Karol Bagh

As is usual when we travel across several time zones, we woke up for the first time in India pretty early. I opened the window shade to be confronted with the huge Hotel Good Times sign on the right edge of the window. I felt like I was waking up in some film noir movie in a sleazy hotel room with the big neon sign flashing in the room.

Thankfully the shades had done an excellent job of hiding it through the night. We were actually pretty lucky to even have the window; there were only like 4 rooms in the entire hotel that had a window. I think we were the only ones in our group with that convenience.

I was ready to survey the neighborhood to tell if it was really as decrepit as it appeared last night. I found that it had all the conveniences you could possibly want in a city neighborhood.



There was a car park by the residence kitty-corner from the hotel:

There was a car wash:

And of course a restaurant. On the left, preparations for opening are being made. On the right, it's open for business.

Our guide, Surdh

We actually had very ambitious plans for this day. We were going to hit the ground running and go out and do some real touring - there were several temples we could have visited, a crafts museum or a toilet museum (What did you do on your first day in India. We went to the Toilet Museum.) In the end we decided on staying around and exploring our neighborhood. Somehow the Indian hotel staff  got involved in our discussions and when they learned that we were going to the local market, they insisted that we needed a guide to show us around and make sure we weren't cheated. Of course we knew they were trying to drum up business but we thought,  "why not?" and got ourselves Surdh for the afternoon for 100 rupees each (about $2.50).

Surdh earned his money alone in the search for an ATM. There were two on the same street as the hotel but neither one of them would give any of us money. The third one was a couple of blocks down and to the left and we may not have found it without help. But we finally did get local currency; I have never had this much trouble anywhere getting money from ATMs. This continued throughout the trip. There were ATMs all over the place. But you could never rely on any of them working at any given moment. As an example, most of the tour members got money from the airport ATMs the day after they failed me; Jerry got money Friday morning from the machine that wouldn't work Thursday noon.

Local market

The local market was not what I expected. First of all, it was a clothing or textile market. Secondly, in America we would have called this area a shopping district, not a market - it was just a street lined with fabric and clothing shops, not a bazaar. We also walked through a "car market" - several blocks of shoddy store fronts and sidewalks full of car parts and broken down vehicles being repaired curbside. (We marveled at the car repairs being done on the street but only learned later that night that it was a car market from the helpful touts who constantly yelled at us "Sir you go wrong way. Only car market that way. Come with me . I take you.) We even noticed body work being done on the street.

Fixing a crashed rear end on the street

We learned quickly that no one walks on the sidewalk here. There are intermittent clear stretches of sidewalk but mostly they are filled with parked vehicles merchandise or trash. So we shared the streets along with all manner of vehicles - bicycle rickshaws, buffalo drawn carts, cars, motorcycles trucks and whatever.