Day 11: Delhi

“You knew in five minutes, but I knew in a sentence...”
-The Arcade Fire, “Old Flame”

Locations: Delhi

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2050741&l=5fce5&id=1101094

Temperature: 97

Morale: 6

Spinning: The Arcade Fire - The Arcade Fire EP, The Arcade Fire - Funeral, St. Vincent - Marry Me (this album gets better and better every time I listen to it), The Thermals - The Body, the Blood, the Machine

Reading: Lonely Planet

Talking: Condescendingly to touts who are trying to screw me.

What's next (I think): Bundi (Rajasthan)

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Sometime during the night in my Delhi hotel room, the A/C shut off. By 7am, my room was hot. How can a sealed hotel room heat up over night? Unbelievable.

I got up around 7:30 and immediately told the manager about my A/C problem. The problem, which in the end involved a simple flipping of the circuit breaker switch, somehow took two hours to fix. Luckily I wasn't there to watch the “progress”—I left the hotel before 8:00 and went to an (air-conditioned) internet cafe to try to set up an Indian Railways account and purchase a ticket to Bundi for the following day.

I was successful in setting up my account, but not at logging in. As I found out the next day, the site was down all day on Aug. 28, but of course there was nothing on the website acknowledging that. It just said my user name or password was incorrect, which was very frustrating given that I knew they were, in fact, correct. Anyhow, I threw in the towel and walked to the train station to book my ticket the old-fashioned way.

It turned out that the only direct train that went to Bundi left Delhi at 8pm each day and arrived in Bundi the next morning. I said I would take a seat on the one that left that evening at 8pm, but of course it was full. So I bought a ticket to Jaipur for the following morning; I’d then catch a bus from Jaipur to Bundi. The train fare from Delhi to Jaipur was Rs 450 for the 5hr trip.

I headed back to my hotel to see if my A/C was fixed, but of course it wasn't. So I took the opportunity to take some of my clothes to be laundered. You see, there are two categories of clothes on trips like this one: clothes that are clean enough that they can be worn into the shower, washed in the shower, rung out, and put back on, and clothes that are so dirty that nothing but an actual machine wash can save them. My blue collared shirt (the same one that I wore in the Middle East and in Senegal), my zip off pants (ditto), and a couple other articles of clothing hovered in the first category for the first week and a half of my trip, but after Amritsar and Chandigarh they were now fully in the second category.

The problem was, I planned to go into a mosque that morning, so I couldn't be without my zip offs (unless I wanted to wear my jeans, but I preferred not to die of heat stroke, so they weren't really an option), so I left my blue collared shirt and a couple other items to be laundered during the day while I mucked around Delhi, and wore my disgustingly dirty zip offs.

By this time my A/C was fixed, so I left my hotel and caught a cycle rickshaw to Old Delhi. I specifically bargained to be taken to the Red Fort for Rs 20, but when we got to Old Delhi the rickshaw driver said he wasn't allowed down Chandni Chowk, the main street in Old Delhi that leads to the Red Fort, which was annoying because he agreed to take me to the Red Fort when he knew all along that he couldn't. Let the lying begin.

So I got out and begrudgingly paid the guy, and set off walking toward the Red Fort, which was built by Shah Jahan (the Mughal emperor who also built the Taj Mahal) in the mid-1600s. On the way, I started sweating. Also on the way, I passed a food joint that had Indians spilling out of it, so I figured it must be good. It turned out to be an Indian fast food restaurant called Haridwar’s. I got a couple paneer pakoras and a samosa and kept walking.

By now I had walked almost a kilometer and I was dripping with sweat. But then, on the horizon, like a mirage in the desert, I saw the international oasis of coolness (in both senses of the word): McDonald's.

McDonald's is cool because it is American. But it is really cool because it is always air-conditioned, no matter what country you are in. I went inside and ordered a chicken sandwich (with cheese! Why don't they do that in the US?) and a Fanta. My food took about 3 minutes to make, and when it was ready the cashier brought it out to where I was sitting and apologized for “the delay.” The McDonald's on Fulton Street could learn a thing or two from the one on Chandni Chowk. Anyway, after about 15 minutes of sitting under the air conditioning vent, I was cooled down, and I resumed my walk to the Red Fort. Why didn't I just get another rickshaw? Because I had already paid for one that was supposed to take me directly to the Red Fort, and I'm stubborn.

I got to the Red Fort, bought my foreigner admission ticket for Rs 100 (Indian admission cost Rs 10), and proceeded through the metal detector (which went off when I walked through due to my camera, but know one cared. So why do you have a metal detector?) and into the fort.

