Delhi

     We are in Delhi for a business trip! We got to visit the Free Trade Warehousing Zone being built in Kurja and have been working at the office in Delhi to learn more about Arshiya’s Transport & Handling team. Luckily for us, this means we get to tour Delhi too (and then take a few days off to visit Agra, Jaipur, and Udaipur)! The moment we arrived in Delhi I noticed the drastic weather change immediately- dry heat! I felt like I was in Arizona in the summer, but hotter. Our apartment that we are living in is great, and we love our new cook, although we can’t exactly communicate.

   

    On the drive to Kurja we passed by thevillages we usually see on our way to the FTWZ in Mumbai. I usually see buffalo cooling down in the stream along the road with just their heads sticking out, but this time we saw kids playing in the water with buffalo! They were climbing on their backs, standing up on them, and playing games right next to them! All of the kids were so friendly and kept waving at us. It was funny because when we pulled over, the ones out of the water would pose for our pictures!

When we got back to Delhi, we went out to tour the city. We started at the Lotus Temple, also known as the Bahai House of Worship. It was one of my favorite places we visited. The building is made of nine petals facing upward towards heaven, and nine pools around it symbolizing the green leaves of a lotus flower. The number nine is a symbol of unity in the Bahai faith. The walk up to the temple, gardens, simple inside, and architecture was so beautiful. You have to take off your shoes before walking around the temples here, and it was hard to get used to!

Next we headed to the India Gate, a huge sandstone arch built in 1931 in memory of the 90,000 soldliers of the British Indian Army who fell in WWI and the 3rd Afgan War in the late 19th Century. In the 1970's the government added a memorial to Indias unknown soldier beneath the arch.  It is in the center of a huge park with kids playing in the fountain, families hanging out on the lawn, vendors everywhere, hawkers, etc. There were so many people visiting the gate, it felt like a smaller version of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. We read in our tour book that there are dancing monkeys by the gate! But when I excitedly ran up to the two police men circling the area asking "Monkey?" and danced for him to try to communicate this...we didn't exactly get the reaction we were hoping for haha. Instead he look very confused, shook his head and walked away. Crazy Americans! Gaby also got tricked into getting a Henna tatoo on her hand and was asked to pay 100 rupees for it! We have learned to say no to the hawkers quickly now before they grab your hand!

We drove down Rajpath street that begins at the India Gate and runs through Lutyen's Delhi, Sir Edwin Lutyen's imperial city that was built between 1914-1931 when the British moved their capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911. In the picture below you can see the two identical North and South Secretariats on each side of Rajpath. Behind the North Secretariat is the Indian Parliment House, the Sansad Bhavan (on the right, but you can't see it in the picture). At the top of Rajpath is the Rastrapati Bhavan, where the President of India lives. It is the biggest presidential house in the world! Here is a picture of us in front of the gates. It was quite the challenge trying to get this picture...the people visiting the gate at the time didn't speak English and acted like they had never seen a camera before! They just wanted us to take a picture of them instead! About 5 trys later, we finally got one.