Before I get to travels: to all my LOST friends out there, I don't get it here, so please don't tell me anything about anything that happens this season. I tried to download it off of abc.com but it only allows people within the US to watch it (sigh).
Anyway, back to travels! So the first few days my parents were here we spent in Delhi and even though I've done lots of sightseeing in Delhi there were still a few sights that were new to me. On their second full day here (flights to India tend to arrive somewhere between midnight and 2 a.m., just one of those things, which makes the first day in India a bit of a haze), we went up to Old Delhi. Old Delhi is in some ways like a time capsule back to life 200 years ago, very little has changed. There are so many people there and with the exception of the two main roads it is a maze of small backstreets. It is an experience, but a bit overwhelming due to the sheer volume of people, so we got there bright and early before too many people were out and about. I had taken a tour there before and I'm very happy to say that I remembered about 1/2 of of the way we had gone; it is really like a maze back there so that is quite an accomplishment.
Anyway, I saw a completely different strange sight while we were in Old Delhi. There are lots of small 'restaurants' there, basically a small room with very small tables, you could squeeze maybe 10 customers in those tables, and you can see the cooking going on right in front of you. I never eat at these types of restaurants because you never know how hygienic it is, even my guide when I took the tour joked about what types of food my western stomach could handle versus the Indian stomach. Anyway, I digress. So, the first small restaurant we pass we see a family of westerners sitting down to eat! I think they were American or Canadian and it looked like a similar situation as me; someone living here with their family visiting and her taking them on the Old Delhi tour. I couldn't help but wonder about them for the rest of the day, I hope they were okay. I can promise to anyone coming to visit me that I won't take any food risks.
Moving on...after our walk through the backstreets we hopped on bicycle rickshaws and went to the Jama Masjid mosque. I hadn't been there because I was told that women weren't allowed to go alone; turns out that isn't exactly right, women can visit but aren't allowed to climb the minarets without a man, which I didn't want to do anyway. The mosque was beautiful, such a quiet calm place in the midst of the craziness that is Old Delhi.
More sightseeing happened throughout the day and we ended with mass at the local cathedral, a wedding was ending right before our mass started, the bride was wearing a white dress but the female guests were wearing some of the most beautiful saris I've seen here, if you ever want to see some seriously beautiful materials just hang out near an Indian wedding, really amazing stuff.
Now onto pictures...I was going to do two, but the second one didn't really come out well. So just one for my family to enjoy: my parents, from behind, in their rickshaw (taken from mine); the one from the front you can't actually tell that they are in a rickshaw and what is the fun of that? So here they are:
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