I love the smell of India in the morning. It smells like . . .victory.

Well, not quite.

Onward to India
An appropriate smell has appeared on our journey (by plane) from Istanbul to Delhi: stale vomit. I say appropriate because I expect to come upon smells like this (and probably much worse) in India. It’s good training. I tried hunting for its source at first, then I tried moving my seat, but it seems to have permeated the entire last 15 rows. In all fairness, we’ve also come across some amazing smells from the Indian food people have brought aboard. I’m excited for more of both. Actually, I’m excited for my first meal in Delhi that hopefully smells a lot like the food in the front of the plane. And I’m also curious how iron my stomach is (not very, at least from the few days of stomach problems in Istanbul) and how it will survive its first bout with Delhi belly. It’s not if, it’s when. Jay mentioned that a friend of a friend caught some lifelong parasite in India. Hopefully that’s not in our future. I think that would be the worst punishment of all for me because it would limit what I could eat (ugh!). For now, to try to weather the storm, I’ve begun to do what any sane person would do on an international flight: get drunk on the unlimited free booze to numb my olfactory senses.

The magic of Bollywood has already graced us with its presence in the form of the film “Tashan” on the plane. Wit, bad music, multiple dance numbers, costume changes, a ridiculous but absorbing story, attractive leads, homages to MTV, Hollywood, road movies, Indian culture, and everything but the kitchen sink thrown in . . .Like a first sexual experience, It is impossible to describe it properly without follow-up experience. I’ll just leave it at “amazing.”

The North
What a bizarre first day. It felt busy but we didn’t really do anything. Got my F-2 visa for Korea processed, which was a relief. Had a great first Thali (set meal) including a masala dosa, Dal (lentils in a spicy tomato sauce), nan bread, and various sauces and curries at Bikanerwalla-a huge vegetarian chain. Better meal for $5-6 than we could have gotten for 10 times that in NYC. On the food front, things look good. We met our CS host, who is interesting, but busy. 3 tuk-tuk (motor rickshaw) rides have left us coated in smog. Traffic and the sheer number of people is overwhelming, especially on day one on a few hours sleep the past few nights combined. Looking out the tuk-tuk window isn’t boring at all, as there are a billion stories here, not 7 million like in NYC.

First Impressions:
Lots of begging. Little infrastructure. Looks like a war zone. Thought I’d be prepared for this after visiting Cambodia, but it’s much worse and I can’t drown it in booze like I used to with Jay and Chris (old travel buddies from Korea) in Phnom Pen. Luxury good shops co-exist next to a hole in the ground or ramshackle building/business and nobody blinks. It is constantly difficult to breathe. Thought we might get carbon monoxide poisoning sitting in traffic and die like people die turning a car on in a closed garage. Drove on a crowded overpass over a crowded highway and thought of a river of smog sweeping us forward.

We had suspected our identity had been thieved in Turkey. It’s definite now and steps are being taken to rectify the situation

There is house help where we’re staying. This seems to be fairly common for the middle and upper classes, although we feel guilty asking for anything from Megish (the 14 year old boy worker). Our host, Kaushal, insists on it, and he’s got a point. Kaushal doesn’t live at the apartment we’re staying in (it’s his 2nd house) and he’s paying the kid to look after it, so he might as well help us. Still, we want to give him a token of our appreciation because he won’t take money. There’s roaches here and dirty floors and outside it looks like the 3rd world, but it has some nice interior touches. We’re having a hard time deciding if this is middle or upper class, although our host seems to be doing well for himself and took us to a fancy hotel for drinks.

Speaking of class, one of the more interesting things we talked about with Kaushal (and there were many) was India’s need for a solid middle class if it wants to sustain its growth. Kaushal says that the extremely rich and poor account for far too large a population segment.

Kaushal gave us some great travel suggestions for our time here. Right now we’re planning on 6 weeks. We’ll head to Agra, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, and Udaipur in the north. In the south, we’ll head to Mumbai, then make a stop at one of the beaches in Goa, then head south to Kerala to check out the backwaters in Cochin, stop along another undecided beach further south in Kerala, head up to Mysore and possibly a hill station, then head to the southeast to Pondicherry and a hippie town just south of there, then fly out of Madras (Chennai) and stop in Singapore before heading back to Korea. We were going to try to get to Varanasi, but Kaushal stressed how filthy it is. This is coming from a Hindu (Hindus believe Varanasi to be among the most holy places in the world) and a Delhi resident. If he says Varanasi is much filthier than Delhi (and here is the filthiest place Sue and I have ever been), then we’ll skip it.

A question I’ve been struggling to answer: Is India like an open sewer? Yes in Old Delhi, where I thought the city might swallow us up in its and seemingly logicless narrow alleys. No at the swanky Grand Intercontinental, where we went for drinks with Kaushal.

No rules on the road-Run a red light? Speed? Drive drunk? All you have to do is honk and all is forgiven?

Sue was so drunk last night that she couldn’t spell my last name. Her best guess was Juwitt.

Don’t know how to repay Kaushal’s ridiculous generosity. We met his family yesterday. His wife was charming and his children two bundles of energy.
Delhi is a throbbing city (and a city that leaves your head throbbing) with life (and mostly the unfortunate side, at least as we saw). You find yourself asking-How do people live here? No really, HOW? How can you survive in this overflowing pile. Why not move to the country, where we assume it to be cheaper and cleaner? We’ll be heading there quickly after arriving in Delhi if we make it here again.

