The first thing I saw once I got to my hotel in Delhi was the headline of a newspaper that proclaimed that the airline I flew from Dubai, Kingfisher, was deemed a safety risk and ordered to shutdown. Awesome.

After much needed sleep, I set about exploring Delhi. The New Delhi area, where I stayed, was very unlike most Indian cities. It featured ( Read more... )

 You will notice that I didn't write much about Mumbai, mostly because we had only a cursory glance at it. However, this excellent book, entitled Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, is one of the best "place" books I have read. At times touching, scary, funny, and poignant, it's an ode to and lament for this crazy city. Even in our brief time here ( Read more... )

 Goa. We did nothing


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 Udaipur is so far my favorite Indian city. The other cities may have more impressive individual sights, like the Taj in  Agra or Amber Fort in Jaipur, but this whole city is somehow less noisy, chaotic, or overwhelming than the rest. It is also truly walkable, which for me is a very important quality. Its setting, on a beautiful lake fringed by ( Read more... )

We reverted to our tourist selves as soon as we arrived at our hotel in Agra, which was worlds away from the place we stayed in Jhansi or Khajuraho (I am not even talking about the night train). The hotel featured a luxurious lobby, two fancy restaurants, pool, various boutiques, and a bunch of other white people. The only sign that we were in ( Read more... )

 Indian wedding. How do I even begin to describe such an unbelievable experience? Something like, if the rest of our trip was a ridiculous disaster of missed trains, broken down vehicles, and various other calamities, it would have still been worth it just for this night alone. Or, after this, I am not nearly as sad about missing Burning Man again ( Read more... )

 The drive to Khajuraho was an experience worthy of its own separate blog entry, but for purposes for brevity I will try to resist. Essentially, driving in India is a continuous, uninterrupted game of “chicken”, compounded by giant potholes and lack of any road markings or signs. Our driver, who we grew to appreciate as the drive wore on, ( Read more... )

Our friend's father insisted that one of his friends drop us off at the train station, and basically escort us all the way to our compartment. In retrospect, he knew what he was doing. There would have been no way we could have successfully navigated the frenzied train station, found our track, and found out that our train was two hours late on our ( Read more... )

We took an early morning flight out of Mumbai and were met in Nagpur by our friend's father. He took us on a little impromptu tour of Nagpur, which is slightly less chaotic and more green than the average Indian city, but only slightly so. He then took us to their house, where we met our friend, who is to be married in a couple of days, and her ( Read more... )

 After a long but pretty comfortable flight, where we managed to procure 3 seats for ourselves (aisle-empty-window), we have safely landed in India. I used the flight to catch up on movies - Social Network, which was great, Town, which was pretty good, and Wall Street 2010, which was terrible. Unfortunately, I watched them in ascending order of ( Read more... )