This is the view from our hotel the morning after we arrived. It seemed safest to check it out from afar!


Guess what?

We're alive and in Delhi. They told us that wireless Internet was not
working in the hotel, so Jasleen is writing from their decrepit
computers. I just plugged mine in and it worked perfectly. Evan, the
drawing looks great, and I'll give you all more photos and stuff in a
bit. We went to the Red Fort and the Ba'hai Temple today and they
were very cool, though the people around us are still the most
exciting (and at times frightening) part of the journey. There is
certainly a lot of poverty here, but it isn't as oppressive as most
people implied... so far. However, the volume of people as well as
how different almost everybody looks from what we're used to is
amazing. Life is definitely a drastic change from what it was 2 days
ago. And, by the way driving here is hilarious! You basically lay on
the horn while bicycles and auto-rickshaws fly towards you while
simultaneously laying on their horns.

So the plan is, we're headed to Jaipur, then Agra from here through
some deal set up through our hotel. It's a little more pricey than
necessary I think, but sometimes haggling here is more a test of
patience than ability. i.e. How many times do I want this lady to
hang up and call back with prices before she finally comes down to the
price that is more fair, but also a relatively insignificant
difference? Or, how much do I want to argue with the cabbie that
there is not actually a "required shopping stop" after we see a
temple? (By the way, this shop had pretty damned amazing things, we
looked at hand stitched pashmina bed sets that were outrageously cool
with elaborate trees and peacocks hand sewn in with beautifully dyed
silk thread. They would cost easily $500 in the states) But the trip
should be fun, we're seeing the required Taj Mahal and various other
forts and fancy looking things and after our two city tour we will go
strait to the train up to Amritsar where we'll meet up with our
friends Sunder Kaur and Hargobind Singh at Hargobind's parent's house.
I think our trip will really pick up after Amritsar when we're out of
the massive cities and also off the beaten track a bit. I don't
particularly like be funneled through Delhi's intricate tourist
network like a cow headed for the slaughter(though obviously not to
the slaughter here, where they hang in the middle of the road), but at
the moment we are just what we look like, rich American tourists who
don't have a damn clue.

So those are my initial impressions I suppose. Delhi really is a lot
of madness mixed in with little pockets of beauty, but I'm not sure
those pockets are worth all of the madness. Ok, Namaste y'all. We'll
update the blog and load pictures from Amritsar and I'll write a more
together picture of how things are going. Love you Mom and Dad and
Evan. If you haven't gotten you're head around the conversion yet,
you guys are 11:30 behind us, so it's 10:45pm here.