Why would we avoid it in the future? You wear filth here. Its on your skin, in your clothes, under your nails. Everywhere. A shower does no good. The city is literally in your skin. Not many other cities can say that, unless they mean it figuratively. This is a city where one of the 10 best restaurants in Asia (according to Time Magazine) is located in one of the filthiest backstreets in the city where you risk being mowed down by cars and auto rickshaws or simply being swallowed up by the sheer masses. So we’re getting out of here and going off to Agra for what I think will be a glorified photo op at sunrise at the Taj. Hopefully that doesn’t send us running and screaming from India, because we’re a bit on edge now.

On the sleeper class train (the class of the common people) to Agra and here are my thoughts/sights:

-Seeing cows grazing in De-facto landfills

-Street kid hassled us for $ through the window of the car. We gave him some from the train window, his friends came over and relentlessly pan-handled for the next 20 minutes while we waited for the train to depart 9It left 30 minutes late). This included poking me, brushing my arm with a found brush, and generally being little pricks. I’m glad I’m not teaching anymore. I also, unfortunately, won’t be giving to the street kids much anymore.

-The garbage can on the train is the window.

-I’ve figured out the smell of Delhi: Something like exhaust, stale vomit, and sewage vapors wrapped up in a bucket of warm piss.

-Thank god for Kaushal, whose hospitality made our time in Delhi bearable-although I must admit that being cooked for by his butler (?) was a bit odd. My mantra: “Go with the flow.”

-Sue and I can’t even imagine how living/growing up here would change our worldview. I feel completely helpless and overwhelmed just visiting and have tried to block out a lot just to get through the days. How could someone do it everyday. Sue’s jealous because she thinks growing up here makes you appreciate things much, much more and be able to adapt to living elsewhere much easier that other people. Hmm.

-How does it get to this? It looks like Hurricane Katrina at its worst as a normal way of life.

-Delhi belly has been mild. Lucky

-Food has been excellent. Definitely the best thing so far.

-Water burned my eyes when I washed my face.

-Intercontinental hotel was eye-opening for its opulence in the midst of the swarming ‘life” outside. We of course, partook in this to de-stress. A-holes we are.

-China seems like a miracle of infrastructure compared to this. I never felt like I was in the middle of a country of over 1billion there. Here, on the other hand, has a population around 1.5 billion or so in the entire country, although it feels like they’re all In Delhi.

-Sue is alternating between miserable and fascinated. She’s started writing again. Whatever it takes.

-How in the world did the Brits maintain a semblance of control here for as long as they did as Colonists. Unbelievable. The amount of religions, ethnicities, regions, the sheer size . . . I think it would be easier to colonize China.

Welcome to Agra
Agra-Took a sleeper car (basic Indian railway transport taken by the common, not middle class, Indian) here. It was memorable for all the wrong reasons, most notably, the hundreds (no exaggeration) of roaches we saw while sitting. This did not sit well with sue, but it’s a testament to her growing fortitude that she managed to tough it out. More amusing was the attitude of our fellow Indian passengers as I killed roach after roach and Sue shuddered and squealed. Their reaction was to shrug and say, “That’s the right way. Keep it up” to me, while ignoring the roaches crawling next to them. It seems that Indian attitudes towards roaches is like ours toward ants or flies-they’re simply a part of the landscape.

Agra was memorable for the Taj-which felt like one big photo op (and our camera ran out of battery!)- but which is also poses a philosophical query about the nature of love. It was created as a monument and tomb to a dead ruler’s wife. It took a ridiculous amount of manpower to build in a poor country, lead to the king being dethroned by his own son and imprisoned with a window out onto the Taj for a view, and, if rumors are true, led to the designers being killed/hands’ being cut off so that they could not duplicate the building’s design. Whether you find this romantic or not tells you a lot about yourself. It symbolizes purely selfish, closed and maniacal love-a truly passionate and all-consuming idea of love that is undoubtedly attractive in many ways and that I know I have dreamed of feeling and having someone feel for me.

It’s interesting that this monument to mad love is housed in India, the same place that gave birth to Buddhism, which stresses all-encompassing, selfless, giving, all-knowing, all feeling love. I couldn’t help but wonder how these two completely opposite notions of love co-exist in the same country.

The Red Fort in Agra was in many ways more impressive than the Taj because I didn’t expect much from it. It’s an ancient city, once of 5000+ buildings, housed inside a red sandstone wall, complete with a mote. It housed the region’s ruler for quite some time, but was most impressive to me because I found the detail of its interior and exterior design to be just as impressive as Angkor Wat (if not moreso). It also was a great place to stroll around peacefully, something that is tough to experience in the constant bustle of India. Check out the pics for detail.

Maybe because we spent so much time in well-maintained and private sites, Agra made us feel that India could be handled after the overwhelming first few days in Delhi. But going to Jaipur knocked Sue back into a “this is too much” mindset, which I could understand after wandering bazaar alleyways populated by 4 auto rickshaws across, bicycles, cows, pedestrians, cow dung, vomit, and rotting vegetables filling in the tiny cracks between each rickshaw, with a lovely stench of all of the above to fill your nostrils as you waded through it all. The views from The Ladies’ Palace were quite nice as you can see from the pics, but overall, we felt beaten down a bit and curious how we would get on during the rest of our trip. Sue, in full trooper mode, promised to press on after some guilting on my part (crappy of me, I know).

This lead to Jodhpur (The Blue City), a smaller city than any of the others we had visited, but still almost 900,000 people. It was a bit more manageable, but bad lodging the first night put us off a bit and we decided to get the heck out of dodge and to Goa to rally the wagons. Jodhpur’s fort was fantastic and must be mentioned as probably the most impressive structure we saw all trip. See pics for its sheer massiveness and beauty at sunset. Also check out how blue the blue city actually is.