India Day 1

India Day 1
So I’m traveling with my two friends Anne and Angela. Angela has an older sister, Jacy, who did SAS like 3 years ago, and is currently dating her boyfriend, John, and they met on SAS. Jacy and John have been traveling since like October all around Laos, India, Cambodia, and Thailand, and will be continuing until May. We pulled into port in Chennai and we had a 1:30 flight to New Delhi to meet Angela’s sister. We were one of the first people waiting at the gangway to get off because we needed to catch our flight. We got in a rickshaw (they are these little motorized cab things, they’re so crazy) and drove straight to the airport. India is SO CRAZY, the driving is seriously ridiculous, I honestly thought we were going to get in an accident like 12 times, and we shoved 5 of us in this tiny rickshaw and we were so crammed. We made it to the airport way faster than a car would’ve taken us because the rickshaws weave through everything. It took us around 40 minutes to get there. When we got there we were totally fine on time. BTW Chennai is the dirtiest city I saw in India, it was really crappy, and HOT, especially in my black yoga pants and tshirt, you cant show your knees or shoulders in India. And the airport was just the jankiest airport I’ve ever seen. It was like this crappy building with all dirt roads around it, there was nothing paved. There was like no airport security either, it was just very..India. Oh, also also negotiate prices of cabs or anything before getting in so they don’t rip you off. We flew jetairways on the way to Delhi, and there was a decent amount of SAS kids on our plane. The plane was nice, but the seats were really uncomfortable so I couldn’t sleep and talked with this kid next to me on SAS that I just met. The flight was like 2 or so hours I think. When we got into Delhi, Angela’s sister was waiting for us, it was so cute to see them so happy to see each other. Jacy and John are so cool and so cute. John is tall with dreads and Jacy is so pretty, literally looks exactly like Natalie Portman. She said people mistake her for her all the time. Jacy planned like everything for us it was so nice of her. She rented us a driver for the whole time we were there, it was a total of 140 U.S. a person, which was really nice because we would have had to spend that money on trains to get from city to city and it’s a lot safer and we were in control of what we did, it was a really good deal. Our drivers name was Kishen Singh(its said like kiss and sing, its funny), he was also at the airport and he drove us to our hotel, we stayed at some niceish hotel in Delhi called Jakpur something. It was considered a nicer hotel, but it was by no means nice, it was pretty dirty insdie. Anne and I shared a room. Indians also always use a bucket to shower, so every hotel we stayed in there was a bucket in the shower. We dropped our stuff off and then we went to grab dinner. We ate at this place that is a chain restaurant, the food was really good. IT was so nice to have Jacy and john with us because I would have had NO idea what to order. We got dosais, its like this crepe type thing with potato in the middle and you use your hands (everyone uses their hands for everything in India) and dip it in the different Currie sauces. I really liked it a lot. After like every meal in India, all restaurants give you anis beads (its black licorice basically, I think its what they use to make black licorice), and sugar little pellets, and you dip a spoon in the anis and put it in your hand, then dip it in the sugar and put that in your hand, its like an end of the meal thing that cleanses your palate or something. I really liked it, actually I really just liked the sugar. After dinner we went to this street market, there were a lot of cute shops, with a dirt road in the middle, of course. This was my first spotting of COWS all over, just roaming the streets. It was so weird at first, but after being all through india they are EVERYWHERE. Cows are sacred in Hinduism so they just let them roam all over. It’s so bizarre. We went to cool jewelry shops and other little shops. We all got henna too, it was so cool. My guy was so good and he did my whole right forearm and hand/fingers really detailed in like not even 10 minutes. After we got our henna, we went to this little restaurant above some random shop and got 2 “cappuccinos” there. When we ordered beer they called in a cappuccino because drinking is really frowned upon in the Hindu religion, no one really does it at all. It was really funny they served us our beer in these big coffee mugs so you can’t tell its beer. After we drank our two beers we went back to the hotel.