like I imagined.  Part of it was probably due to the fact that we retired pretty early most nights because of the jet lag and also wanting to limit our time out after dark by ourselves.