Delhi, India

The best part about HUGE cities is the public transportation, and as you can see, Delhi’s is particularly well used.

We stayed with Saurabh in a suburb of Delhi called Dwarka (section 10). We enjoyed being out of the busy downtown for a few days and were excited to watch some locals play cricket from the balcony and sample some homemade chapatti while having dinner with his parents. One night Saurabh took us to experience our first Sikh place of worship called Gurdwara Bangla Sahib and had us excited for our upcoming trip to the Golden Temple.

Another night we drove to Jawaharlal Nehru University for some grub and a nice walk through the campus. Luckily Saurabh had some contacts to get us past the guard gates; something we would not have been prepared for had we bused it in alone. We also visited Hauz Khas Village and met up with one of Saurabh’s friends who runs a traveler’s café that is built on an unorthodox ‘donation only’ model. Around the corner we walked through a park above Deer Park which had some pretty cool old temple ruins that we explored just in time to watch the sunset. Sunsets are different in India because the thick layer of smog blocks most of the refraction so you can look directly at a perfectly shaped circular sun sink into the horizon.

One morning Robin decided to call our travel insurance in fear that she may be hosting a parasite (likely giardia from swimming in Nepal). Within about 2 hours of the call, a local practitioner showed up at Saurabh’s door and prescribed some antibiotics, dehydration tablets, anti-nausea pills, multi vitamin pills, and one more that we can’t recall what it was for. The diagnosis was perhaps a little over the top and we were shocked that we could buy a $2 antibiotic cycle without a proper prescription! The end result of the visit was a casual hand written report that filled an entire page:

Our last afternoon with Saurabh we had a little party with some friends of his. Lucky for us, one of his friends worked for a company that sold cocktail mixes so we had a fun time experimenting with different flavors. We jotted down some insider tips on where to eat and shop and then headed to our hotel in the city. The next few days we spent sightseeing with our first destination being the Lotus Temple (the seventh in a series of Bahith temples that were built around the world). Iniside the temple, you can spend 10 minutes of silence, a rarity in Delhi. The architecture reminded us a lot of the Sydney Opera House, and although it was quite spectacular we also enjoyed getting lost in a nearby park watching kids play cricket and stumbling on our first ever queue of people in India (!!!) on their way to Kalkaji Devi Temple.

Of all the areas we visited we found that our favorite was a rather nice area near Karol Bagh which had somewhat fancier streets and was an interesting contrast to the famous Parantha Wali Gali Street near the Red Fort. Although we were excited about visiting one of the Ghandi memorials and had fun banging the huge peace gong, we hope they can find a way to improve the memorial layout for future visitors so that they can understand more about Ghandi’s life.