The Ambiance of Delhi. . .

OK, so I hate to disappoint you, but I am not going to bore you with the details of my 23-hour, torturous flight from Vancouver to Delhi. Suffice to say that I might not be coming back to Canada simply because I don't want to suffer through that again, and Singapore (I had a stopover there for one day) is THE most boring place on earth.

ON PURPOSE!!!!

I was reading up on the place and everything from gum to oral sex (except as foreplay) is banned there.

When I arrived in Delhi, though, I very quickly found myself missing the strict organization of nearly all aspects of life that is typical in first world countries.

These are my first impressions of Delhi:

HOT, LOUD!!!!, SMELLY, and EVIL

Remind you of someplace? Well, it should, because the creators of the city were inspired by a very famous place when they built it: Hell.

Firstly, the heat is enough to make you want to never leave the air conditioned airport, and makes you willing to pay 6 times the usual price of a room to have that beloved AC. I wanted to walk around in nothing but my bathing suit, but even when I was just wearing my tank top, I got so many leery stares that I felt as if I was walking around naked. The heat also dispenses the need of blankets. In fact, it makes you want to chuck the mattress onto the floor, because in your heat-induced delirium, you think it's the mattress's fault that you're so hot.

Then there's the noise. It never, ever stops. It's constant, day and night. During the day time, you can't hear anything over the screaming and gnashing of teeth of all of the crushing humanity. I don't really know why they're yelling, but probably just because once one person speaks, the other has to be just a little bit louder than the other person to be heard, and then another person has to be louder than that person, and so on and so on, until you've got 15 million people all competing to be heard over the others.

At night there's the cars, that before you couldn't hear, but once most people have decided to go to sleep (how they manage it without serious ear plugs, I don't know) they begin a fresh assault on your ears. The things with driving in cars in India, is that no one uses their rear view mirrors. And it's not because they just shoulder check a lot. Oh no, no, no.

They just change lanes.

If somebody honks, they stop and let that person through. If they're a bigger vehicle, that is. If they're smaller, they've got to obey the hierarchy of the road (by the by, pedestrians are at the bottom of the pyramid, and cows are at the top)

Yes, over in India, people use their horns for everything: to tell someone they're passing, to tell someone that they're going through a light, to tell someone that they're behind them, or simply because they felt that a little bit of honking of the horn was right for "ambiance of Delhi". . .

After noise there comes smell. And since you can't very well convey a sense of smell to someone through words, I think I'll give you a picture that shows what it's like to walk out of the airport of Delhi:

Yep, I've got to say that that image pretty well sums up the general impression of the smell you get when you step out of the airport. Except multiply it by 13 million people taking two dumps a day and a sub-par sanitation system. And apparently it's better than it was just five years ago.

The evil part's the most interesting part though, so I'm going to leave that for my next post, because it plays a big role in how I ended up: getting scammed, betrayed, meeting the person I hate most in the world, and getting proposed to all in a matter of days.