DELHI...(refugee camp)airports,home and pleasures sweet pleasures...
Delhi- incredible, enormous, incomprehensible city... We arrived on an overnight bus, having been harrassed all night by some of the men in the booth opposite us (not that I can claim to have defended us from this- I slept through it!) to a scrum of rickshaw drivers all trying to convince us that we should go to their hotel, that ours would be full, burnt down, dirty... After bargaining with them for some time we realised that they operated in a complicated hierachy, at the top of which was a young man with wild looking eyes. Nobody would dispute the price he offered and he escourted us out of the carpark, tried to charge us extra money saying it was a 'car park fee' before jumping out and leaving us with another driver. All very complicated.
We saw several different performances of tradional dance- on stage 'Kathak' dance and outdoors at a craft fair, a range of different folk dance forms and acrobatics.
Jama Masjid, the principle mosque of Old Delhi, and the crush of traffic just before the evening prayer. It was built by Shah Jahan, the Mughall ruler who also built the Taj Mahal.
A common sight- comparing historical accounts from each of our selection of guidebooks!
But its leaders are enmeshed in a court case with the Indian government, who want to demolish the camp in order to develop the land for the Commonwealth Games.
Gary flew into Delhi airport- a strange world in which the toilets were western style and actually had toilet paper. We felt somehow we had gone half way home. Standing at the gate waiting for Gary to emerge amidst the crouds of British and Indian people from the London flight, I felt a mixture of nostalgia and the excitement of exploration still to come. I was a disorientating feeling, difficult to describe, almost as if home could have been reached just by passing your arm through the gate. The thought that England was potentially only 10 hours away made it feel at once even further, more imaginable and alien.
Gary flew into Delhi airport- a strange world in which the toilets were western style and actually had toilet paper. We felt somehow we had gone half way home. Standing at the gate waiting for Gary to emerge amidst the crouds of British and Indian people from the London flight, I felt a mixture of nostalgia and the excitement of exploration still to come. I was a disorientating feeling, difficult to describe, almost as if home could have been reached just by passing your arm through the gate. The thought that England was potentially only 10 hours away made it feel at once even further, more imaginable and alien.
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