India Part I: You say Mogul, I say Mughal

And so it was that, with bellies full of delicious noodles and ferns, with heads full of nervous anticipation, we boarded our flight to Delhi. Malaysia had been very good to us; was India the beginning of the real "adventure"?

After disembarking the plane, one of the first things we noticed was that all of the immigration officials who were supposed to let us into the country were chatting with each other. Eventually enough of us gathered that they surmised it was time to get to work and they slowly made their way back to their desks to let us through. We hopped in our cab and got our first glimpse of Delhi.

On our first cab ride, many thoughts passed through our minds: "dusty," "lots of people," "is that a cow in the road?" "boy am I glad I'm not driving," and so forth. Kristen made the observation that to travel in India it helps to have a healthy sense of humor. Over the next few days we got to know the city of Delhi a bit better. And it turns out that it's a wonderful place. We visited during the Commonwealth Games, sort of like the Olympics for the British Commonwealth. So things were busy. But then, it's safe to say that things are always busy in Delhi. In fact, our first visit to a museum was a literally unforgettable experience.

We visited the Indira Ghandi Museum, at the home of the former prime minister who was tragically assassinated by dissidents. We have no guess of how many people were visiting the museum with us, but let's just say if we told you, you probably wouldn't believe us. The crowd was organized as basically a solid line/mass of people that constantly moved through each room of the museum. We were given the privilege of being allowed to read the descriptions, but the rest of the people were ordered to keep moving and if we wanted to move along we'd have to push our way into the river of people and just keep going until we wanted to get off again. But, after that experience, things were much less crowded and it would be interesting to go back to Delhi in a few months and see if things are different. We suspect the city had been 'cleaned up' for the benefit of the games.

With all the news about outsourcing jobs to India, it's easy to think that a lot of Indians speak English fluently, but we had a few instances in Delhi when the good old language barrier popped up again. When we were first talking to our driver who took us sightseeing for a day, Kristen asked him if he could point out one of the new Tata cars if we passed one (the Nano). He replied by saying, "No, you are in New Delhi". We were so glad he cleared that up, because we had been thinking we were in New Tata. We also had lunch for a total of US $1.50 at a paratha stand in Old Delhi where it was clear that no one spoke English. We communicated by pointing and saying what few words we knew (fortunately most of them involve food). And we were treated with one of our favorite meals in Delhi.

Delhi also has some really nice restaurants. We decided to splurge and go to "the best Indian restaurant in the world" according to the iPod of a very amusing pair of British couples sitting next to us. Bill and Chelsea Clinton ate there and everything. The food was 40 times what we paid for that lunch in Old Delhi and we didn't like it as much, though it was still good. Their big thing is kebabs. We realized our big thing is parathas (a stuffed wheat tortilla) and it became our go to food when we were in a place where we wanted to eat and no one spoke English or if we were in a rush.

We spent our time in Delhi wandering around a lot of Mogul ruins, mosques and forts. They were so beautiful! We had both heard about these Mogul peopile but have to confess we didn't know much of anything. We learned just a bit more- they were a Muslim empire that came down from Afghanistan and ruled northern India. And they have beautiful architecture. They are the people that brought us the Taj Mahal (more on that later).







These Mogul sites also provided us with a respite from the hectic and dusty city streets. They were very tranquil sites with lots of green around them. And lots of Indian tourists enjoying their own patrimony- it was great to see people enjoying their own cultural heritage. In fact, there were so many Indian tourists, that it seemed like there were hardly any Westerners. We were such a novelty that people kept asking to have their picture taken with us. Why, we don't really understand. We can only imagine what people say about their photos when they get home to show people...

After a few days, we took a train to Jaipur, which we will feature in our next post...