The ratio of Indian to foreign tourists was about the same at the Red Fort as at the Golden Temple in Amritsar and the Nek Chand rock garden in Chandigarh: about 75:1. I am not making this up. I waited in line behind about 50 tourists to enter the fort, and not one of them was foreign.

The thing about Indian tourists is that they don't pay much attention to what they're looking at. Maybe they all know the history of every building inside the Red Fort, but I'm guessing they don't, and not one of them bothered to look at the signs that had information about each building written in both English and Hindi. They just kind of strolled around the place. And they didn't even take many photos, although most of them had cameras. I don't really get it. If they were just out for a casual stroll, why pay admission and why stand outside in the heat of the day?

One group of guys from Chennai asked me to take their picture in front of the Fort. We got to talking and I asked where they were from, and they said “Tamil Nadu,” and I said “Oh, so from Chennai, or Pondicherry?” And they said “Yes, from Chennai, but how did you know that Chennai was in Tamil Nadu?” Obviously, expectations of Americans' knowledge of geography are quite high.

Walking around the Red Fort in the 97 degree heat, I realized something about Indians: they almost never sweat. In two weeks here I can count the number of sweating Indians I have seen on one hand (and I can count the number of minutes that I have not been sweating on the other). I don't want to get too deep into the whole physiology of sweating thing, but why do Indians sweat so much less? Is it because they are used to the heat and are actually less hot than I am? Or are they are just as hot but somehow their bodies don't need to sweat to cool themselves down? Or is it because they drink less water than I do and thus have nothing to sweat out? If I came to India in June, when it is 45 degrees Celsius instead of 35 degrees, would they be sweating then?

Ahh, questions to which we may never know the answers. I'll have to settle for pondering the meaning of life, which seems simple in comparison.

Anyhow, back to the Red Fort. Built by Shah Jahan, it took ten years to complete (1638-1648), but the emperor never actually moved his capital from Agra to here because he was deposed and imprisoned (in Agra) by Aurangzeb, who was none other than his own son. Nice.

The place is better described in pictures, so I'll be brief. Inside Lahore Gate (the external gate that points toward Lahore, now in Pakistan) you first come to a row of bazaars that used to sell items that the royal family might want to buy (silk, gold, jewelry). Today they sell tourist junk.

After that, you get to the main section of the fort, which houses multiple large, impressive buildings that were used for everything from worshiping to living to resolving disputes. I'll save descriptions of each building for my photo captions.

After leaving the Red Fort I bargained for a cycle rickshaw (Rs 10) to Jama Masjid, which is the largest mosque in India and was also built by Shah Jahan. But when I arrived at the mosque it was noon, and only Muslims were allowed inside until 2pm. So I strolled around to find an internet place to kill time, but there was none—instead, I found a place that sold Fanta and I bought one.

Right after I put away my money belt, a cute little girl pulled on my arm and pointed to a juice box and asked me to buy two for her friend and her. They were Rs 5 each, so I said “What's a quarter” and bought them. I got a great picture in return.

But I also picked an annoying little kid who followed me around for the next two hours (I am not exaggerating) asking me for money. I didn't give him any, and in fact I threatened to hit him with my Fanta bottle when he kept following me. In the end a police officer had to hit him with a stick to get him to leave. Yikes. I guess I should have hit him with my Fanta bottle. It was much softer.

In the two hours that the annoying kid was following me around, I went back to Haridwar's and got some more Indian fast food, but by the time 2pm rolled around I didn’t even feel like going back to the mosque, so I took an auto-rickshaw to the Bahai Temple on the other side of the city.

The rickshaw to the temple cost Rs 100 for a 30 minute ride. I did have to bargain a bit to get that price, but it wasn't very hard. You see, it's low season for tourism in India, which means I have considerable bargaining power. For example, here's how this particular session went:

Me: How much to Bahai Temple?

Them: Oooo, very far. 300 rupees.

Me: 300 rupees? Are you on drugs?

(They give me a missing-teeth grin that says, “Damn, I tried to screw you really hard, but you caught me.”)

Me: I paid 40 rupees to get from Paharganj to here (actually, I had paid Rs 20 for a cycle rickshaw, but auto-rickshaws tend to cost about twice as much, so I wasn’t really lying), and this is only a little over twice that distance. So I'll pay you 100 rupees, take it or leave it.

Them: 100 rupees? No, no, not enough. Very far!

