Day 2 - Heart of Delhi

For lunch, a group of four of us and the adviser, John, ventured out into the city. We hailed a taxi cab to take us to a local bazaar which was supposed to be 15 minutes away. The driver disagreed however and said, “I don’t know why everybody says that, it’s more like 30 minutes.” Not knowing the city, it was hard for us to tell who was telling the truth – after all it seemed highly plausible that a driver might want to keep us in his car for longer than was necessary. However, since we were on a fixed time schedule, we decided to forgo the bazaar and just get some lunch a bit closer to the hotel. The driver suggested a place called Magdalene, which was cheap and not too spicy. Upon further questioning, however, it turns out that we weren’t hearing him correctly (all 5 of us!) and he was actually speaking about an international restaurant that was in the U.S. Turns out, this restaurant was McDonald’s.

Undaunted, we told him we’d rather have Indian food and he dropped us off at an Indian restaurant. Trouble was, this restaurant was one of the most expensive ones and we really didn’t feel like spending so much coin on the first day here. We decided we’d find our own place and set off walking the streets of Delhi. We saw many things, a lonely dog curled up sleeping on the sidewalk, some apparently homeless people who slept in the corners of the walls surrounding buildings, numerous street vendors hawking sweets, meat, and trinkets. Among all this, there’s also many well-dressed people with nice cellphones and cars. It seems to be such a paradox to have such large groups of rich and poor living with one another.

We found a restaurant named Gola which served us some authentic chicken tandoori, chicken masala, and mutton curry. (The mutton is pictured.) It was overwhelming, exciting, and confusing all at once. 5 Americans sitting at a table in some restaurant in Delhi -- I’m sure we were quite a sight to see.

I hope to do it again tomorrow.