So yes, I'm still alive. India has taken me by storm and I'm only too happy to be caught up in it. The first day was a challenge, but soon I settled in and began my exploration of Delhi. I wandered around, ready to pass out - keep in mind that Delhi right now is about 110 F and 95% humid. At first I was irritated by the number of people who approached me asking me to buy their food, jewelry, or just asking for money...I must have looked lost because one boy came up to me and said, "Madam, you are from Delhi?" I glared at him and kept walking. He followed me. Very persistent, "Madam, I just want to learn to speak English. Where are you from?" Maybe it was the heat or maybe I just wanted to speak to someone, but I finally broke into a smile and replied, "Where can I make an international phone call?"

Thus, I met my first random friend in India. His name was Suresh and he came from a small farming village between Delhi and Agra. Very sweet boy (he was 17), he took me to this Hindu temple called the Lashmi Temple and we took off our shoes and he explained all the deities to me. After that, he took me to the government tourist office so that I could book my night bus to Dharamsala. The bus was full - wondering now if that was a lie - so I hired a private driver instead!! So cheap to hire a man to drive me around and into the mountains for five days! Pretty crazy. Then Suresh took me to a dress shop and I bought a Punjabi dress. Yeah, so there I was, smack in the middle of Delhi all alone, but at least I had the right clothes and hey, I had a driver.

When I got back to my hotel (I'm a baby and stayed in the hotel the entire time, couldn't deal with anything else), the phone rang and it was the man from the tourist office. "Are you going to eat dinner? Would you like to go with me?" Oh God. I told him I had other plans. "I don't know why, but when you came into the office it was like something from the heavens." Whatever. It's nice when people invoke spirituality in their pick-up lines, isn't it? Would never have given the tourist office the place I was staying had I known it would be a direct line to me!

The next two days were filled with wondrous exploration. Delhi is split into two parts: Old Delhi and New Delhi. Old Delhi hasn't changed for what seems like centuries. I wandered around Mughal monuments and pored through gardens with geometric landscaping and forts dating back to BC. Everything was lush and green and the monuments were sandstone and marble. I came face-to-face with the sheer power of the Mughal empire. All the emperors and their families were buried with their faces facing Mecca. Their tombs have lasted centuries, most of them erected around the 16th century.

Old Delhi was another story altogether. Crowded with cycling rickshaw men, women carrying flour on their heads, horses pulling lumber, goats being roasted over spitfire, children darting furiously, constant noise, dusty streets, sickening squalor and peddlars galore. There were people sleeping on the roads, shielding the sun from their eyes. Crammed tenement housing, shit on the road, jewelry stalls, silk stalls, bead stalls. Flies. Dust. Shouting. A festival of indigency and decay, dancing before my disbelieving eyes. I rode a rickshaw through the narrow, bumpy, incense-laden bazaar. I suddenly understood the meaning of over-population. This gem of a trading place was the comfortable workplace and source of sustenance for the wide-eyed children and sweating men. A cryptic Wall Street of bargaining and trade. Here was where the business deal was born. I would never have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

~Hope