Me: Ok, fine.

(I walk away.)

Them: Wait wait ok ok your price!

So now you know the best and worst things about low season in India: bargaining power, and gallons of sweat.

The Bahai Temple was beautiful, as expected, though not as beautiful as the Bahai Temple in Haifa, Israel. It is shaped like a blooming white lotus, and is surrounded by pools and formal gardens. I planned on going inside and sitting down for a while and doing some thinking, but when I walked in (after waiting in line behind about 200 Indian tourists—again, I was the only foreigner) I found out that the place wasn't air-conditioned, and was actually hotter than the outside air. So that plan went out the window—I stayed inside for just long enough to remember the place and then went back outside to get my shoes, which I had left at the booth outside the entrance.

Getting my shoes back was miserable. There were about 50 Indians pushing and shoving and rubbing up against me, and even though they weren't sweating, I was, and having them on top of me made me even hotter. It took me about seven minutes to get my shoes because there was so much pushing and shoving and jockeying for position going on. Isn’t the Bahai religion is about peace? Cool out! The last time I saw a bunch of people being this disorderly was in Senegal, waiting in line for the ferry from Dakar to Ile de Goree. And once again, I find myself comparing India to Africa. Uh oh.

After the Bahai Temple I took an auto-rickshaw to Humayun's Tomb. Humayun was a Mughal emperor in the mid-1500s, and his Persian-born wife built this tomb for him. As with other Mughal tombs, my biggest question upon seeing the towering monument was “All this for a dead body?”

While at Humayun's I met a girl from Beijing who had been working at an NGO in Chandigarh for the past few months and was now traveling around India until she had to go back to China. We talked for a while about our travels, and then, with a wink, she asked me where I got the “Free Tibet” shirt that I was wearing. Oh, you mean you don't like it? I was planning on wearing it while I applied for my Chinese visa!

From Humayun's Tomb I planned to take an auto-rickshaw to Safdarjang's Tomb, and then if I had time to Qutb Minar, the site of a monument to Islam in India and the first mosque ever built in India . I didn't know if I could make it to Qutb Minar before it closed, especially if it took time to find a rickshaw. But my auto-rickshaw driver to Safdarjang's tomb offered to take me to Safdarjang's, then to Qutb Minar, and then back to my hotel, all for Rs 250 (Qutb Minar was a few kilometers outside the city, so the entire trip would take over an hour not including stops at each of the sites). I almost said “Done” but then I figured I should try to bargain, and I got him down to Rs 200. Five dollars for my own personal auto-rickshaw for over two hours. God this place is cheap.

Safdarjang's Tomb was much like Humayun's, only slightly more advanced because it was built a couple centuries later. But, in the end, it was just a big, Mughal tomb. Take a look at the photos.

Qutb Minar was a bit different, seeing as it isn’t a big monument to a dead person. The main sight is a 73m high pillar that was built to mark the Islamic victory over the last Hindu kingdom in Delhi in 1193. Also on the grounds is the first mosque built in India—the Quwwat-ul-Islam Masjid, which means The Might of Islam Mosque (clearly these people had no inferiority complex). The mosque was built on the site of former Hindu temples—in fact, an inscription over the East gate says that this mosque was built with the materials obtained from “demolishing 27 idolatrous temples.” Yeah, knock down all those infidels' temples—that's helpful.

My trusty rickshaw driver took me from Qutb Minar back to my hotel, where I found that my air conditioning had broken again. The best part is, even though I knew that the circuit breaker switch need only be flipped, it took the hotel manager almost an hour to flip it. If I'm back in Delhi later in the trip, I will not be staying at Hotel Shelton.

Oh, I forgot to mention that today was the Raksha Bandhan (Brother/Sister) festival in India, during which the relationship between brothers and sisters is celebrated and sisters tie Rakhi bracelets onto their brothers' wrists. Also, brothers and sisters feed each other sweets. Wait, please tell me that is not where we got the idea of the bride and groom feeding each other wedding cake! If so, that is disturbing.

After I mailed my stuff I went and got dinner at a local restaurant in Paharganj. I had a tasty mutton dish that was basically chunks of mutton and peppers and onions in a spicy curry. I also got paneer naan (flatbread stuffed with cheese), which is really, really good. I think my favorite thing about this trip so far has been the food.

I had to get up early the next morning to catch my train to Jaipur, so I went to bed soon after dinner Luckily the air conditioning was pumping by now and the room was freezing (just the way I like it), so I went right to sleep.