delhi (wherein erica is scared by a bloody chicken)

This is an overdue update from Delhi. A million things have happened and I’ve been nowhere near the internet. I got to Delhi on Friday afternoon. A few random stories from Mumbai before I get into the Delhi stuff, though. At a restaurant, this random creeper who tried to chat me up last March found me again! He stopped at my table and was like, “Hey, do you remember me?” I made myself look as confused as possible, and then said “Uh… no.” And then he stared at me for a second longer, apologized, and moved on. Whewww. It’s so weird that 6 months have gone by, and there are still a handful of people in Mumbai that know me. Also random and unrelated – my efforts at blending in were working a bit too well. An older lady stopped me on the street to ask me for directions – in Marathi! Or at least I assume it was Marathi, since I know enough Hindi to know when someone is speaking it. Unfortunately I couldn’t help her, since I don’t know a single word of Marathi. Weird. I only knew she was asking for directions because we were next to an entrance to a tunnel that went under the street, and she was pointing at a sign.

The last thing I did in Mumbai was see another Bollywood film. A really stupid one called Hijack, about a plane that gets hijacked, if you couldn’t figure that out from the title. It was kind of stupid timing – I saw it on 9/11 without even realizing the significance, and also it was the night before I had to take a domestic flight in India. And I’m not a big fan of flying already. But whatever, it was entertaining enough, and again the plot was suitably contrived so I could follow without subtitles. My comprehension is getting better though, honestly. I can understand about 25% of what’s being said, I’d guess. But it’s not overly helpful. For example, I might hear a sentence, but I’d understand it like this: “Oh my god! Raj and Rohit are ---- to ---- and ----!” So I get that something is happening but I don’t know what. My vocabulary is limited to food, objects around the house, and overused words from songs. I must work on that.

But anyway – Delhi! I landed Friday afternoon, then proceeded to hang out in the domestic airport for about 5 hours. I made a friend named Amit who helped me out and let me use his phone. (What’s with random Amits helping us out in airports?) I was stuck waiting for a few hours because I wasn’t sure when Erica was supposed to be flying in from Hyderabad so I was waiting to hear from her. She missed the last flight out though, and had to come in Saturday morning. So her mother-in-law picked me up from the airport, which was extremely nice, and brought me back to their apartment, and the next morning we went back to pick up Erica.

So, Erica and I are reunited, and the fun begins, right? We’ve been staying with her in-laws for the last few days. They’ve been feeding us home-cooked Indian food every day, and letting us ride around with a private car and driver, which seems really fancy to me but is actually a pretty common thing for people to have here. On Saturday night, our plan was to meet up with Erica’s friend Sahira, then go out for dinner and to some bars/clubs. Obviously, this didn’t work out. We found out about the bombings right when we were pulling up to Sahira’s. So we stayed the night there, but didn’t go anywhere. It was still a good night though, and Erica and I have some funny videos to post. On Sunday, we went to Connaught Place to do some shopping with Erica’s father-in-law. A couple of the bombs went off in that area, and one bomb was found and defused in the park at the center of the shopping area. So there were police everywhere, and a few million news vans.

We went back there again today to meet our friend Sid for lunch. Originally we planned to have a few other meetings while in Delhi, but everything has gotten a bit messed up and disorganized after the bomb stuff happened, so we’ve been taking it easy here. We met with Erica’s father-in-law again later on and we all went for coffee. The guys at the coffee shop screwed up at first and gave our order to the wrong table. Then my drink had a fly in it. So Erica’s father-in-law got irritated and yelled at the coffee shop guy... and you have to imagine this, he’s a really big man, like 6 feet and several inches, and he calls the poor waiter guy over and is like “Do the flies come free with the chocolate?” It was simultaneously embarrassing and hilarious. He totally chewed out the coffee shop staff, but by the end of it everyone was laughing, even the waiter was fighting not to laugh. I had sympathy for the coffee guys, of course.

We also did a bit of street shopping. Erica is pretty hardcore when she bargains. It’s a big change from shopping with Micah last time. I made a video of that too, will post whenever I get a chance.

OH. Ugh. One more story. Last night on the way home, we stopped at this outdoor fruit and vegetable market. They also had a meat market. Erica was making a video, and we wandered into the meat market. This was a very, very fresh meat market. As in, you point to which live chicken you want, and they cut off the head and de-feather it, cut it up right in front of you. We were a bit slow to realize what was happening. Erica was focused on making her video, when suddenly the guy she was recording chopped the head off a chicken right in front of her. She swore loudly and ran away. The meat guys found this all very funny.

Anyway, tonight we fly back to Mumbai. I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to catch up on posting photos and videos when we get there.