My Diary

I kept a journal for the first 10 days of my Indian adventure but lost it on the overnight bus ride between Panji and Mumbai. The following is taken more or less verbatim from the replacement journal that Tori bought me.

So, beginning yesterday, we separated from the group and embarked on a 15 hour bus, jet, taxi ride to Delhi. The Bus was miserable because I was on the tail end of my sickness and coughed the demons out all night. I also had to pee and the bus had no bathroom nor did it stop much but kept a pace of about 25 miles an hour, the highest speed traffic ever gets up to in India. I did get to see a good Bollywood movie about some Douche and his nerdy friend. The douche, Farah Khan, seduced a secret agent and tried to get his friend laid. Then there was some dancing and a few songs and somehow things got resolved. The best part was when the douche's wife found out he was flirting with a secret agent. She threw a big fit and slapped him then he apologized and all was forgiven. The movie sucked, actually.
We stayed in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) for only a few hours, much to Tori's regret. Mumbai is the fashion capitol of India and she was dissapointed that she missed the glamour. What I saw of Mumbai leads me to believe it is the dirtiest and most polluted of Indian cities and I was glad to leave it (this all takes place a month before the terrorist attacks).
From the bus I got into a taxi and sputtered to the airport. I tried bargaining my bottle of Smirnoff for the ride, figuring they wouldn't allow it on the plane, but the airport security told me I could bring it so long as I didn't drink any on the plane. I paid the taxi and gave the security guy a firework.
The plane we flew on was owned by an airline called SpiceJet. What a stupid name, "SpiceJet." I sounds like a novelty, like a toy investment for some rich kid or a marketing group fresh out of American business school. The other major airline, Kingfisher, is owned by a beer company. I'm not sure if I would have preferred to fly with them or not.
The interior of the SpiceJet was new, but cheap. The seats looked and felt like padded lawn chairs screwed into the floor. Though they could recline, the passanger behind would have their legs squished, and the food trays extended all the way to my stomach. The exterior of the plane was covered in dirt, as if it recently landed on a gravel runway.
My introduction to Delhi was nice. Tori and I toured the city (the cleanest and best maintained in all of India) and found a room in the Janpath Guest House, an expensive mosquito breeding ground. After a nap we explored a Bazaar where I bought a couple hookahs. As we were leaving we set off the metal detectors but the guards didn't investigate us. They did bother the each and every Indian that entered the bazaar, even if they didn't set off the metal detectors.
My biggest learning adventure happened the next day, keep reading.