Cow Hypocrisy and Camel Safaris!

Feeling refreshed from our fancy flight, we arrived in Delhi and instantly loved India. It was like we thought we would experience - insanely hot, beggars/street vendors/people everywhere, the organized chaos of a country that is home to 1.2 billion people. Everyone we met was friendly and, praise to hundreds of years of British rule, spoke perfect English! India has all other developing countries that we've been to beat in the English department. Not only do even the street vendors and cleaners all speak it, but they love to use phrases like "feast your eyes" and "it's cold outside, come into my shop!" haha. There were also a few things we didn't expect. The thing that strikes you first, when you wander your first city street in India, is the stray cows. Yes, STRAY. They are everywhere... lying in the middle of the road, walking beside you near the shops, eating garbage near a food stall. The drivers on every street just swerve around them like they are parked or moving vehicles. In India, the Muslim faith decrees that cows are sacred. There is no beef served anywhere in the country (even McDs... but we'll get to that much later!). These animals are supposed to be looked after and revered by the people. Well, they don't eat them, but they sure don't look after them either. It is so sad to see them all wandering around aimlessly in the hot sun, looking confused. It is indeed cow hypocrisy, and it is wide spread! The second thing that struck us about Delhi, the city known for its crowded crazy streets and daily mayhem, was it's silence! Many of the main streets were quiet and we could walk around them with comfortable space between us. It was bizarre. We soon found out that we had arrived in the middle of a 2 day festival that shut all the shops and kept everyone indoors! We did get to see some loud festival parades, as well as some effigies being burned, so not all was lost. We have a few days in Delhi at the end of our trip, and we have been assured that the chaos will be in full swing :)

Our first day in the city we took the shockingly easy metro and wandered around Connaught Place ("C.P."). we toured the Indira Gandhi museum, and learned that the Gandhi family is pretty much like the Kennedy family of India - lots of tragedy! Not knowing where to go, we let our rickshaw driver take us to a restaurant he recommended. We were pleasantly surprised to find it packed with locals and full of really good food! I was loving the Indian cuisine already. The first night in Delhi we met our new tour group... all girls (except for one married couple in their late 60s!) and again, very few people our age ;( However, our guide, Chandra, is fantastic and we've made fast friends with 2 girls from England, Anjali and Sam. The next morning just Mars and I accompanied Chandra to get an omelet from a very local street vendor. The vendor laughed when he saw us. We laughed when we saw that he had no intention of making the omelets in a hygienic fashion and the fact that (I discovered AFTER I drank my tea) he had no qualms about "Reusing" the tea from the bottom of old mugs! The food was delicious.

We spent the rest of the day touring the Old Delhi and getting our first taste of Indian culture... Everyone stares at you the most obvious and awkward way, but it was somehow much less annoying than the Chinese staring methods. Also, Indians love to ask personal questions and see no problem in quizzing strangers about any number of topics. We visited Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque), the largest mosque in India. I love the photo of the worshippers on one side of the cleansing pool, and the pigeons on the other. We also visited the Sikh temple Gurdwara Sisganj where we went inside to see prayer, then helped the women make food for anyone who needed it(a Sikh imperative that is done every single day).

The next day, it was off to Jaislamer (the golden city) via overnight train. Out the windows of the train, we saw our first glimpses of a slum. I immediately took a liking to Jaisalmer. The city is mostly enclosed within the walls of an old fort, it it has A LOT of character! The people were friendly and helpful, and the setting was gorgeous, with fort walls, old mansions (called havelis) and Jain temples seen from every street and rooftop (see stray cow outside an old Haveli). This was an added plus, as a few of us decided to start doing morning yoga sessions on the roof, which was so freaking cool to be doing on one of my first days in India! We also got to see a Bollywood movie (although i think it was a low budget one) being filmed. There is a possibility that a few of us are in it, as we were on one of the lake temples in the forground of one of the shots. Woo-hoo! I decided to get an early taste for the massage skills of Indians, and signed up for one with a nice older Indian lady. She took me into the back of her shop/house/hut and stripped me down for a traditional oil massage (while answering her cell phone amid rolling power outages!). All was going well until I flipped onto my front and got a full, no hesitation, breast massage. Apparently this is understood to be just another part to massage in the full body process, but it was weird to say the least! Figuring that since we were now so well acquainted, I took her up on her offer to thread my eyebrows (an Indian speciality that Amy swears by at home). I was horrified when I saw how thin she made them! For those of you who know my extreme fussiness with eyebrows, you will know it is not an exaggeration when I say that I would have rather she had taken my passport! But, c'est la vie! Less than 3 months to grow them back before xmas.

Next, to our excitement and extreme amusement, we mounted Tiger and Calou, our trusty camels, and set off on a safari through the Thar desert. It was 41 degrees everyday in the desert, but the sheer comedy of the camels made the 2.5 hour journey fly by. They are in the running with kangaroos to be the funniest animals EVER. We arrived to find a small grass hut and some cots in the open air... this was where we would spend the night.. sleeping under the desert stars and peeing behind a sand dune! It was a surreal and fantastic experience that will go down as one of my favourites in my travels thus far. Truly unique and fun! The guides sang a funny camel safari song for us, and even let a few of us make our camels trot on the way back... definitely not a smooth ride!