India-Day 1: Delhi

So, India’s a big, populated, crowded, and generally crazy country. People have been traveling there for ages, but maybe not in the droves that hit up Thailand or Vietnam. Thus, as part of the country introduction, the good old Lonely Planet guidebook includes a list of scams to avoid. We arrived in Delhi at three in the morning, as India seems to be inconveniently located in the middle of East Asia and Europe. We were staying with family friends of Danthemanstan, but didn’t want to interrupt them at 4 am. Our initial plan was to just sleep/relax at the airport. Well, Delhi’s airport is the sparsest of any airport I have been to recently, especially so considering it’s the capital of the second most populous country in the world. We decided to try go to a cheap hotel near the airport to catch half a night’s rest. Bad idea.
As recommended in the book, we got a pre-paid taxi to the hotel. It should been maybe ten to fifteen minutes. So after twenty or more, I started pushing the pre-paid taxi helper (who was riding along) to stop and go back to where the hotel should have been. He claimed that metro construction made the hotel inaccessible. At this point I realized he was riding along solely to scam us. I had this impression when he initially insisted that we were “friends”. So he took us to an “official” Indian tourist office. I went inside, they (supposedly) helped me find a hotel by calling up some in the guidebook. Of course, as the book suggested, he was most likely calling someone in another room. When I got quoted $350 for a room (and not at the Delhi Hilton) I had had enough, and went back to the taxi. We demanded to be taken to any hotel nearby. We were taken (at this point over an hour into the ordeal) to a street that offered rooms at ten to twenty times what they should have cost, so we kept on saying no. Soon enough it was six, and the metro was opened, so we just had them drop us off at a metro station. As he dropped us off, clearly not getting any of the scam commission that the “taxi helper” had promised him, the driver busted out his English and told us next time to get a hotel reservation. He was right, but then again, he certainly could have just taken us to the address to which we paid be taken.

We killed some early morning time walking around the major government area (Rajpath) in New Delhi. We then made our way to see Anapalm and Alka. They are both Indian, but lived in DC for a long time, and Danthemanstan went to school with their children. They had both just moved back (like still unpacking) to Delhi, where Anapalm was starting a new job working for the World Bank. They had a gorgeous, spacious apartment and set us up in a guest room with its own bathroom. They were incredibly gracious and it was wonderful to be able to stay with them.

The really great event of the day, though, was to go to chaat store with them. They needed to get some snacks and chutneys for a dinner they were having (and just in general), so all four piled into an auto-rickshaw (auto for short) and went to one of the famous chains. Anapalm was a great host and showed us how to eat the best chaat the proper way. Chaat is an outrageously delicious snack that is a fried dough ball with chutneys or salad like mixtures put inside of the dough ball. The fillings as well as the size and consistency of the dough balls vary greatly. Getting the filling in the dough ball and not over yourself is hard at first, but we learned quickly. The fillings we had were spicy and sweet at the same time, with a biting tamarind flavor. We gorged ourselves while Alka shopped. After enjoying some great take-out and some tasty leftovers, we hit the hay early after our first day in India to make up for the mess of the morning.