Delhi Revisited

Guess what?  There's a lot more to India than Hyderabad.  This week we are vacationing in the Golden Triangle, visiting Delhi, Agra, Jaipur and Udaipur in northern India.

I stayed at the Crowne Plaza Today Gurgaon (that's the official name of the hotel) when I first arrived in India in May.  Unfortunately, I was sick most of the time then.  Now I'm fully acclimated. 

New Delhi seems  so much more orderly than Hyderabad.  The drivers stay in their lanes most of the time and they don't honk their horns so much.  We didn't see any gigantic holes in the ground, and very few abandoned, unfinished buildings.  Plus, compared to a few months ago, the landscape was much greener.  What I thought was a DMZ turned out to be a horse-pasture.

Our flight arrived around midnight, but the luggage and driver both showed up quickly.  Heading to the hotel, we noticed many processions of young men dressed in orange, carrying these yoke-like  things.  Turns out there's a big Shiva festival on August 8.  For the next several days, we continued to see similar processions, accompanied by blaring music, and also noticed that many women wore orange.  Kind of like the wearing of the green for St. Patrick's day.

We stayed up waaay too late in the bar with a Brit named Mick.  Next morning, Steve enjoyed the best shower of his life with the Rainforest Shower (kind of like the Commando 450 that Kramer bought in that Seinfeld episode, only used to wash elephants).  We thought we'd take a quick tour of the major sights before heading out to Agra.  Unfortunately, even on Saturday, we got bogged down in traffic.  Delhi is hosting the Commonwealth Games in a few months, and there are a lot of "diversions" (detours) due to construction.

Nevertheless, we visited the India Gate, which is a monument to the soldiers who died in World War I.  It's pretty impressive, kind of like the Arc de Triomphe.  Since it's a major tourist attraction, there were lots of hawkers, including our first snake charmer.  Steve is scared by snakes and is completely intolerant of hawkers, so this was not his favorite scene.  I am fascinated by everything and everyone, enjoying the people more than the monument.  This will be a theme for the whole journey.

More tomorrow.