I am in Delhi

Nameste,

We all made it to Delhi! It was a long 24 hour plane ride with transit
at Taipei. The meals on the plane were quite good but it was hard to
sleep.

It was definitely an experience at the airport as we had to haul 35
baggages in to 5 taxis...yah, stacked on the roof on the cars! The
roads in Delhi are crazy with 5-6 cars driving in a 3 lane street. They love to honk and beep. At the back of trucks it would have a sign to tell people to honk! After a few days I figured the meaning of honking...it's to let other cars know that they want to pass or that they are next to them. The roads would have cars, bicycles, auto rickshaws, people as well as cows or donkeys...real crazy but they seem to have a system that keep everyone in flow.

It is cloudy and muggy here and had drizzled a bit earlier but
there is a breeze. We are staying in an old Tibetan 'camp' that's converted to a small hotel near old Delhi. This is a
normal neighborhood with many people hanging around the back alley and
sell things. Some interesting things I saw so far are a family of 5
riding on a motor bike, young girls selling flowers and people selling magazines, or cut pieces of coconut at intersections.

We were all quite tired from the trip and kind of feeling the jet
lag... I am sharing my room with
Maggie and the air conditioner is not work in the room!!!! I was so
tired yesterday that I slept from 5pm til 3:30 am. I had a
bit of headache when I woke up but took an Avil and was fine. I could
not sleep once I woke up so I wrote in my journal.

Our second day was quite an interesting day in old Delhi. We went to
the Sikh temple in Delhi and wow, I couldn't believe the amount of people whom go
and worship. We had to wear scarves on our head before going in. We
walked in bare feet but the Sikhs actually drank the water where we walked
(I believe it's Holy water). All Sikh temples have a community kitchen with volunteers who prepare foods to feed over 1000 people a day.

We also visited a Jain temple and saw the temple with both European
and Muslim influences. Our guide, Naveena was fantastic! She is a
fourth generation female with a PhD. She shared with us that the swatiska is actually a symbol from the Jain religion in which a married woman would draw on the door of her parents to give health and prosperous blesssings to her own parents after visiting. Also, if the symbol goes clockwise it represents a male symbol and counter
clockwise represents females. Hitler actually used the female symbol
without realizing it...lol.

Crossing streets in Delhi can be very interesting. The streets were for pedestrians, cycle rickshaws, cars, auto rickshaws and all sorts of vehicles. We basically had to walk with the flow and any hesitations would have killed us but we survived! We watched the locals and the locals watched us...equal amount of curiosity on both sides.

Poverty is very real in India. There would be people
sleeping on streets everywhere and a whole family would sit near a
Muslim temple and the children would beg for money. Manual labour is
at its highest in Delhi. Women and children would be sorting rocks in
road constructions, men would be carrying huge load on their shoulder
or head and a couple of men would be pushing a bicycle with parcels
stacked 10 feet high.

We had a nice westernized breakfast this morning with eggs, toast,
coffee (very good black coffee) and milk tea. Things are relatively
inexpensive in India. Internet usage is 30 INR (Indian rupees) and
hour which is about 75 cents. Our lunch at a local cafeteria was $2
and the food was very good.