Namaste India

Our first 24 hours in India were spent with only the clothes on our back. Our flight was delayed in Melbourne due to a thunderstorm and we had to sprint to make our connection in Singapore. We were warned in advance that our luggage wouldn’t make the connection and much to our surprise we were given 4,000 Rupees each (about $100 Cdn) for the inconvenience. We were actually quite happy with Jet Airways (India’s budget airline). Believe it or not even the meal was good, a nice spicy curried fish.
We arrived at an obscenely early hour of the morning and were greeted by the hotel “boy” who whisked us off to our hotel. The first thing we noticed was the Indian drivers’ liberal use of the horn. Even when approaching a vacant intersection it gets hammered a couple of times. Winding through the side streets to our hotel we were a little nervous about our chosen neighbourhood. Open fires in the streets, stray dogs, and everything just looking like it needed a good scrubbing. Fortunately our hotel room turned out to exceed our expectations (I think our expectations were low having read a whole lot of shoddy hotel reviews prior to arriving). The complimentary dental hygiene kit was especially appreciated considering we wouldn’t see our luggage for another 24 hours.
Try as we may, we were unable to sleep past the crack of dawn (which was only a couple hours away anyway) because of the symphony of barking dogs, beeping cars, and muffler-less vehicles that clattered up from the streets below. We set out to explore Delhi on foot, despite the autorickshaw driver that stalked us for the first kilometre of our walk. I’ve heard that India can be a bit of a “sensory overload” at times and I would have to say that is a gross understatement. At times the only thing that prevented me from stopping a staring with my mouth agape was the fact that there were people everywhere hassling us to buy stuff. If we kept on moving we kept the hassling to a minimum. We even had a guy offer to clean our ears for us!?? He had a rather tired looking Q-tip poking out of his hat band; needless to say we declined. Everywhere we went, people stared at us; a behaviour we can expect for the entire trip I think. Our walk brought us to the “hub” of Delhi, Connaught Place. We were both expecting to encounter some semblance of a CBD- a few skyscrapers, some more polished looking streets perhaps, but quickly discovered that our neighbourhood was a good reflection of what most of the city looked like. We managed to find a clean enough restaurant for lunch where we were seated just below the cricket match playing on TV. We figured this was a strategic move so that the patrons didn’t have to crane their necks to stare at us during the commercial breaks. After lunch we booked some train tickets and managed to visit a couple of the bazaars.
We took the metro back home at dusk. I was a little apprehensive of doing the walk through our neighbourhood after dark but we were met with a pleasant surprise when we discovered that the streets turned into a lively night market.
The unpleasant surprise was that our luggage had not been delivered, and the airport staff were refusing to answer the phone. There was some urgency in the matter due to the fact that we were leaving on a very early train the next morning and we didn’t want our luggage chasing us around India on the back of some camel. We finally got through to the lost luggage counter at 2am and managed to get a taxi out to the airport, pick up our bags, and squeeze in a little nap before leaving for the train at 5:30.