I wake up after my 1 hour snooze and am ready to go explore New Delhi – as long as a 2 hour taxi tour before my flight counts as actual exploration. I pay in advance for the taxi, its crazy overpriced, but I figure its better to have a trusted driver with all my luggage than take a random off the street which is how I rolled in Nairobi sans the stuff. We start driving on the streets which are actually better paved than the potholed-speckled freeways of LA. There is an immense fog which I suspect why all the cars have their hazards on while driving. What really strikes me about Delhi is that there is so much English and all license plates, store fronts, and billboards are written in Roman characters. If there was Hindi written on anything, it was preceded or succeeded by English. I suppose I expected the signs to look like Cairo but with Hindi instead of Arabic. I thought I would have a fun challenge trying to learn license plate numbers in Hindi or numbers of prices, but Delhi is much more westernized than I expected. It’s also nothing like Slumdog Millionaire - ignorant expectation, I know – but the capital of India has just a small amount of litter although the smog is contrastingly thick (I kind of wonder if the fog is actually smog but don’t bother asking the driver). I also pictured the fabled streets of India filled with cows, trucks, cars, and chaos like the pictures I’ve seen but Delhi at least has pretty functional European style roads, round-abouts, and manicured shrubbery around the roadways.
I love driving past the diverse scenes. The autorikshaws (sp?) are cute little green cloth covered vehicles enough for about 2-3 people to ride. They ride in the far left alongside bicycle taxis. Swerving between my taxi are other cars and medium-sized cargo trucks filled with produce and people hanging on the back. On the streets I see women that are either dressed modernly or in traditional Indian attire, which I find interesting in the same vicinity. Since its about 7:30am now, children are dressed in full uniform walking to school. Another random thing I find interesting is the fact that Pepsi dominated Delhi as opposed to Coca Cola having a stronghold. There is also a presence of other brands like Nokia, Citibank, ING, and Gold’s gym strangely enough. The brand Tata is also everywhere – on cell phone billboards, signs, and painted on the back of nearly every produce truck. We in the U.S. would not know the Tata name, but the name stems from the billionaire owner based in India. I know this because Bill has mentioned that the Tata family has been a supporter of Operation Smile, which is always nice.
Of course Delhi also has its forms of poverty, although not as prevailing as I might have imagined since India has a tremendously high poverty level, it is still present. I saw some individuals in ragged clothing on the sides of street. Sometimes the obvious homeless population sold some products on the sidewalk, other instances they huddled around a fire, or just sat there. The rundown houses, not far from the beautiful shops and wealthier homes, were held by decomposing red bricks and what appeared to be like fabric or old clothing that served as roofing. Since I was staying with Operation Smile at a high-end hotel and quickly driving through the city center, I do imagine there are more impoverished areas in the city that I entirely missed. Much like many other cities, there are emaciated wild dogs running around Delhi.
Since it is early in the morning on Monday, most of the monuments and museums were closed. I did get a drive-by tour of the Parliament center, Lotus temple (so gorgeous), Gate of India, and the Indian Museum of Modern Art. The expensive taxi ride lasts about 1.5 hours. At the airport drop off, the driver informs me that I owe more money since the trip was 90km and I had only paid for 80km despite the fact that I was adamant in the beginning that we not go over 80km. I suppose between different countries, taxi drivers are scheming creatures and hardly seem different.
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