Indiaaaaaaaaaaaaa…Incredible Indiaaaaaaa!

28-07-2013
A few hours of sleep would have been great, particularly after this last crazy week, before our departure.
We are in Paris, at Sara’s grandma’s house, who kindly took us in and cook us our first meal since our departure from Portugal. Veal chops with garlic and spaghetti. With some french cheeses saved for the end of the meal. Our palates so far have not endured any deprival! And our intestines are still working as a charm!

Right now it’s about 7h18 and we’re about to leave headed to Charles de Gaulle airport, to catch our flight to Deli, with a stopover at Ryad. Sara’s grandma sent us off, asking us not to go too far, telling us that in Portugal our lives are much better. We don’t disagree with her notion, we simply want to reinforce it!  =)
Off we go!

28-07-2013 to 29-07-2013
11h25. Saudia Airlines, 777. Pratically at the back of the airplane, middle seats, squeezed between an indian lady and an arab man.

Strike 1 : the arab man’s personal entertainment system isn’t working, so he’s changed seats. One down, lady to go! :)
Strike 2 : either the indian lady’s screen isn’t working or she doesn’t like Diogo, either ways…she’s gone too! :)
We have the 4 middle seats all to ourselves!!

With one hour flight time, we receive our first lunch: curry chicken rice with cashew nuts, cinnamon-carrot cake with white chocolate topping, tomato and cucumber salad, smoked salmon salad, bread and a mini-Mars to finish it off.

The waiting at the airport was tiring, but pretty quiet and rater musical….Halaaa hakbah!! :)
We will particularly recall the rugs for the daily prayers, the images indicating “Gentlemen” and “Ladies” for the WC (no bodies, only heads almost fully covered in the ladies case) and the damn construction works in our terminal that didn’t stop all night long while we were in the waiting area (right next to the noise).

We slept for a few minutes at a time we would say, until check-in began! We lost track of time cause we decided to update some things on the laptop and we checked-in rather late at the gate, but we made it and we were IN!

05h20. Saudia Airlines, 777.

Siting almost at the tail of the airplane. Left row seats, with an indian man on our right side, by the aisle. The flight was practically filled with stary-eyes indians and the french lady we met in Ryad who was going to teach english in Delhi for 3 week (she also flew with us from Paris to  Ryad). Good luck with that!

After 4 flight hours, mostly spent sleeping, we had breakfast with croissant, juice, omelet, a sort of arab-style spanish tortilla (pretty close) and sausages. Shortly after we finally landed in New Delhi.
29-07-2013
We were so tired arriving at New Delhi, with so little sleep!
We got our luggage pretty quick from the baggage claim and proceeded to the metro express straight to New Delhi station. Just followed the metro indications when leaving the airport building.
Of course we got immediately approached by a neatly dressed indian young guy that asked if we needed transportation.
It took a while to convince him to go away but we never stopped walking – best strategy!
We heard there are a lot of scams at airports, train and bus stations, where they will tell you your hotel is full and you need to go by taxi with them to go to another hotel.
Common sense should always be the rule.
The airport express to New Delhi was 150 rupees each.

Right now, as we are writing about the walk from the train station to our hotel (Raj New Delhi) we are fully recovered, but the truth is that it was a not so pleasant and exhausting experience. In a few words: humidity, excrements, urine, honking, overall confusion and a general bad smell are the things we will most recall from this walk.

At the end of the day we ended up dining at the hotel. We had some chicken curry, naan and plain rice and it all worked out fine!

30/07/2013
We’re done with our sweet little filled-with-cockroaches hotel, so we finally made it.
We only paid for 1 night instead of 3 nights and we think the hotel is chasing us for the other two nights, cause they were calling our taxi driver! Maybe they just want to tell us we were fantastic guests (we did agree with the guy at the reception from the day before to stay one night only, but maybe the replacement guy today didn’t know about our arrangement!).
While we took care of our arrangement for the stay, we also agreed with the hotel to book a driver to do some sightseeing with us on the following morning. He gave us two prices 740 rupees (approx 9 euros) for half a day and 1040 rupees (approx 13 euros) for a full day.

We had a “heavy-level” morning with our nepalese taxi driver Dev Rana! He gave us important information like New Delhi has 14 million people and 10% of indians are good, while remaining 90% are cheaters… people are very money driven unlike in Nepal, according to Dev.
A day with Dev ended up costing us 1000 rupees but we paid an additional 80 rupees for parking (we felt this was more like a tip). But we liked Dev so much that we ended up paying for his breakfast and lunch with us!
We had breakfast at Mcdonalds and lunch of tandoori chicken at less than 250 rupees per person.

As far as the visit went, we got to visit Ghandhi’s mausoleum in a peaceful littlle park (where we had to enter barefeet), the Red Fort (being hand painted with red clay by several men, to make sure the fort keeps being red!), the amazing but dirty as hell and crazy street market of Chandni Chowk and we passed by Connaught Place (bought a couple of books and had lunch there).
As far as sightseeing goes, India can be a rough place we have to admit. But we’re sure that culturally speaking we will be amazed along the way.
Delhi is a mess. People everywhere, along with dirt, sewers and animals of all sort.
To get a clearer image of what things are like here, imagine trash and “cow-cars” everywhere, where you have to horn for your life to get around in the traffic (better yet Dev took care of this part for us).
Crossing streets by foot is an amazing challenge, you just have to sort of close your eyes and hope no cars, bycocles, cows or other animal vehicles will run into you.
The street smell gets in your nose and doesn’t get out that easily…and it isn’t necessarily the best smell you can imagine.
Also part of the adventure. :)
The ATM was pretty good though. A small 1sqm room guarded by a policeman. It was quite good but your body needs to be able to withstand hypothermic temperatures if you plan to take longer than 2 minutes inside!
You must understand that AC is really important and whenever they can they push it! Push it heavy-level!!!
So as for as humidity goes…for christ’s sake we hope to be able to endure Mumbai and Goa’s weather cause we expect heavy-level humidity there!
So now Dev has dropped us in the Old Delhi Station. We waited for the train in an AC waiting room. More like a fan waiting room, but it was ok.

Dev_Rana_at_New_Delhi_Station

We were expecting the train not to be much of a shock, but then again this is India! The train station looked scary!

Our dinner today should be only some cookies since we will only get to Jaipur at 8pm. Tomorrow we will get on a 10-hour night train to Jaisalmer.
Again…so far so good.
Our stomachs and intestines seem to be handling it pretty well so far.

Notes of the day:

“Heavy level” – Dev Rana’s expression for “really damn good”
“Better conceal than reveal” – expressão para descrever Riade
“In New Delhi, you must horn for your life” – Sara’s expression upon seeing the way people drive in Delhi
Crazy people – the way Dev Rana described New Delhi residents. In his word: “Crazy people, these indians are so crazy” then he started to laugh a little crazy himself!
A lot of busy – Dev’s overall expression to describe the chaos of New Delhi
Good computer engineer – Dev referring to Diogo when he kindly taught him on to handle memory storage on his smartphone
Indiaaaaaaaaaaaaa…Incredible Indiaaaaaaa! – link