#1

Hello!
So We've arrived safely in New Delhi and have just finished our first day.

The plane ride was a little intimidating at first, totalling at 24 hours with one stop in Doha Qatar in the Middle East. The plane was pretty empty so we had plenty of oppurtunity to get up and move seats and all. Caitlin and Dylan slept almost the whole flight from JFK to Doha. Aly and I on the other hand found sleeping difficult so we took to playing competitive Tetris and watching "Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls." Being in the air for that long was a really disorienting experience. We took off in the middle of the night and landed in the middle of the night.
However after that first flight the second was a breeze.
Getting through immigration was a little time consuming in New Delhi because every passenger needed to fill out a swine flu survey.
We met Justine at the gate and took her hired car back to her Auntie Meera's B & B in Delhi. It's gorgeous. We have a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms( one with 3 beds and one with 2), 2 bathrooms, a water purifier in the house, and internet. Justine also informed us it was rated the #1 B & B in Delhi according to tripadvisor.com.
We all freshened up a bit and decided to go to a walk before breakfast. We walked down the block to the local Chai Wallah, a man that makes a concoction of tea, milk, spices, and sugar, and serves it to what seemed to be everyone in the surrounding community in little glass tumblers for 10 Rupees or 5 American Cents.
We eventually found our way back, had a wonderful breakfast of Auntie's self proclaimed "Indian Eggs" with a side of sweet Toe-Mah-Toe Chutnee, honey dew, toast, and home made Mango Lasci ( sort of a mango smoothie made with home made yogurt and mango).

After breakfast we were off. We spend the day in Old Delhi which is an indescribable experience that you won't completely be able to grasp until you go there. We took rickshaws all day swerving in and out of traffic because there are no lanes on Indian roads and rickshaws have just as much right of way as trucks, cars, pedestrians, and cows. We wound up losing Caitlin and Aly at one point when their rickshaw driver decided to take them to a different entrance to the Mosque we visited. Later in the day our driver got into a rickshaw accident when he sideswiped a man walking with a huge basin balanced on his head. No one was harmed not even the basin :).

We visited the oldest and biggest Mosque in Asia which is also host to a large bazaar outside.As a woman I had to put on a bhurka to enter and walk barefoot in the blistering Indian Afternoon (today was around 103 I believe.)
What really took getting used to was being stared at by almost everyone we walked by. In simplest terms we looked pretty exotic with our light skin, hair, sunglasses, and American attire.
Not only is Old Delhi host to the mosque but a huge twinning networks of shops and bazaars. (Imagine if Canal Street in China town was about 10 times the size.) And I learned how essential bartering and bargaining was. We haggled for everything from Rickshaw drivers, to jewelery, to the entrance price of the Mosque, which is a national monument.
Thank goodness we had Justine. I don't know if we could have navigated the city if she wasn't there.
For lunch we went to a little place the locals rave about called Karim's. It literally is in an Alley off of another alley in Old Delhi. The food was sublime. And it cost each person a wopping $3 a piece for 5 entrees and 4 orders of different types of bread.We wound up exploring Delhi from 9:30 Am until we got back home at 7 PM . Auntie Meera made us a home made meal of Allo Puri , which is a potatoe curry you place on top of what is like an Indian pop over and then top it all off with a sweet but spicy chutnee. It was a remarkable first day and we are going to sleep so well tonight!

I love and miss you all!

Kat