Delhi

We turned up in Delhi on a train 4 hours late (fitting for our last train in India) at almost midnight, in the rain. We were very happy to have booked a place and went straight to bed! The next day was similarly rainy so we spent the time playing cards and doing mundane stuff like washing and buying a Nepal Lonely Planet and ringing the ATO. Woohoo! Actually Scott and I were sight-seen-out so we declined to go on a whizzbang taxi tour of Delhi on the last day there, when the rain cleared up a bit. We weren’t too upset – the Red Fort sounded nice but we didn’t mind missing the lengthy excursion to the taxi driver’s sister’s friend’s shop. So pretty much Scott and I saw nothing of Delhi in our 2 days there, but it seemed like a nice enough place! We were happy to hang out with Drew and Chris for our last couple of days together, before they headed to Eygpt and we headed to Varanasi, en route to Nepal.

We did, however, spend our last night together by going out on the town. We saw a show that went through some of the major folk dances in India, including a harvest dance, a demon vs god dance with extravangant costumes, a drum dance and a stick dance where the guy did impossible things with an oversized diabolo. We’d thought it might be a bit touristy but it was actually really entertaining and well worth it. Forgot to take our camera though. After the dancing, we splashed out on dinner at a revolving restaurant, 24 floors up. It was a strange experience – fun to be in a posh place with an amazing view over nightime Delhi, and the food was delicious – but Scott escpecially found it a bit of a culture shock to be somewhere so decadent in a country with so much need. We’d spent 5 months eating simply, spending little and dealing with everyday Indians like beggars and rickshaw drivers and tea-sellers, so to be suddenly surrounded by rich Indians spending on one meal what could feed another family for months – was weird and made us feel a bit guilty too, wondering why we were there. Although the truth of it is that spending less on that meal wouldn’t have meant we would give more to beggars or something, it just felt out of place. Anyway, we still had a nice meal and it was pretty fun watching the floor move!

Then finally, after a fun 3 weeks in which we all had (mostly) a good time and nobody killed each other, we bid goodbye to Chris and Drew and set off on our train to Varanasi, having seen pretty much nothing of Delhi but not minding all that much – we were getting pretty sick of the constant harassment in touristy places. It wasn’t so bad at JITM when we worked there, the locals just wanted to say hi and sometimes ask questions or show us their homes, and the teachers at the college were really friendly, but in tourist places there are so many people trying to get you to buy things or give them money or come look at something or ask you your life story or tell you theirs, that it can get tiring and you’re not so inclined to go exploring. It’s not a good attitude because it stops you from giving your attention to genuinely nice people, and from getting to know some interesting new people, but in the end you just become that way in India to stop yourself going crazy. It hits you sometimes, when you just walk past a crippled beggar without really seeing him, or wave your hand in dismissal at a scruffy child saying "one rupee", or tell a rickshaw driver to get lost when they pull up beside you to ask if you need a rickshaw. It hits you how easy it is to become complacent about things that might have made you cry when you first arrived. Maybe it’s the ubiquity of the poverty, or maybe it’s getting sick of the invasion of your space, or maybe it’s because our efforts to help at JITM seemed more like banging our heads against a wall, or maybe it’s because we’ve been eating similar food and using squat toilets and squeezing in overcrowded buses/trains and sleeping in flea-ridden beds too, so we don’t feel as different from the people in the street as we should. And I think that’s why we’re happy to be going to Nepal – we need some space, and some perspective.