Dear God...Delhi...Part Deux.

rural india
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After our sunrise viewing of the Taj we hit the road for Delhi.  We stopped at a roadside joint for our aloo parantha and chai and made our way to Delhi.  We got to our hotel and it was booked so we made our way to the second hotel and checked in.  We said goodbye to Nareesh and took the skyrail to the bazaar.  We ate some falafel and did some shopping.  We met up with the guy who arranged our driver/tour and got some money back for an elephant ride we never took.  Headed back to the hotel and watched some HBO.

haircut anyone?
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The next day, we decided to take care of some errands before our travel day.  Most importantly, we needed to mail our box of goodies home.  We set out for the postoffice with bags and bags of stuff.  The first post office told us they don't do parcels and gave us the address of another post office.  We took a tuk tuk to the second post office across town.  They told us that they didn't do parcels either.  They told us the name of another post office.  We hopped on a tuk tuk and went there.  That post office told us that their computers were down and we would have to go to another post office 1 kilometer down the road, however, we could get our stuff boxed and sewn (that's right sewn) here.  For 100 rupies they pulled an old box out of the alley put our stuff in it and then wrapped it in cloth and sewed it up, then tried to charge us 200 rupies for it.  We laughed at them and moved on.  When the tuk tuk driver refused to drive us for no apparent reason, we walked the 1 kilometer with our package to the fourth post office.  We waited in line and found out we didn't have enough cash on us by about $3.  So we left the package with them and set out to find an ATM.  Found one...didn't work.  Found a second...that worked.  Made it back to the post office and mailed our package.  Aren't errands fun?!  So, that took four hours.  Shit you not...four hours.  We squeezed in one more errand (book buying) before everything shut down for the day.  Headed back to the hotel because our taxi was coming at 4am.

In summary, we REALLY DID ENJOY India!  We are sharing our most challenging stories with you because THAT is India.  And yet, you still find a way to love it, find it interesting, beautiful, dynamic, and contradictory.  It was magical.  Mainly because we don't understand how we loved it so much...magicians...all of them.