Day 1 in Delhi

My first full day in Delhi started off with my wakeup call (Bollywood music blaring from the radio) at 7:00 AM, followed by breakfast at the hotel. The hotel restaraunt has glass walls, facing the patio and it is very sunny and bright in the morning! The breakfast buffet was mostly vegetables, rice, breads, and very delicious fresh juices! The weather here is perfect! It is not too hot and not too cold! It is warm and sunny with a nice breeze that comes occasionaly when you walk outside. I am really excited to start the volunteer work in Dharamsala but I am glad that I have the opportunity to spend more time in Delhi before heading North! After breakfast, we called a driver and tour guide to pick us up from the hotel and show us around New Delhi and Old Delhi. We visited the Humayun's tomb which blew me away with the intricacy of the architecture and preservation of the beautiful structure that has been around for thousands of years! It made me wonder what kind of palace the emperor's must have lived in if their burrial place was so huge and extravagant! India has the most beautiful architecture I've ever seen! They are also the oldest I have seen! We also visited the India gate which was beautiful also! The guide was really good about explaining the historical significance of each place we visited, such as the Hindu and Muslim temples. It was really sad seeing the poverty throughout the city and the children, covered in dirt, begging for money. I know that it's not good to give them money because it encourages them to beg so instead, we have a stash of granola bars, fruit snacks, rasins and lolipops that we have been handing out to homeless people on the streets. We were outside at a spot off the street with a grassy area and benches and I spotted a couple of homeless children playing with a plastic bottle in the dirt so I walked over to them to give them each a couple lolipops and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I was surrounded by a crowd of dirty kids with tattered clothes who were touching my arms and tugging on my clothes to get my attention and to get lolipops. Luckily I had enough to go around and for each child to get at least one but it took a while after that before they finaly left me alone and went back to playing. I wondered how many of them were brothers and sisters and if they had any parents. There was one girl who looked like she may have been about 10 or 11 years old that seemed to be taking care of them all. It is heartbreaking to see kids and toddlers so young, roaming the streets by themselves. One of my favorite activities of the day was riding on a bicycle rickshaw around Old Delhi! Old Delhi is so busy and crowded and chaotic but when you are sitting on the rickshaw seat, you can just watch the chaos, smell the smells, hear the noises, see the colors and feel the breezes caused by zooming traffic the speed of the rickshaw! The buildings that are built right on the edge of the road (with no sidewalks) are old, dull and dark but the open wall facing the street lets you see the inside of the bright, colorful, and cheerful looking shops where they sell flowers, jewelery, fabrics, and an assortment of other colorful and sparkly things! Even the fruits and vegetables look brighter and bolder thatn I have ever seen! After all of our site-seeing, the guide took us to a shop where we looked at silk and wool carpets and jewellery and clothes. We didn't buy anything at that shop though. I needed to buy some clothes so we went to a clothing store to see what they had. The clothes shopping experience there was much more different than anything I have ever experienced in the U.S. I thought that I would go in the store and pick out a couple outfits that I liked and pay for them at cash register but it was not like that at all! First, when I walked into the store, a woman lead me through the store, which was a long and narrow and the walls covered in shelves from floor to ceiling, holding hundreds of bright colored clothes wrapped in clear plastic bags. There were mattresses against the shelves that the sellers sat on while unwrapping the clothes to show to customers who sat on leather sofas. The woman showed me to a vacant sofa and offered me tea and coffee while she started laying out all different kinds of fabric on the matresses. All of the ones that I didn't find appealing, she would thrown into a heap on the mattress and a man standing on the matress was working on folding them up and re-wrapping them in the plastic and putting them back on the shelves. Sometimes the woman would ask him to go get something for her and he would go down a few shelves and retreve another stack of fabrics. I saw a lot that I liked but finaly I narrowed it down to my top favorites. I bought two salwar kameez sets (one yellow and pink, the other blue and gold) and one sari (pink and gold). They took my measurments and then I got to pick the kind of neckline I wanted and they told me that they would be sewn and delivered to my hotel room the next night. Of course they didn't let me leave after those 3 purhases though! They insisted that I look at the jewellery so I did and they tried to sell me everything in the store! I didn't want to buy any jewellery though so I managed to escape the store clerks just long enough to find Uncle Kurt and Alex and make our way out of the store. We were all tired at the end of the day so we all skipped dinner and went to our rooms to sleep.